Playful letting be

Our title is a converted phrase from a guru of the Realistic Living Institute in Texas that wrote of “effortless letting be.” The ORID (Objective, Reflective, Interpretive, Decisional) iteration of the brain-mind process that science reveals in brain structure and the Institute of Cultural Affairs uses for its Imaginal Education, we locate “playful letting be” to the active “D”ecisional category of willful doing. It’s the ides of October and we can be playful.

My Dad at 93 ran away from my sister’s residence or from his “confinement” at the hospice at few times. My brother, a chaplain of Honolulu’s Blue, was then called in the middle of the night after the police found my Dad aimlessly wandering on the superhighway. From the silence of his bed, Papa ascended into Mililani Memorial Park at 95.

My mother turned 95 a few weeks back. She lies by her lonesome at a Honolulu care facility for the elderly. On the times I visited her, the rest of the ward patients were fed on wheelchairs and sat together for a while before going back to their respective beds, some falling asleep in their chairs in the hallway. It was their social time! My mother is bedridden, propped-up for feeding, which she handled by herself, or at least she did a year ago.

“Letting be” and “letting go” are now the twin preoccupations of her life, mostly the first, and not for long, the latter. I do not plan to be present at her internment. I bid her adieu on my last visit to her, also to North America and east Pacific, after 50 years of going to and fro.

I recall a gall bladder surgery in Honolulu 2007 while Dad was led to his plot at Mililani. I travelled from Saipan to Hawaii for his funeral to catch the tail end of his wake but I landed on a surgery table instead, though in my mind I spent the time conversing with my Dad in nether lands. His will decreed burial rather than cremation, so his offspring complied.

My mother will see her last day at the care home. She had her own apartment but she needed assistance when she broke her hipbone after a fall.

“Loss is one thing; regret is another,” says a speaker serenely sitting with prosthetic arm and legs after the natural ones were lost in a college accident. He became a care provider and shares his experiences on medical practice to wide audiences.

He gave a moving TED account of his awakenment to human service. It resonated with my experience. Hospitals are designed to be disease-focused more than folks-centered. They do a needed function but it is no place to die, let alone live, he affirmed. The place promotes antiseptic sterility; anesthetic patient is the rule with no exception. He would rather that grief be transformed into gratitude rather than repugnance. “Play” to him is the highest form of human adaptation, full of laughter and mirth.

Our Texas guru phrased “effortless letting be” in his voluminous writings. He coined the triune dynamic of awe, awesome, and the awed ones equivalent to the formulation of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit of the Rock-of-Peter tradition. Google his name and you get dolls but try Realistic Living Institute and you get the staff in living color, Gene and Joyce Marshalls, and Alan Richards.

RLI’s theological root goes back to a religious course that featured thoughts of Rudolf Bultmann, Paul Tillich, Dietrich Bonheoffer, and H. Richard Niebuhr; earlier, the likes of Soren Kierkegaard and existential thought reigned before the Death-of-God blew the lid off theology. 

Google religious studies (RS-1), a course that helped many pull together their Rock-of-Peter tradition. I invite those curious enough to scour their thoughts, or the absence thereof, to Google Realistic Living Institute, and join their reflections.

Sunday the 27th, I sought Saipan’s young Vanessa Jean Woodruff’s “letting go” service. I could not locate the Palauan Evangelical Church on Navy Hill so I went to the Pohnpei UCC at Kannat Tabla thinking they might know. They did. They sent me back to Navy Hill, only to discover that I missed the event by a day!

In his 80s, Gene Marshall had hospital care with the requisite tests and a case of arterial hardening recommended bypass surgery. The Marshalls thought it through, declining the medical procedure. “Effortlessly letting go” conjoined with “effortlessly letting be,” an awe happening akin to a religious experience is what the Marshalls got. 

Since 1977, RLI dialogued on the “awe happening,” a Christian Resurgence effort with Islam, Judaism, Taoism, Buddhism, Hinduism, the Goddess heritage, antiquity’s tribal religions and current religious hand wringing and writhing (writing, too, but we wanted to be more descriptive). 

As humans depend on other creatures for survival, “some unto death that others might live,” RLI’s output enables spirit sustenance. I do not know what the Marshalls come to in their count of remaining years. Mine is 16 years of “playful letting be” conjoined to “playful letting go.”