Holy Detachment

Stage Four — Community: How should people live together?

My friend,

One more thing before we leave this stage, and it is the hinge on which the next one turns.

To live truly within a community, you must remain free inside it.

This sounds like a contradiction and is not. The person who needs the community — for standing, identity, security, the assurance that he matters — cannot love it. He can only manage it, defend his position in it, and quietly resent it when it fails to supply what he requires.

The free person is the only one who can love a community, because he is not extracting anything from it.

The Palace

The Acts of Thomas tells a story I have never forgotten.

A wealthy king gives the Apostle Thomas a great sum of gold and commissions a magnificent palace. Thomas takes the money and does not buy a single stone. He goes through the surrounding villages and gives all of it away — to the poor, the sick, the widowed.

The king eventually demands to see his palace. Thomas answers, calmly, that the palace has been built. It simply cannot be seen from here.

Every act of mercy, the story says, is a stone laid somewhere that does not decay.

What Detachment Is Not

I must be careful here, because this teaching has been used to do real harm.

Holy detachment is not indifference. It does not mean caring less about people. Thomas gave the gold to actual poor people; he was not above the world, he was in it with his hands open.

It is not a refusal to grieve. When you lose what you love, you will mourn, and the mourning is not a failure of detachment. We will spend a good deal of the next stage on lament.

And it is not an excuse for irresponsibility. A man who neglects his obligations and calls it holy detachment has merely found a spiritual word for what he was going to do anyway.

What it is: holding your possessions, your status, and your circumstances with an open hand rather than a clenched one. A shift in where your weight rests — off the shifting sand of worldly security and onto something that holds.

The pilgrim is the freest person on the road because he has no earthly home to defend and no position to protect. He travels light, and so he does not fret about whether the road is comfortable. He cares about the integrity of the walk.

The Pillars as Freedom

Truth: see the temporary things as temporary. When you actually recognize that status and wealth are passing weather, they lose their power to command you. This is not pessimism; it is accuracy.

Humility: release the need for recognition. A heart attached to its own name is a heart in chains, and it will eventually do something shameful to protect that name.

Mercy: open your hands. Only a detached heart can be genuinely merciful, because only someone unafraid of losing his resources can give without calculating. Mercy is costly restoration, and it is available only to those who are not guarding.

The Witness

Blessed are those whose strength is in you; who have set their hearts on a pilgrimage.

Passing through the valley of Weeping, they make it a place of springs. Yes, the autumn rain covers it with blessings. They go from strength to strength.

Psalm 84:5–7

Sit with the middle line. Passing through the valley of Weeping, they make it a place of springs.

Not: they avoid the valley. Not: the valley is revealed to have been pleasant all along. They pass through it — and something about the passage turns the place of weeping into a place where water comes up.

I have watched this happen in people. I cannot explain the mechanism. But the ones who go through grief without either denying it or being destroyed by it very often become sources of something for everyone who comes after them.

For a day in your courts is better than a thousand. I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God, than to dwell in the tents of wickedness.

Psalm 84:10

A doorkeeper. The lowest post in the building. He would rather have the worst position in the right place than the best position in the wrong one.

Test this. The whole company of the faithful lived this way: having confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth... they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one (Hebrews 11:13, 16). And Christ gave the reason plainly: where your treasure is, there your heart will be also (Matthew 6:21). Not your heart should follow your treasure — it simply does. Which means the question of where you are storing things is really a question about where you would like your heart to end up.

The Practice: Traveling Light

Name the clench. Identify the one thing you would find hardest to lose — not the thing you should say, the true one. Reputation, a relationship, a plan for your life, financial security. Naming it is most of the work.

Give something that costs. Not surplus. Something you will feel.

One anonymous good. Do something genuinely helpful that cannot be traced to you. Notice how much of you wanted the credit; that measurement is the point.

Ask yourself this week: What am I defending that I do not actually own? If it were taken tomorrow, what would remain?

The Close of the Stage

You have an answer now to the fourth question. How should people live together?

Be reliable in small things over long periods. Begin at home, where it is hardest and least witnessed. Aim at restoration rather than victory when you disagree. Use whatever authority you hold to carry weight rather than to be served. Live fully in your city as a resident of another country. And hold all of it — the house, the standing, the work, the security — with an open hand.

Now the road turns inward again, and more steeply.

I must tell you why detachment had to come last. A person still clutching his reputation cannot have his heart healed. He will spend the entire surgery defending the wound. The next stage requires you to look at things about yourself that you have arranged your life to avoid looking at, and that is only possible for someone who has already loosened his grip on being thought well of.

You have been out among people, and they have shown you things. Some of what they showed you was not flattering. Good — take it with you.

The fifth stage asks: how is the heart healed? It is the hardest part of this book. It is also the part where the most is given.

A Blessing

May you find the courage to walk light, the wisdom to see clearly, and the grace to find a spring in the valley of tears.

May you hold everything you have been given loosely enough to enjoy it and firmly enough to be faithful with it.

And may your hands be empty enough to be useful.