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Understanding Fear
January 10, 2010
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Reading
The following is a story of one man’s life. His mother died when he was 9 years old. He was born the son of farmers and so received very little education. He failed in business at the age of 21. He was defeated in a legislative race at the age of 22, and failed again in business at 24. He was devastated by the death of a sweetheart when he was 26, and subsequently had a nervous breakdown when he was 27. At 34 he lost a congressional race, and lost it again two years later. He lost a senatorial race at the age of 45. After another two years, he failed in an effort to become vice-president. He then went on to lose another senatorial race at the age of 49. He was often described as insecure, shy, depressed, melancholy, secretive, non-confrontational, self-doubting and preoccupied with the idea of premature death and even the possibility that he might go mad. He was uncomfortable in high-society gatherings, and his etiquette was often considered substandard. At the age of 52 .... He became the sixteenth president of the United States. The man was Abraham Lincoln. Once Lincoln mentioned to an old friend that all the troubles and anxieties of his life could not equal the opposition and criticism he received during the Civil War. They were so great, Lincoln said, that he did not think he could possibly survive them. From all over America came cries that he was too stupid and unfit to be president or to reunite the country. But, a great man such as Abraham Lincoln is a gift to his time. He drew strength from his personal history of tragedies. He had endured the unendurable from childhood to adulthood. Thus, anchored on his personal strength, he led an entire nation through its most trying period.
Sermon This reading was from a website called “Panic Anxiety Education Management Service” from South Australia. The author, whose name I do not know, speaks of how anxiety disorder attacks the very sense of self and that people with anxiety disorder can feel so alone. However, when people share their fears with others, they soon discover that many others have a similar affliction. It is interesting to note that some great people who have had this disorder, including Alfred Lord Tennyson, Charlotte Bronte, Nikola Tesla, Sigmund Freud, Emily Dickinson, John Steinbeck, Sir Isaac Newton, Robert Burns, Edvard Munch and John Stuart Mill, to name a few. Thus, those of us who suffer from anxiety disorder are not alone, and certainly all of us here at times, have experienced fear, anxiety and stress that have prevented us from living healthy and happy lives. It is important here to understand that fear is a natural response to a threat. And indeed, it is a necessary emotion. For without it, we would not survive as a species. But there are those fears that cause inhibition and paralysis in people’s lives, such that they may act irrationally, even though some, as we have just noted, do well when in the grips of an anxiety disorder. But we understand this phenomenon. It is not difficult to be caught in the grips of unreasoning fear, especially in times of uncertainty such as our own. At such times, it is important to understand our fear, to have compassion for ourselves, to look at what exactly at what is making us afraid, and to come to some strategies of changing not so much our outer lives, but our perceptions that prevent us from seeing our lives clearly. When we are afraid, however, it is difficult to know if what we are afraid of is real and reasonable. I like to say, that we tend to live in two worlds: one of possibility and the other probability. For example, it is possible that the ceiling of this sanctuary could cave in. Such things happen, but rarely. Therefore, should we be afraid of its falling on us right now? In the movie, Bowling for Columbine, Michael Moore asks the famed actor Charlton Heston had he ever been a victim of a crime. Heston said no, and here he is a man in his eighties living in a gated community with much security and many guns. It does not seem probable that he will be a victim of a crime. Nevertheless, Mr. Heston acts as if he is afraid. I, on the other hand, have been a victim of several crimes, in particular when I worked as a VISTA worker in the ghettos of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, but I was never a victim of a violent crime, only of burglary and theft. But I never felt threatened or a need to own a gun. Perhaps, I was lucky. Perhaps, I was fooling myself, but I don’t think so. I think rather that a gun would not have helped me and that my belief that I was probably safe from being hurt if not from being ripped off, as safe as driving or riding in a car, made it possible for me to relate to the people in the neighborhood with good will and good faith. Fear does prevent us from acting reasonably, from having good relationships with others and it can affect our health. It can cause us to isolate ourselves, to blame others for our problems, to compromise when we should have stood up for ourselves, to have a negative attitude, to procrastinate, to take things personally, to give up, to have self-pity, to be a perfectionist, to endlessly daydream and to compare ourselves with others. And it can cause physical symptoms such as diarrhea, headaches, stomachaches, high blood pressure, and overeating. Fear and stress can contribute to serious physical problems. For example, a 13-year study from Journal of the American Heart Association of March, 2003, found people with high levels of stress had an almost double risk of fatal stroke compared with people without stress. But there is the other problem with fear, the social problem. For fear can cause our society to suffer, as well, just as if our society were a patient suffering from a stroke. Bonaro Overstreet in her book, Understanding Fear in Ourselves and Others said: Of all the emotional forces that pattern our individual and interpersonal behaviors, fear has that most insidious power to make us do what we ought not to do, and leave undone what we ought to do. Under its influence and trying to escape its influence, we seemed fated to give it a stronger hold upon us.If, today, we live in a time of crisis, it is in large measure because the fear-born follies of our individual and group pasts have piled up in the present. Errors of omission and commission crowd us now, demanding of us a swift new wisdom about destructive fears, and the conditions that foster them. To call a halt to this compounding of folly – or even to slow its progress – we must become clear about some of the reasons why we have not yet made an adequate attack upon our human fear problem. It seems to me that our nation is suffering from our human fear problem. This past Christmas, a young Nigerian man, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, attempted to blow up an airline jet. There has been much consternation and finger-pointing about this incident and it does seem that some old-fashion police follow-up work would have prevented this young man from flying on a plane at all. But what I am hearing now is a lot of irrational, nonsensical, dishonest talk that may lead us down a path that we have been before that will not only make ourselves less secure, but less happy and poorer. I see a picture of the young Nigerian man and he reminds of the gang members I taught some years ago in alternative education. He has the look of a lost, angry, surly, tough guy, a young man whose anger makes him an easy target for suggestibility that he is a victim of his circumstances, that the evil ones are Americans, that he would be some kind of hero, prove his manhood and make himself into a martyr. He is called upon to sacrifice himself, just as a gang member would as he is called upon to do a drive-by shooting. And these young men are afraid, deeply afraid. And what frightens them the most is appearing vulnerable. That is they are afraid of their own fear. They cannot acknowledge the truth of their existence. Thus, they put on a persona, which comes from a Greek word that refers to the masks actors wore in ancient Greek theater. It is the fear that Ms Overstreet refers to of trying to escape fear’s influence and thus it has a stronger hold on us. But I am concerned that that same kind of fear that grips the personas of the young Nigerian man and gang members is gripping the imagination of the American people. As a result, we fail to acknowledge our own fear and of the truth of our own existence. We then lose our perspective because of our fear of terrorism. We have been fighting what is called a war on terror for almost a decade. Now, think for a moment what that means. What is this terror on which we have declared war? Well, terror is a feeling, a feeling of intense fear. And who is feeling this terror? Why we are. So, to declare war on terror is to declare on our own feelings of fear. Does that make sense? After September 11, 2001, instead of declaring war on terror, our government could have instituted another strategy. Remember that at that time, there was sympathy for our nation, even from Muslim nations. We had an opportunity to enter into a conversation about the nature of terrorism, about the men who decided to kill civilians to fulfill their distorted view of themselves as men, just as gang members would. We could have labeled them criminals, which they are, in my mind. To declare war, actually played into the hands of Osama ben Laden because he relished the idea that the world see him as a combatant with the evil United States, and that we were fighting him, as if he were some super power. But we could have made the 9/11 case into police work, which would have not played in ben Laden’s hands, for he does not want the world to see him as a criminal especially in the countries where he lives and operates. But police work is not as glamorous as war. It requires a lot of research and use of intelligence. It requires the cooperation of other nations and their police agencies. And when it is done correctly, it is as if nothing had happen, unlike military force that can create the image of great leaders. What troubles me is that we have lost something, we have lost our rational fear, a fear that helps to keep us to preserve our lives and to work towards making a better world for ourselves and for our children and future generations. We have lost our rational fear of war and of becoming something that we would have abhorred before September 11, 2001, of becoming like the terrorists. Theodore Rubin in his book, Compassion and Self-Hatred, discusses the idea of fearing war is rational and how those who promote war often do so out there own fear and self-hatred. He said: To fear war, which is a psychotic enterprise no matter what the ultimate rationalization or motivation, and to fear physical confrontations which can lead to death are appropriate life-saving reactions. The decision to refuse to kill and to chance being killed has genuine merit in the scope of human complexity, however devoted one may be to cause or country. Willingness to sacrifice one’s life for a cause or for someone else is almost inevitably the result of severe self-hate, and dreams of a glorious nonexistent Valhalla or severely aberrated judgment… Many so-called brave and self-sacrificing acts are born of impulses having little or nothing at all to do with love [of others]. They are often the result of brain-washing, simplistic development and thinking, rage, poor judgment, poor impulse control, poor frustration tolerance, and enormous but usually hidden fund of raging self-hate.I am not a pacifist, though I admire my pacifist friends. But what is important is about using military force is that we do so not out of our irrational fear, but out of our considered determination that no other option is available. To use war to satisfy our emotional vulnerabilities will only create more misery and make us give up on the principles of our democracy. Thus, we lose more then just innocent lives and much treasure. We lose our self-respect. Recent polls, for example, have suggested that Americans actually now support the use of torture. Torture is wrong, it is immoral, ineffective and violates the very sense of ourselves as a nation that was created as a nation of laws. For democracy is more than just a place that people vote for their leaders, it is also a place that supports the rule of law, rights of individuals, equality, justice, truth, the public good, equal protection, freedom of religion, rights of minorities to be free from the tyranny of the majority, and rights of the accused. Sadly, many of our leaders in politics and communications have promoted this irrational fear. But just as we can be determined not to give into our irrational fears on a personal level, we as American citizens can reject the dishonest fear-mongering of our leaders who take us away from the principles of our democracy and our self-respect. In his book, This I Believe: The Personal Philosophies of One Hundred Thoughtful Men and Women, Edward R. Murrow spoke on how the English during a time much more harrowing than our own were able to keep to their principles because of their confidence in themselves. He said: In the Autumn of 1940, when Britain stood alone, when the bombers came at dusk each evening and went away at dawn, I observed a sign on a church just off the East India Dock Road; it was crudely lettered and it read: "If your knees knock, kneel on them." I quoted that sign in a broadcast to America that night, but did not fully understand it. For even in those dark days I could observe no more kneeling or knocking knees than at the time of the Anschluss or Munich. The imminence of disaster brought no spiritual revival. And yet, at a time when most men save Englishmen despaired of England’s life, there was a steadiness, a confidence and determination that must have been based on something other than a lack of imagination.Now, Great Britain in the autumn and winter of 1940 was in far great peril then we are now. Nevertheless, according to Murrow, they had confidence in themselves and in the principles of their kind of governance. I know of so many stories of the heroism of the ordinary people of Great Britain who withstood the bombing, who would queue up quietly and orderly to go to bomb shelters, who would house another whose house was bombed or a soldier. It is a powerful feeling to have that kind of confidence, to not give up, not to compromise of our cherished values, both on a personal level and as a nation. We are going for a tough time right now, especially economically. Thus we are vulnerable to suggestibility about the cause of our problems and can be enticed into irrational actions, perhaps even violent actions. Remember that we all can be afraid and there is no shame in that. And even in our fear, we can do amazing, wonderful things. I only suggest that we are honest about when and what we are afraid of and to treat each other and ourselves with respect and dignity. For if we do that, then we can recapture the spirit of our great American democracy that also reflects the principles of our liberal faith, a spirit that calls forth to us to live confidently with love and compassion. |
| Sermon Copyright © 2010 Harold W. Beu |
