On Fear – continued

 

A couple of weeks ago, I began what might be called a meditation on fear.  It concluded: “Lots of questions.  No answers.   … to be continued.”

 

So let’s continue.  I have heard the words “God fearing” explained away any number of times.  But I think there is a difference, a real and palpable difference, between a “God fearing” man or woman, and a “God loving” man or woman.

 

What I want to ask is WHY?  Why have religions taught us to fear God?  Why would we want to teach our children to fear?  Why have we united ourselves around sacred fear?  What is it within us that is seduced by sacred fear?

 

Please don’t expect answers.  As I ponder this I realize that it has been one of the most confusing questions of my life.  I bonded with the 23^rd Psalm the first time I heard it, which was as a very young child.  “I shall fear no evil, for Thou art with me.”  It made perfect sense to me.  I knew by then there was evil in the world.  And it could strike without warning.  But I was not to fear it.  Nor was I to fear God.

 

I have been blessed with a relatively fearless life.  I’ve really only faced numbing fear perhaps two times.  Once was when I was quite young, perhaps six?  It was the first time that my mind comprehended that the world was not safe.  I was a Jew.  One out of every three Jews on planet earth had been exterminated by Hitler in a war that had ended only a few years before I was born.  The next day I had to go to school with a knowledge I’d not possessed the day before – the knowledge that there were people in this world who hated me, and indeed would just as soon kill me if they could.  But somehow that changed into a rather fearless outlook.  “Even Hitler failed.  Do your worst.”  I shall fear no evil, for Thou art with me.

  

Most recently (not quite two years ago) it had been so long since I’d been truly afraid for myself that I didn’t recognize my feelings as fear when they bubbled up and threatened to engulf me.  I’ve had the habit of speaking truth to power throughout my life.  It’s caused me problems from time to time, but never fear.  This time was different.  I blew a huge chunk of savings for retirement on a full page ad in the two main Seattle papers (the Times and P-I) about what our president was doing in Iraq – and what that was doing to us.  As the day of publication approached I was more and more distracted.  The day the ad appeared a reporter from a local TV station came to interview me.  I was a mess.  It was one lousy interview.  But it wasn’t until I’d read perhaps fifty or sixty e-mails over the next few days, e-mails thanking me for my “courage” in speaking out that I understood just how afraid I had been.  People now attack the policy in Iraq with impunity, but in October of 2006 there was a lot of silence.  And those who did speak out, found that the Bush administration and media came down on them.  Hard. 

 

It was a great teaching moment.  For the first time I’d experienced just how potent fear can be.  I began to understand how a people can be silenced.  How easy it is to silence people.  But there was nothing else positive in those fears.  I will fear no oppression, for Thou art with me.

 

So where is all this going?  I’m not sure.  A healthy respect for danger is positive.  But I see nothing positive in fear.  And I see nothing positive in a religion that teaches fear.  I believe that to the extent I have conquered my fears it is because I experience a God of love, not a God of fear. 

 

These aren’t conclusions.  Just ponderings.  And it really doesn’t answer the question.  How did so many of us, for so many generations, become seduced by sacred fear?  Something’s missing.  So again … to be continued.

An Open House

 

We have an Open House, at the Interfaith Community Church this Sunday.  The idea is to make welcome, in a low key way, any who might like to come and visit the church, and see what an Interfaith service might look like.  Feel like.

 

So, of course, I’ve been hard at work on the sermon.  I want to be welcoming, but not overbearing, explain, but not evangelize.  So what do I say?

 

I love that the word “interfaith” arises out of the 1960’s.  The first use of it that I can find (from the Oxford English Dictionary) refers to an interfaith effort to help out of work people find jobs.  Social justice has always been at the heart of interfaith.  Do I start there?

 

My passion for Interfaith comes from my own belief that, like the Japanese folk saying puts it: “There are many roads to the top of Mount Fuji.”   Or, as I like to put it, “It’s not the religion you practice, it’s how you practice your religion.”

 

For so many thousands of years we, as humanity, have been taken up with the question of which doctrines about God are right.  In the book I’ve begun to write I ask, “So how’s it working for you?”  So many wars fought in the name of one religion or the other, or one sect of one religion and another.  It seems to me that we have spent far too much energy on whose religious beliefs are “right” and far too little energy treating each other with the love, and respect, and compassion that each of our religions in their own way have asked of us.

 

It’s NOT that all religions are the same.  They aren’t.  Christianity isn’t Buddhism.  Islam isn’t Judaism.  Each religion is different.  Each religion looks at the sacred differently.  Yet each religion calls upon us to respect the earth.  Each religion calls upon us to treat the “other” with love and understanding.  So how did we end up with slavery, and exploitation?  How did we end up with massive corporations run by multi-billionaires and so many dying from hunger?

 

It seems to me we much too often stop with a statement of what we believe.  Isn’t what we DO with those beliefs that counts? 

 

That, for me, is Interfaith, and living the Interfaith life.  It is realizing my commonality with Jews, Christians, Buddhists, Muslims, Humanists and every other form of the sacred community who will ACT with love and compassion and respect for one another.

 

It seems revelatory to come to a point that a person can be nurtured by another’s faith.  I recall my “glory days” as a Choir Director at a Methodist Church in Monterey Park, California some thirty years ago: realizing that I, as a Jew, could find meaning leading a choir whose faith was not my own.  I remained Jewish.  The church remained Methodist.  But we learned from each other.  And, I believe, were blessed with a little bit broader perception of magnitude of the holy.

 

Now, to put that into the sermon!

Fear

 

I think I could spend several entries on the joy of vacation and the wonder of reconnecting with old friends.  I returned a week ago from a truly energizing twelve day jaunt.  I went “friend-hopping” – visiting three couples very dear to me.  Such a delight! 

 

But what is on my mind today is how fearful we humans are, and how destructive our fears can be.  It’s driven home these days in the politics of fear that so plagues our nation and, indeed our world.  It is not that we are fearless.  It’s that we tend to vote for the “leader” we fear less.  So making us fear the “other guy”(the other religion, the other country) becomes the order of the day. 

 

Of course, we hate to acknowledge it – which is, I think, why we say we just hate negative ads, even as we allow ourselves to be guided by them.  But why?  Why is fear so potent?

 

I wonder if it is, in part at least, related to a disconnect between our minds and our embodied selves.  In other words, who we would like to be, as opposed to who we have allowed ourselves to become.  If we don't acknowledge our fear, we needn't face it.

 

Economist John Kenneth Galbraith wrote, “The modern Conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.”  I’m not so sure that the “Conservatives” are all that guilty and the “Progressives” are all that pure.  But the thought that our minds can rationalize who we are rather than guide us to our better selves is worth pondering.

 

How else to explain the universal horror at the existence of poverty and the explosion of poverty at the same time?  How else to explain the statement that “all men are created equal” and yet the continued exploitation of one group of people by another? 

 

“Do as I say, not as I do,” is a cliché because all too often it so accurately describes us.  What is needed is that we do as we say.  And that is amazingly hard work!  Is it the hard work we fear?  Or is it something deeper? 

 

If we believe that all of us carry the spark of the divine, and that all spiritual and faith traditions are paths toward Love, then mustn’t how we live our lives reflect this universal brother and sisterhood?  This call is hardly new.  I believe it can be found in the words of Jesus, of Hillel, of Mohammed, of the Buddha and so many others … including the poet John Donne, who reminded us that we are interconnected with each other, that another person’s poverty is our own poverty, and another person’s death is our own death, and therefore to “Ask not for whom the bells tolls … it tolls for thee.”

 

And the truth is, more and more people acknowledge this.  Yet we still find it incredibly hard to embody what we proclaim.  And I wonder if at the core of this may yet again be fear. 

 

Franklin Roosevelt famously stated “We have nothing to fear, but fear itself.”  But fear is potent, and coercive, and yet seductive at the same time.    Lots of questions.  No answers.   … to be continued.