Growing Down: Letting Go and the Path of Descent

Drew Jackson is a poet, speaker, and public theologian who serves as the Director of Mission Integration for the CAC. He is the author of God Speaks Through Wombs: Poems on God’s Unexpected Coming and Touch the Earth: Poems on The Way. Drew lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Genay, and their twin daughters, Zora and Suhaila.

I was introduced to the CAC and Fr. Richard’s teachings in my early twenties, very much in the throes of the first half of life—I was fresh out of college, a new seminarian, and focused on making something of myself. At the same time, however, my life was being turned upside-down. My mom, who had been a rock and the center of gravity for our family, was sick with breast cancer. She passed away at the age of fifty-six, when I was just twenty-three years old.

I had experienced the death of family members before, but I had never lost anyone as close to me as my mother. At the time we lost her, I felt like my life was just beginning—newly married, new to vocational ministry, fatherhood just around the corner—but the reality began to sink in that I would not have the chance to experience any of these things with my mom. She was gone, and I was undone.

It was at this point that a friend introduced me to Fr. Richard’s teachings. I remember devouring Eager to Love and The Naked Now, but what grabbed my heart initially was his teaching about letting go. I can’t remember exactly where I read it, but I recall him talking about Meister Eckhart (1260–1328) and “a spirituality of subtraction”—the concept that all healthy spirituality eventually leads us downward, on the path of unknowing. This wasn’t new to me, as my mom had talked to me about this for years, but something about losing my mom opened my soul to this teaching in a new way.

If great love and great suffering are the paths to transformation, as Fr. Richard often says, then I had experienced both with my mom, and the suffering of losing her was preparing me for something new. Buried in the experience of my mom’s death was an invitation for me to let go of the life I had imagined and had come to expect would take shape. If I kept trying to hold onto the life I thought I was supposed to have, I would miss out on “the life that is truly life” that I was being invited to embrace, “for whoever tries to save their own life will lose it, but the one who loses their own life will find it” (Matthew 16:25).

To help me reflect on this spirituality of subtraction, I wrote a short poem called “Growing Down”:
Know that growth
more often looks like
letting go
than adding more;
having all the extra
stripped away
until all that’s left
Is Love.

There are so many more things I could share about the impact that CAC and Fr. Richard have had on me, but I hold eternal gratitude for how they have been guides for me on this journey of descent. 

This reflection appears in the Summer 2023 issue of the Mendicant, our quarterly donor newsletter.