Sign of the Times

Beyond Fear
Annie Dillard shares this experience of fear from her childhood. “When I was five, I would not go to bed willingly, because something came into my room. This was a private matter between it and me. If I spoke of it, it would kill me … I dared not blink or breathe.” Then one night she figured out that the windshields of passing cars were reflecting the corner streetlights outside. That was the source of the strange, terrifying light that swept across her bedroom night after night. Says Dillard, “Figuring it out was as memorable as the thing itself. Figuring it out was a long and forced ascent to the very rim of being, to the membrane of skin that both separates and connects the inner life and the outer world.”
While our experience may not match that of Annie Dillard, it does seem true that the human experience of fear is a universal theme – something that seems to have been in our bones since birth. Like it or not, daily life brings with it a certain amount of risk, pain, anxiety and change, and with all that inevitably there comes a level of fear.
Now I think it is important to say that not all fear is bad or to be avoided. It can prepare us emotionally to deal with difficult or dangerous situations, can even make us want to do something about that which we fear. A hundred years ago, that grand old preacher, Henry Ward Beecher said, “God planted fear in the soul as truly as God planted hope or courage. It’s a kind of bell gong which rings the mind into quick life in order to face unusual danger.”
Ah, but fear can be extraordinarily destructive if, rather than being a temporary stimulus to creative action, it becomes instead a permanent and ruling passion. And there are so many Lords of Fear out there telling us to be very afraid – afraid of change, afraid of anyone who does not look or believe like us, afraid of moving beyond the limits of our own comfort and safety. And such fear can tear us apart at the seams. It was C.S. Lewis who wrote, “Hatred is often the compensation by which a frightened man reimburses himself for the miseries of Fear. The more he fears, the more he will hate.” His words may sound harsh, until you consider how nasty and mean-spirited our fear-obsessed national mood and discussion have become. When fear begins to shape human lives, human community become distorted, even broken, as the humanity of the “other” is too often denied.
How to move beyond such destructive fear? Perhaps by responding to the real people in the real places where we live instead of to the stories we have heard about what has happened to other people somewhere else; perhaps by looking into each other’s eyes expecting to see allies instead of threats. Yes, I suppose it can be a dangerous way to live, but it just might be the only way to living a life that truly matters – a life that pours itself out for others as a matter of course, that spends itself without counting the cost, that trusts that there is always more life where our own life comes from.
Yes, the voices of fear are all around us. But if we allow ourselves to become so consumed with fear that we forget who we are and why we are alive in the first place, we will have lost the essence of what makes human life human and humane.
Gene Nelson is the senior minister of The Community Church of Sebastopol.