Overcoming Fear and Retaining Our Humanity by The Rev. Dr. Frank G. Kirkpatrick
Posted on
4th Sunday of Advent
December 20, 2015
Trinity Church, Hartford
The Rev. Dr. Frank G. Kirkpatrick
“Overcoming Fear and Retaining our Humanity”
If there is a phrase that best seems to capture the mood of our times it might be this one: be afraid, be very afraid. Fear has become the dominant emotion in much of America today. It has become the fuel which has inflamed people’s passions against others whom they are told, usually without any shred of justification, they ought to fear. And it may well become the emotion that will eventually destroy everyone in our path because we fear them and believe we can only eliminate them if they are no longer to pose a threat to us. And in the process fear will destroy our own humanity as well.
It is sometimes said that the opposite of love is hate. But I’d like to suggest the true opposite of love is fear, and that fear, when it is not assuaged, eventually leads to hate and hate to violence and ultimately violence to the erosion of our fundamental humanity, of our nature as the persons we were created by God to be. I’d also like to suggest, however, that from our Christian faith we can find resources that will help us to confront our fears and in the process reconstruct the way in which we relate to others whom we are now being taught to fear and to destroy. Through that reconstruction we can begin to restore the humanity in ourselves and in others, a common humanity that fear seeks to undermine and erode.
Fear of the other begins with a fear for oneself. I want only the best for myself and those I love and if I perceive someone as threatening these things then my fear for myself, my insecurity in the presence of others, develops and increases. This self-protective fear, based on the belief that I am who I am only when I can count only on myself and my own resources, convinces me that unless I disarm or neutralize the threatening Other, I will lose myself and all that I hold dear. While this view of the threatening other is often in harmony with an economic view that puts the satisfying of self-interest ahead of the satisfaction of the needs of others, it is a view of human relationships that is at odds with a fundamental Christian conviction or belief: a belief that I am essentially, through God’s intention and creation, actually and most fully myself when I stand in a mutual relation of love and trust toward the other. The great mystery, and at the same time the greatest of all truths found at the heart of the Abrahamic tradition, is that as human persons we were made by the same God to live in and for each other, not primarily for ourselves: we were made for love. Love means accepting the other person, with his or her own unique and irreplaceable personhood, as a complement to myself, as one who helps to complete me, who through mutuality brings me to the highest state of fulfillment and flourishing, as I do to him or her. And this is because we were created to achieve the greatest possible degree of fulfillment and flourishing only in and through a mutually loving relationship. My deepest humanity is realized and protected only when I remain true to the basic conviction that living in love will fulfill me even when others threaten me with their hateful power. My deepest humanity is realized only when I refuse to respond to the siren call of those who would seek to enhance their power and personal agendas by exploiting my fears and attempting to drive me by their rhetoric and demagoguery into fighting my fear by threatening others with violence and exclusion. This is the abuse and manipulation of fear: and it is morally reprehensible especially as part of a campaign for the presidency of the United States. Living out of fear, in other words, can destroy my truer and better self and it can lead to the destruction of others if the demagogue convinces me that they are my enemy who must be destroyed by me if I am to live fully for myself.
But psychology and experience demonstrate that my destruction of the other will not make me live at peace with myself: it will only lead me into deeper bastions of fear and insecurity from which I will peer out with suspicion, mistrust, and hatred toward others whom I do not know and whom I choose to treat as profoundly different from me and who, therefore, are worthy of my disdain and ultimately of standing at the end of the barrel of the gun I or the forces deployed on my behalf are am aiming at them.
The prevalence of fear as a way of life is based on a false narrative that tells us that we are fully human only when we exist in fearful relations with others and are successful in finding ways to dominate, exclude, or suppress them. But the Christian story is at bottom a story of how fear-based and domination fueled relationships have been superceded and replaced by relationships based on reconciliation and acceptance of the Other because we are all simply human. Reconciliation and love, according to the Christian narrative, are the motives that led Jesus to accept death at the hands of fearful people rather than destroy them by his godly power. By accepting death on a cross he annulled the power of fear and overcame it by the power of love. Now to avoid misunderstanding, we should carefully note that Jesus’ lack of fear did not mean that he was not crucified painfully on a cross: he died in pain, but he died without fear or insecurity and his humanity remained intact and was not overcome by fear.
Today of course acts of terrorism and gun violence fill our minds with fear: fear for ourselves, for our loved ones, and for all those innocent persons upon whom violent acts of terror will be unleashed. But as people of faith we need to come to grips with this fear and not let it define who we are and how we should live. We might recall Elizabeth’s words to Mary in this morning’s Gospel:
“blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord”. Mary accepts these words from Elizabeth and reminds herself that God’s mercy is absolutely reliable according to the promise he made to our ancestors.
These are the two poles on which all our hope depends. There is fear and in many instances we are justified in responding to it by acts of protection. It is prudent to take steps to disarm the ones who intend us harm. It is equally prudent to remove the weapons of violence from our own midst. But even the most responsible attempts to disarm others cannot overcome the roots of our fear. For that we need God’s merciful love which can address our fears and overcome them. This overcoming of fear does not necessarily mean that what we fear is unreal or imaginary. Hatred and violence will not simply disappear if we have enough faith in God’s mercy. What we fear may actually happen. But our fundamental conviction is that when evil things happen they will not be able to overwhelm us, or diminish us, or turn us into people who seek revenge by escalating violence and calling for hatred of other people or forces which threaten us. It cheapens our humanity if we live out of fear: it drives us into an unbreakable cycle of violence in which our true humanity and that of the other fade from sight. We cannot overcome fear by weapons of war or worshipping the gun.
Love does not magically remove all harmful things from our lives. But it can remove the false and ultimately futile ways in which we live in the presence of harm and threat. It can help us greet those things that might harm us, whether it be someone with a gun or a weapon of terror, even a dread disease, with the assurance that there is nothing in heaven or earth that can stand between us and the love of God through whom all things are possible and in whom the fullness of our lives is ultimately attained.