Learning The Clutch

"Learning The Clutch"
Ecclesiastes 3:5-6

Ever had to teach someone how to drive a stick shift?  Like a family member?  It's one of those things you should never do for a family member.  It's similar to wallpapering with your spouse.  You just don't do it.  It does not enhance marital bliss.  Teaching your child how to drive a stick shift does not create a fun bonding time.

Nobody taught me how to drive a stick shift.  In our white bread, suburban neighborhood there was one little grocery store.  My next door neighbor owned it.  Medina Grocery.  I started working there when I was 12 or 13.  I continued working there through my first year of college.

I started out as a stock boy and a bag boy, carrying groceries out for all the characters that came into that little, oil wood floor store.  People didn't come in just to get groceries.  They came in for the experience.  For the conversations around the produce section, or a cup of eggnog in the back room.  Eggnog that had extra ingredients.

Medina Grocery also had a home delivery service.  People would call in their orders.  I'd get a grocery cart and get all their list of stuff off the shelves, and put it in a box on the back table.  Write their name on the outside of the box.  Organize the table filled with boxes for the delivery guy, in the order he'd be delivering them.

The delivery truck was an old Dodge panel job.  Fire engine red.  Medina Grocery printed on the side with a picture of a cartoonish guy running with a bag of groceries, some of which were flying out of the top of the bag.

By the end of my working tenure there, I was the delivery guy.  The first time I was the delivery guy, I wasn't the delivery guy.  The regular guy was sick, and John Frost, the owner, asked me if I knew how to drive a stick shift.  I said, "Sure."  I didn't.  That's what I mean when I said no one ever taught me to drive a stick shift.  I taught myself on that maiden delivery run.  I taught myself out of my own teenaged arrogance and fearlessness.

It was a three-on-the-tree.  If you don't know what that is, don't learn.  Just stay away from it.  You'll be fine.

How many of you have been to Seattle?  I'm not sure if you noticed, but it's a rather hilly place.  So on my first ever delivery run, driving a three-on-the-tree stick shift, I was going up this hill.  There's a stop light a fourth of the way up the hill.  I got stopped by the red light.

When the light turned green, I put it in gear, let out the clutch and killed the engine.  Did it again.  And again.  And again, about six or seven times.  The light turned yellow, then red.  I'm still there.  About 10 cars are lined up behind me.  I did that through three cycles of green to red lights.  The line of cars behind me was a quarter of a mile long.

I'm in a red panel truck with Medina Grocery painted on the sides.  Everyone knows where it's from.  Finally, at the next green, I gave that thing all the gas, popped the clutch and squealed the tires of the Medina Grocery truck for about a block up the hill.  I was now an expert stick shift driver.

I didn't know anything about stick shifts and clutches and how they worked.  I'm not even sure if I understand them now, and I drive a six speed stick shift in my truck.  The nice thing is, I don't have to be worried about being trapped at a light on a hill in Kansas.

But the way I understand it is, when the clutch peddle is pushed in, it releases the transmission's effect on the drive train.  Think of the drive train as a spinning plate.  The clutch pads are on both sides of that spinning plate.  When you push in the clutch peddle, the two clutch pads get pushed away from the spinning plate.  Put the drive train in gear, or change gears.  Then let your foot up slowly on the clutch peddle, easing the two pads back on to that spinning plate.

If you let up quickly on the clutch peddle, the pads grab too quickly and violently on the drive plate and the engine dies.  That's what I was doing in the Medina Grocery truck.

So it's a two step process with the clutch.  It's letting go.  And then easing back on.  Letting go.  And easing on.   In learning to drive a stick shift using a clutch, (and I'm not teaching anybody, so don't get any ideas) the hardest part is the easing back on.  Letting go is easy.  You just push on the clutch peddle.  Simple.  It's the easing back on to the source of power that's the toughest part to learn.

It's the opposite in life.  In life, the letting go is the hardest part.  The releasing.  The pushing back from.  The changing.  The divorcing.  The teenager driving on their own for the first time.  Or, the child going off to college.  The retiring.  The misheld expectations or assumptions.  The dying.  It's that hand opening release on the power that drives our life that is the hardest.

Ranier Marie Rilke has the poem:
We need, in love, to practice only this:
letting go.
For holding on
comes easily: we do not need to learn it.

Animals have it easy.  They run on instincts.  They gather food.  They find a mate.  They make babies and take care of those babies.  They defend their turf, nests and territory as best they can.  The live, they die.  They eat or get eaten.  Certainly they deal with resistance, pain, and struggle.  But they do all that on an unthinking, instinctual level.

But humans.  We do most of the same things.  But along with all that comes self-reflection.  Self-awareness.  Along with that comes blame, guilt, self-pity, worry, and resentment.  Both animals and humans have memory, but memory works different for us.  Our memory can be used to inflict emotional pain on ourselves.  Our memory serves to hold on to certain recollections that do nothing more than make us feel bad about ourselves.  We just can't or won't push the clutch peddle in and release those things, so we can change gears and move forward differently.

That's why I like these verses in Ecclesiastes, made popular in the song, "Turn, Turn, Turn" by the Byrds back in the '60's.

For everything there is a season,
a time for every matter under heaven:
...a time to gather stones together,
and a time to cast away stones;
a time to embrace,
and a time to refrain from embracing;
a time to seek,
and a time to lose;
a time to keep,
and a time to cast away...

I like the back and forth in this poetry.  It's like the motion of working the clutch.  There is the pushing in of the clutch--the releasing, the freeing, the letting go.  And there is the easing back out the clutch, the easing into new ways to grab hold of, to live and move through this life.  There's a rhythm to this letting go, and easing back into a hand hold.

The problem is that we humans want to grab and hold on as much as we can.  We don't like having to do the other:  the letting go.  Think of all the grasping and grabbing that happens:  Our country as number one in the world and the force that needs to be exerted with which we uphold that status.  Holding on to our standard of living which, in order to do so, creates economic exploitation, greed and over-consumption.

When suffering or sick, the fear that comes with illness causes us to hold on to health or life--and certainly that is a good thing to do.  We don't want to give up and let go every time we have a cold, or face some kind of illness (or heart condition).

When facing death our cultures whole stance is death-denying, in an attempt to hold on to that last breath.  Everyone around the dying person plays a part in that conspiracy of denial, which makes it all the more difficult for the dying person to let go.

We want, as the poem in Ecclesiastes states, the gathering, the embracing, the seeking, the keeping.  It's much harder to open up and allow the casting away, the refraining from embracing, the losing, and the casting away.

There are some paradox's to the act of letting go.  One woman I dealt with a number of years ago just couldn't relax.  We talked about different relaxation techniques, but try as she may, she couldn't get there.  What I discovered, in dealing with her, is that trying doesn't produce relaxation.  Trying is just another form of the energy of control.  If she controlled all the facets of her relaxation techniques, then it should work, right?  But just the opposite happened.  The more she tried to relax, the less relaxed she became.  Especially when what she tried didn't work.

The paradox was that in order to relax she had to let go of trying to relax.  She had to let go of her sense of control over her relaxation.  Relaxation was only going to come by just letting go.

The more controlling we are, the more grasping we are, the more we become unyielding and unopen.  In one of the monasteries I was in, there was a beautiful chant the monks recited.  It was in Latin, and is much more beautiful in Latin, but the English translation is:
Come Holy Spirit
Bend what is rigid in us,
Melt what is frozen.

I really loved that chant, because it reminded me that the more rigid and frozen we are, the less yielding we are to God's Spirit, and God's work in our lives.  The more we are unwilling to open ourselves up and let go, the more we try to be in control, the less we will simply relax into the Spirit of God.

Yielding and opening up to God has the element of allowing in it.  As we let go, and yield ourselves to God and God's Spirit, that means we are allowing that to happen.  We have an attitude of receptivity, rather than grasping.  You can only receive something, if your hands were already full, by opening your hands up and letting go of what we are holding on to so tightly.

Yielding to God means allowing ourselves to take God as God presents God's self to us, and to take life as God presents life to us, rather than trying to control our experiences with God, and everything else about our lives.  Yielding and allowing means embracing God as God is, not as we think God and life should go.

And then a huge part of this yielding and relaxing into God means trusting that God is at work in the letting go.  If we are experiencing too much stress and strain in life, it may be a sign or signal that, when we should be yielding, it has degenerated into control.

In one of the silent retreats I was on, the monk instructed us to think about this question:  "How do you practice with the Cross?"  I thought, That's a really weird question.  But of course I couldn't say that because it was a silent retreat.

But the more I thought about it, I realized it's an awesome question.  The Cross is the prime instance of yielding, letting go, and total relaxing into God.  It is the trusting and confident abandonment of self into God.  Without the Cross, we lose touch with our understanding, capacity, and need to yield before God.

And in that yielding is an expression of the deepest love.  Love is precisely a yielding--a letting go of a space we have filled with self, and once emptied, we can then invite and receive the beloved into that space.  That is the kind of self-emptying, letting-go-love of Christ on the Cross.

One woman, whose young child had died, said, "My heart is broken, but it is broken open..."  That's a beautiful expression of allowing God, when we have been hurt deeply, and our empty places are filled with pain, to break that space open, so the pain can go, and the love of God can fill that emptiness.  To clutch the pain, to grasp for it, to hold it in, will never allow us to be open and yielding to the loving God who wants to come to us with compassion.


That Medina Grocery delivery truck and I became friends after a while.  I learned the rhythm of totally releasing, and then easing into the grabbing hold of the power drive.  But I had to release first, totally let go, before I could then reaccess the power.  As I said, that's the hard part for us--releasing, yielding, and letting go.  Releasing is the only first step in going forward, and going smoother.