The Prayer of Letting Go
The Prayer of Letting Go
Every fall, the trees in the East begin their slow preparation to release what they've been holding all summer. I know we don't have that dramatic show here in Southern California, but I've always loved that image. Trees don't grip their leaves out of fear. They let them go at exactly the right moment, trusting that what comes next is not loss but transformation.
I've been thinking about letting go as a form of prayer.
WHAT ARE YOU HOLDING?
Most of us are carrying things we were never designed to carry. Resentments that have lived so long in us they feel like furniture. Worries about things we cannot change. Grief we never quite let ourselves feel. Expectations of ourselves and others that are quietly exhausting everyone involved.
The spiritual tradition calls this "attachment" — not in the warm sense of love and connection, but in the sense of clinging to a particular outcome or a particular version of how things should be. Attachment is what prevents us from being fully present to what actually is.
A RELEASING PRACTICE
This practice comes from the Christian contemplative tradition, particularly as it intersects with the insights of centering prayer. Find a quiet moment. Take a few slow breaths.
Bring to mind one thing you are holding too tightly—a worry, a grievance, a hope with closed fists around it. Imagine yourself holding it in your open palms. Look at it. Acknowledge it honestly. And then, slowly, turn your palms downward and imagine releasing it into God's hands.
You may need to do this many times. That's not failure—that's how it works. We let go and then we pick it back up again, and then we let go again. Each time is a small act of trust.
Meister Eckhart wrote: "Only the hand that erases can write the true thing." There is something we can only receive when we have first released what we are clutching in its place.
What is yours to release this season? I'd love to sit with that question alongside you.
Go make peace, my friends.
Pastor Leanne
Community Presbyterian Church
32202 Del Obispo
San Juan Capistrano. CA 92675
949-493-1502
info@sjcpres.org