by
Rev. Joy Atkinson
Presented to the Unitarian
Society of Santa Barbara
October 28, 2007
©2007 by Rev. Joy Atkinson
Santa Barbara, California
Quote before the sermon:
Fear grows in darkness; if you think there’s a
bogeyman around, turn on the light.
-Dorothy Thompson
Chalice Words:
You gain strength, courage and confidence by every
experience in which you really stop and look fear
in the face.
You must do the thing
which you think you cannot do.
-Eleanor Roosevelt
From ghosties
and ghoulies
And
long-legged beasties
And
things that go bump in the night
Good
Lord, deliver us.
I learned this little prayer-like rhyme as a child. It acknowledges
the fears that children have—fears of the monster in the closet, the goblins in
the haunted house, the nasty things that howl and hide out in the woods, all
always there, waiting to pounce. At Halloween, we see these creatures of fear,
made manifest in costumes and decorations, having become objects of play. But
very young children are often still frightened. I remember my young son, at age
three or four, running in terror from the door when the trick-or-treat goblins
and ghosts appeared one Halloween, a couple of years before he became one of
them himself.
The
life of a young child is both wondrous and frightening. The world is new, and
many things are fun, but there are things to be afraid of, like losing our
parents, or the ever-present threat that they will get mad at us, or that other
kids will reject or hurt us, or that we'll be abandoned. There's so much we
don't understand, and have no power over. Life is just plain scary sometimes,
even if we haven't been abused or neglected. The fears of childhood are real
but often a bit vague. So children make them concrete—as monsters in the closet
and demons under the bed.
It is not so very different when we're adults. We may feel
anxious and vaguely threatened at times—fidgeting and worried by day, waking
out of a nightmare at 3AM with a sense of dread—and we may not know exactly
what we fear. The writer Sam Keen has said: “Who is so grown up as to have lost
the desire for protection against the terrors of the night? The beasties and
things that go bump don't wear the faces of bears and burglars as we get older.
They all begin to wear the mask of death.” So the culprit, he says, the Big
Fear beneath our worries and anxieties, is really death, masquerading in other
forms. Theologian Paul Tillich made a similar claim. He said that fear in the
form of anxiety is our human reaction to the threat of non-being--by which he
meant not just the threat of physical death, but the threat of a sense of
meaninglessness.
Fear is a complex feeling. There are many objects of fear:
illness, pain and death, flying or driving, spiders or crowds, war, loneliness,
or even, unfortunately, whole groups or races of people. The fact that we have
so many names for this feeling indicates its importance and complexity in human
existence: we call it terror, dread, panic, horror, fright, alarm, anxiety,
worry. Each word has its own shades of meaning, but they are all types of fear.
Biologically, fear is useful in that it mobilizes the fight
or flight reaction. I remember the heart-pounding fear I felt late one night as
a teenager, having gotten off the subway in Astoria, New York and begun walking
the mile home. There was no one around. Soon, I heard footsteps behind me, and
glanced back to find that someone was following me, someone I had seen staring
at me on the subway. As I picked up my pace, so did he. As I jaywalked across
the street to try and shake him, he did too, crossing crookedly exactly as I
did. I decided that flight was my best option, and I suddenly bolted, and just
kept going until I reached the safety of home. He had started to run too, but,
perhaps deciding I wasn't as easy prey as he thought, he ceased his pursuit.
That was raw fear! Fear in this form is direct, specific, conscious and focused
on an object or event.
Another kind of fear, anxiety, is more subtle, vague and
indirect, with the cause of it often unconscious. With acute anxiety, and some
phobias, the physical fight or flight response may appear, even when there is
no immediate threat. The adrenaline produced by acute anxiety can cause rapid
pulse, hyperventilation, and hyper watchfulness. But with no opportunity to
fight or flee, one can carry around these uncomfortable physiological responses
for an extended time, which takes a toll on one's health. Such anxiety may need
to be treated with psychotherapy and maybe medication.
But whether the anxiety is acute, or is the garden variety
existential anxiety that we all feel from time to time, I think Tillich is
right: the deepest root of it is the threat of non-being: that is, death, or a
loss of meaning. Even a commonplace worry like how you'll do in an interview,
or on a test, or meeting someone new, has at its base a fear of losing your
sense of yourself, your feeling of personal worth. There is at least a
temporary sense of non-being when you are rejected or fail. What seem to be
superficial worries and anxieties can go very deep, as we sometimes learn
through the dreams we have before facing a challenge or ordeal.
Sam Keen writes that the best way around fear is to go
through it. He writes: “Push fears out the front door, disown them...and they
will only return by the back door. Embrace fear. Invite it into the house of
awareness. Hold it gently until it is ready to leave.” Keen points out what
many of us have experienced. That somewhere during the spiraling downward of a
negative emotion like fear or anxiety, an escape route opens up, if we stop
running away from what we dread, squarely face it, and let the demon speak. As
the haunting refrain of a song by Joni Mitchell puts it, fear can either be
stepping stones, or sinking sand.
I believe we can give our fears a voice, make use of
them as stepping stones through the darkness, if we bring them into conscious
awareness. Why is it that we are so afraid to move forward with some aspect of
our lives? Is it fear of failure, or of embarrassment, or of losing someone's
love and esteem, or even fear of success? It's not easy to plumb the depths of
our fears and anxieties for clues to understanding our deeper selves, but if we
are ready and able to do so, we may find that there is much to learn.
I have a friend who was deathly afraid to drive. Finally,
frustrated that she had to take three long bus rides because she couldn't make
the 15-minute drive to work, she faced the fear, and began to understand its
connections to other fears from her childhood. She triumphantly got her license
at age 40. Now, some 15 years later, she can barely remember what was so
terrifying. Another friend came down with a serious and debilitating disease
years ago. He actually went crazy with fear for a time. But at some point he
found his personal escape route, and faced head-on the disabilities he now has
to live with. He took time to go back to school and complete a degree, and he
found many activities he could still do well, and enjoy: taking classes,
singing, volunteer work in his church.
The Day of the Dead traditions of Central and South America bring the threat of non-being that underlies our lives up into consciousness. People confront that dreaded skeleton at the base of life, and even play with it for a time. They bake sweet bread in skull and bone shapes, and give children skeleton puppets or skulls made of candy. They dress skeletons in regular clothes and pose them doing normal everyday activities to gently mock the living, as a reminder of our mortality. A popular custom is to make up Calaveras—skull stories—rhyming epitaphs of living friends and relatives. Here’s one I made up about myself, as an example:
There
goes Joy, a skull with topknot red
How
svelte she will finally be
When she is
good and dead!
On el Dia De Los Muertos, which combines the Catholic All Souls Day, the ancient European Halloween, and Aztec traditions, people visit their relatives' graves, decorate the tombstones, leave gifts, light candles and say prayers to the dead, They actually have a picnic in the cemetery, and graveyard fireworks light their way home. It is a celebration, a loving embrace of those who have died, an acknowledgement that death is a part of life, and a way to cope with our most basic fear.
May we find ways to cope with our own fears and anxieties; they may be some of the best teachers we will ever have.
Benediction
Don’t be afraid to go out on a limb. That’s where the
fruit is.
-Jackson Browne
Our
true identity awaits us on the other side of fear.
I wish you a spooky good time on Halloween.