For the past few weeks, I’ve been reading The Book of Joy, by the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, with a group of parishioners at church. The book is very good, and I definitely recommend it for anyone who is searching for a way to have hope in a difficult and dangerous world, but I’d like to focus on just one aspect of the conversation between these two magnificent men: attachment.

The issue of ‘attachment’ is central to Buddhism. Very simply, ‘attachment’ is when we overly identify our selves with another person, object, location, or concept. I’m no Buddhist scholar, and there are a great variety of Buddhisms out there, so this really may be oversimplifying things, but I think that this is generally the idea. Things in this world are fleeting, change is inevitable, and so we should not live as if things are eternal and immutable. Doing so leads to suffering.

Christianity has its own take on attachment, something that Archbishop Tutu gets into in The Book of Joy, but which is not new to modern or African Christianity. Jesus was pretty clear that “the things of this world are passing away,” and the early Church, especially St. Paul, continued this way of thinking. At first, it took an apocalyptic turn, assuming that the ‘change’ was monumental and imminent, but after some time and a number of persecutions, the Church began to see “the world” and “the flesh” as particularly changeable. Unlike Buddhists, who might stop there, Christians say that we should then found our hearts on things that actually are eternal: namely, God and God’s special revelation in Jesus Christ.

Since then, the Church has, in its various manifestations, seen various things as immutable and eternal. These are things that we allow some amount of attachment towards because, we feel, they are “from God.” For many Protestants, the Bible can be a site of attachment. For Roman Catholics, there is the infallibility of the Pope and the sure grace found in the seven Sacraments. Anglicans, and Episcopalians among them, do not generally consider any of the above to be fully infallible (though certainly holy and deserving of respect), though we have our own hang-ups. We’re very proud of our history, be it local, regional, or international, and we are also rather proud of how much comfortable we say that we are with “mystery”, or the idea that the rational mind cannot fully comprehend God and the holy.

Mystery, however, is very close to the idea of non-attachment, and although we can indeed be very proud of how we embrace mystery, Anglicans are still oriented towards the mysterious relationship we have with one another and with the Trinity (which itself is a mystery of relationships). Mystery is like the parables; neither have easy answers. Once we feel like we’ve pinned them down, some new insight pops up to challenge all that we’ve previously been sure is true. I often mention in sermons and teaching that the story of the prodigal son made perfect sense to me until I became a parent myself. Then it made more sense, but it was a complicated sense that didn’t “explain away” the story. The parable’s message became more complicated, deeper, and richer. In other words, the mysteries of God, like parables, aren’t figured out or finalized. They’re furthered and made more mature. Or, like Episcopalians often say, life as a Christian is about an ever-deepening conversion to our life in God.

What does this have to do with attachment? Quite a bit. How do we love things as Christians? Knowing the pitfalls and stumbling blocks of the world and the flesh, how do Christians love things in the world – especially when we recognize those things as beloved by God and pronounced as “good” in the story of creation?

When we love something as a Christian, we do not love a single thing or a stable person or fixed perspective. We love something that is changing. My children, who are now six and nine, will one day be sixteen and nineteen. They will be themselves, but they will also be very, very different people. And this is because people are a mystery. They are not infallible. They change, shift, deepen, and live in a variety of different ways in this changeable world that all of us inhabit. This does not mean that they have no essence (and here is where Christians part from Buddhists). We Christians believe that all people have a soul – but that that soul resides with God, not in this changing world. We love the mutable person, because they are the expression of the soul that is loved by the only thing in all existence that has any claim to eternity: God in Jesus Christ.

For all of us, our identity – who we are as people – only makes sense in God. That identity is expressed in a great variety of ways (and sometimes contradictory ways), but that identity is singular in God. And for Christians, it’s okay to be attached to that. It’s okay to rely on that identity in God. It’s okay to rest in that unchanging truth, that there is something in us that God loves eternally, and because God is eternity himself (or herself or themself), that identity is eternal, too. To put it rather bluntly, there is never a time when we are unlovable. We are never without love. We may sin, and we may sin in terrible ways, but God knows that those sins are not what makes us who we are. God’s love is what makes us who we are. God’s faith on the cross, as Jesus Christ, makes us who we are. We have no other choice than to be loved.