Photo: The Penance of D Johnson, by Eyre Crowe (1869).
Letting go: Clive Ashwin offers a Quaker view of renunciation
‘Renunciation can be coloured by grief.’
From its beginning, our life is governed by acquisitions. These include not only material objects, such as our possessions, but the gathering of know-how and understanding. From the moment we are born we learn what behaviour is likely to result in the provision of food or other comforts. The acquisition of speech enables us to become more specific in the expression of our needs.
At school, if we are fortunate, we develop the ability to read, to write, and to calculate in varying degrees. At the same time, we acquire some understanding of how others are likely to behave, and how we might influence their behaviour. We seek to follow a career and formulate some kind of life plan. We form what we hope will be enduring relationships.
As time moves on, we might accumulate material possessions, such as a home and its contents. Our acquisitions, mental and material, help us to define ourselves as individuals. They give us a sense of identity. We learn how to make a favourable impression upon those we respect and love.
Life feels like one long journey of acquisition, including the quest for spiritual enlightenment. In the past, a child’s religious pathway was normally determined by that of their parents. Now this is less likely to be the case, and a dwindling proportion of those who identify themselves as Quakers would claim ‘birthright’ identity.
But sooner or later we reach a watershed in life when things seem to go into reverse. We begin to lose some of our acquisitions. We no longer run up the stairs, but walk and use the hand rail. Hundred-watt bulbs are not as bright as they used to be. We take longer to recall names, places and events. We retire, and might miss the demands of work. We can feel a sense of emptiness.
People who have been part of our world go elsewhere, change or die. We grieve over the loss of a parent, a son, a daughter, a partner, a friend. We can fear being isolated and alone. We might become alarmed or angry because many of the acquisitions, mental and material, which we took for granted are no longer available to us.
We find the act of letting go difficult, especially when something is central to our life. Beethoven lost his most valued possession – hearing – at the height of his creative powers. His late works became complex patterns on paper for sounds which he could imagine but would never hear. Degas, a leading impressionist and an accomplished painter, gradually lost his sight. The handling of fluid pigments became too difficult, so he worked increasingly in pastels, spending much of his last years on sculpture, where touch took over from sight.
Even more difficult than the process of acquisition is the act of renunciation – letting go – and accepting that a possession, a skill, or a phase in our life, is drawing to a close, and in that respect we will no longer be the same person.
The blessing of a retentive memory can become a burden. We might find it increasingly difficult to rid ourselves of the acquired memories of injuries we imagine others have done to us. We may find ourselves unable to forgive ‘those that have trespassed against us’. We hold on to such memories because they help us to account for ways in which we, too, have failed. They can become valued mental possessions which we regularly revisit and brood over.
This sense of loss is sometimes compounded with feelings of remorse. We look back and regret moments when we have failed ourselves or others. With hindsight – that perfect science – we imagine how we could have done so much better. A contributor to Quaker faith & practice recollects: ‘Then my mother died. I felt the expected grief, remorse at my failings as a daughter…’ (21.52). Such feelings about our parents – and children – are common.
‘Is it possible to accept the loss of our acquisitions as part of God’s plan for us?’
Renunciation can be coloured by grief. Samuel Johnson, the distinguished eighteenth-century littérateur, was troubled by the memory of a youthful act of disobedience towards his father (a humble provincial bookseller of Uttoxeter who played a vital role in his literary career) and spoke of ‘the pungency of remorse’.
To absolve himself from this feeling, and as an act of contrition long after the death of his father, Johnson went to the market place of Uttoxeter and stood silently on the site of his father’s bookstall, bare-headed, in the rain, an event which is movingly commemorated every year on the same spot.
These are feelings which afflict both great and humble, regardless of social standing, fame or wealth. Robert Louis Stevenson became one of the most successful authors of his day. His books and essays are still read with pleasure. He suffered from ill health for much of his adult life and settled in Samoa in the Pacific to benefit from its benign climate, dying there at the age of forty-four at the height of his fame.
Stevenson accepted that his lease on life was temporary and prepared himself for an end which must have seemed inevitable without anger or rancour, or, as he put it, ‘to renounce when that should be necessary and not be embittered’.
Is it possible to accept the loss of our acquisitions as part of God’s plan for us? Can we adopt an attitude of good-humoured renunciation as a way of cooperating with God’s will? Surely this is a defining characteristic of the Christian life expressed in the Quaker philosophy.
Advices & queries 29 counsels us that, ‘Although old age may bring increasing disability and loneliness, it can also bring serenity, detachment and wisdom.’ How can we find that detachment and wisdom, other than through our enduring awareness of God’s love for us?
Samuel Johnson was a passionate opponent of slavery and left part of his personal fortune to his servant and loyal companion Frank Barber, a once-enslaved Jamaican, who also became his literary executor and was one of the most important sources for Boswell, Johnson’s biographer.
Johnson’s most valued possession was his tongue and his ready wit. More than anything else, his conversation defined his identity. Late in life, he awoke one morning to discover that he had lost the power of speech, probably as the result of a stroke. He got out of bed and wrote a card for Frank to deliver to a trusted neighbour. His short message remains one of the most moving and uplifting in the English language, and a testament to his faith.
‘Dear Sir – It has pleased God, this morning, to deprive me of the powers of speech; and as I do not know but that it may be his further good pleasure to deprive me soon of my senses, I request you will on receipt of this note, come to me, and act for me, as the exigencies of my case may require.
‘I am, sincerely yours, Sam Johnson.’
