Sermon: Driving Back Fear

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Driving Back Fear

By Charles Rush

March 10, 2002

is weeks subject of fear, reminds me of a couple of New Yorker cartoons. The first one shows pilot and co-Pilot talking to each other, with the audio switch on so that all the passengers on the plane can over hear them, to their horror as the Pilot says, “This is so cool. I'm flying this whole thing with my Palm Pilot.”

Or this one for the control freaks among us, and you know who you are. A man gets home and is lecturing his cat around about the litter saying, “Never, ever, ever think outside the box.”

Finally, for the corporate control freaks. A group of guys sitting around a board room with flow charts in the background, reviewing the annual Christmas card. The front of the card says “Seasons Greetings”- an absolutely plain, banal, non-descript card. First guy says, “Looks okay to me, does it look okay to you.” Second guy says, “Looks okay to me, does it look okay to you,” on down the line til the last guy says, “Maybe we should run it by the legal department.” That is fear and the real world we live in…

Over the last couple years, national television has been sliding steadily towards facile and moronic, beginning with invention of ‘reality shows' from Survivor to Temptation Island- the latest being ‘Fear Factor'- where contestants have to eat Buffalo testicles or put their arms into containers of icky eels or deal with spiders. The show is so stupid, it is embarrassing to admit publicly that you've seen it. Okay, I've seen it. The whole premise, presumably, is to get us to deal with our fears. But take spiders- arachnophobia. Never mind that we are never more than 3 feet from a spider our entire lives. Never mind that spiders are our best allies in a world that, except for them, would be overrun with insects of every kind. I don't know… The subject is fear, and we're talking about spiders?

It is a genre of programming that could only happen in a world so predictable, so prosperous, and so routine that we have to invent fear to keep from being bored. Then came September 11th and… far from some TV show… it was on our way to work actually, the pretty predictable routine was interrupted in a way that was simple beyond our imagination. Nobody could believe that a plane could actually hit those buildings. Nobody believed that those buildings could actually fall down… And then the general panic and a million small deeds of heroism, bravery, humanity… And then people started seeing people falling, seeing people gravely hurt… seeing a lot of things that don't easily erase from memory… No one knew quite what to do… You couldn't really call… The television didn't even know exactly what we were witnessing. No one knew for sure how extensive this attack was going to be. And most of us did what we did when we were kids. We ran and we ran… until we got our kids at school. And we ran home and we got under the covers.

That was real fear. We don't need any stupid ‘reality shows' to talk to explore the shape and feel of fear. We have a fairly good emotional map of the terrain.

But what to do with it? What we did was all gather spontaneously for prayer services. We sat in silence together. We hugged a lot of people that we saw. And it was good.

Later on, I got to thinking about how under-equipped we really are to deal with some of these things. They just haven't been needed, thank God. I got to thinking about other people who dealt with fear, people who lived in earlier centuries.

“The Spartans, knew quite a bit about fear. During the fifth century BCE the Spartans were the most feared army in the known world. There was a popular notion that no army could face them on land and live, This was probably true, especially after the battle of Thermoplyae, the Hot Gates, in 480 BCE. In that mountain pass 300 Spartans along with 4000 of their allies withstood the might of tens of thousands in the Persian army for three days, a suicidal holding action that allowed the Greek city-states to rise to the Persian invasion. Those 300 Spartans killed over 20,000 Persian troops in 3 days. Eventually, the Persians overran them but the Spartants held the Persians at bay long enough that the City-States could indeed unite and the Persians were eventually repelled. It is remembered as one of the great battles not only in Greece but up to this day.

“The Spartans were students of fear, both in themselves and in their enemies. The Spartans had a discipline they called phobologia, the science of fear. Phobologic discipline involved 28 exercises, each one focusing on a separate nexus of the nervous system. The 5 main areas were knees & hamstrings, lungs and heart, groin and bowels, lower back, and neck and trapezius. A secondary focus is the face muscles, which they called phobosynakteres, “fear accumulators.” Fear spawns in the body, they taught, and must be overcome there. Once fear gets started, then a phobokyklos, “a fear loop,” may begin and feed on itself until there is a “runaway of terror.” But, put the body into a state of aphobia, “fearlessness,” and the mind would follow, the Spartans believed. By learning how fear felt, they could let it drain away.[1]

“Before a battle they would sacrifice to Phobos, the god of fear, from whom we get our English word, “phobia.” In their minds, it was the mark of an ill-prepared and amateur army to rely in the moments before battle on what the Spartans called pseudoandreia, “false courage.” This was artificially inflated martial frenzy produced by a general 11th hour harangue or some peak of bronze-banging bravado built to by shouting and shield pounding. In contrast, the Spartans wore crimson cloaks and they burnished their bronze until it was gleaming in the sun. They were trained to wait silently and let the enemy come running and screaming. They performed as one unit this simple maneuver called “palming the pine,” in which the Spartans snapped their spears from vertical into forward position for their mode of murder. It caused many foes to lose heart, make pee pee in their pants, and run at the mere sight of it. Then they marched into battle in tight ranks singing!

“After a fierce battle, the Spartans practiced what they called hesma phobou, purging, or literally, “fear-shedding.” The terror that the Spartans had managed to keep at bay slipped its bonds after a battle, and surged on the warriors. They knelt, both out of reverence and because they were weak-kneed. Many wept, others shuddered violently. They gulped wine while their hands shook. This was not regarded as weak or effeminate, but natural. Odd, isn't it, that we who are supposedly so advanced have almost no rituals concerning fear.” Odd isn't it that Spartan soldiers would see the need to deal so thoroughly with fear and we would just presume that a trauma of this magnitude could be worked through individually and without great fan fare.

“Fear is a small cell with no air in it and no light. It is suffocating inside, and dark. There is no room to turn around inside it, like a coffin. You can only face in one direction, but it hardly matters since you cannot see anyhow. There is no future in the dark. Everything is over. Everything is past. When you are locked up like that, tomorrow is as far away as the moon.

People can stop by and tap on your walls. They can even bang on the door to show you where it is, but when you are afraid you cannot open up. They might not be who they say they are. They might just make things worse. It is safer to stay where you are, where you know what is what, even if you cannot breathe, even if you cannot move. This is how fear feels”.[2]

That is why it is so odd to me when I get these calls from reporters on certain significant occasions and they ask me, ‘Are your people back to normal yet?' ‘Is the crisis over?' It is such an odd question. I try to explain to them that in a way it is over (in the since that folks are back on a regular routine) but if you scratch a record, it always skips but after a while you learn to live with the skip. It's a bad analogy, not least, because many of these reporters have never actually played a record.

But it is not something you get over exactly, real trauma isn't like that. And normal? I don't think there is going to be a return to some stasis that was our life before. If the civilian population is a terrorist target, the whole world is in the sights, and the mundane routine could at any time break open into a bad Bruce Willis movie. We are all citizens of Jerusalem now. I'm sure that folks in Toledo, Ohio and Boise, Idaho don't feel that as immediately as those of us in Metropolitan New York or Washington because always knew that we were targets for nuts. But just look at the pattern. We've had a serious incident involving Al Queda every 9 to 12 months for the past several years. We know this is going to happen again and that it is likely to be a feature on our social landscape for the rest of this generation, so normal now is not what normal used to be.

I was glad to see the thoughtful article in the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday that interviewed therapists who have been working corporately. They pointed out some of the ongoing symptoms of our collective trauma: inability to focus, for some people a general lethargy, for others a difficulty sleeping, for some an inability to get certain thoughts or images out of our heads, for people that work in high visibility offices like lower Manhattan or the Sears Tower in Chicago a worrisome feeling of vulnerability, and for almost all of us a general irritability. The psychologist Emily Stein simply reported that she had seen an increase in unhappy people. Said she, “It is not that they lost husbands or children. It is a subtle gnawing black cloud, which is hard to treat.”[3] Another therapist, Ellen McGrath, made the prescient observation that for most people, this is when the season of the irrational actually begins- an upsurge in anxiety, fear, rage, self-destructive behavior, despair, helplessness. And in the long term, they say many of us will hunker down into survival mode and be concerned about just taking care of ourselves and our immediate family. And another article in the NYT yesterday underscored that for people who had direct loss, most of them are quietly struggling each day with a debilitating sadness that takes most of their energy to overcome. We are not helped having people all around us tell us that we should be moving on, getting over it, and getting on with the rest of our lives. That is what is not normal.

This is big, big enough that it will have to be cast out, like Jesus healing people by casting out the demons that possessed them and laying on hands, invoking the Spirit of God, and re-forming us in a new direction. It will take Spiritual power.

Our text this morning from I John mentions one spiritual weapon that should not be overlooked in addition to the considerable array of psychological approaches- and that is the importance of love.

I would remind you that these thoughts were written by some folks that knew the shape and feel of fear. The earliest Christians were actively persecuted by the Romans and harassed by their fellow Jews. They were tortured into betraying one another. They had to meet in hidden places. These people knew about fear. And their testimony was ‘Perfect love casts out fear'. Our scriptures say that love casts out fear. It is the antidote that contains the venom of fear which infects us and keeps it from paralyzing us. Love has a dramatic power like that.

Through that whole experience, what they discovered is the healing power of the Spirit moving through us in community, in togetherness. Christians discovered the truth of what Jesus came to teach them- that the authentic spiritual life is not about I, it is fundamentally a ‘we' phenomena. We have come to know this as true. We have seen the face of Christ in each other. I occasionally have people that say to me, ‘Reverend, I'm religious but I've sworn off organized religion.' It is a sentiment that I understand, the part about swearing off boring and irrelevant worship services, but if I respond honestly I have to say, “you miss the point. Community is not optional for Christianity. Without we, you have no substantial I.”

We need each other. Among other things, when you feel that urge to hunker down and just survive, just you and your little brood. When you get cynical and you find yourself saying to yourself, late at night when you are not sleeping, ‘man, just keep my money for myself and just invest in something fun for me because… well, just because…”, stop and pray. Pray for community to surround you, pray that, quite in spite of your fears and your protective cynical mentality, that God would use you as a conduit of divine love, open you, expand you, that ‘I' might bloom into ‘We'. Love is the spiritual antidote to fear.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt was right when he addressed the nation on the eve of our involvement fighting Naziism in Europe and he said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” We may well be entering another era where managing our fear will become a central and regular spiritual and emotional challenge.

Fear in the extreme is crippling. I was reading an article in the New Yorker about Aga Gulla, one of the pivotal tribal leaders in Afghanistan. He is about my age and has been involved in military campaigns most of his adult life. The article reported, in a very matter of fact way, that he has had several episodes in the past, where he just has a complete nervous breakdown and behaves in bizarre manner for several days on end. And it was matter of fact because it is such a pervasive phenomenon among Afghani men of my generation that everyone just lives with it and works around it. Trauma and fear break down strong men eventually.

And I am absolutely sure that if you could talk to ordinary Israeli's that live in Jerusalem you would find that ordinarily rational people are having the strangest thoughts and dreams. It is not a world you would choose to live in but if you have to- and we may not have any choice in the matter- you had better develop serious emotional and spiritual resources to find a modicum of peace and centerdness.

Again, love is not the only resource, but it is one principal ally. It brings people together where fear isolates us into ourselves. We will have to be intent on finding ways to come together, to celebrate new birth, to share the beauty of children, to live out of the simple but profound wonder of being neighbors to each other in support and caring, to lift up new romance in our midst, to care for one another and share our burdens. This is what will keep us grounded spiritually

As Jesus taught us, this network of community will need to expand beyond us to our neighbors far away, and eventually even to our enemies. And we know that but for now let us not lose sight of the one thing immediately at hand, the need to share community and love right around us. Fear, like the demons in the bible, is legion. And it will take a spiritual force of all of us coming together to keep it at bay. We can do it. We will do it.

Amen.

[1] This summary of the Spartan's practices concerning fear is from Steven Pressfield's Gates of Fire (NY: Doubleday, 1993). See also Herodotus, The Histories, and Mary Renault's The Last of the Wine.

[2] My thanks to my colleague, and very good friend, Micahel Usey, who developed this material for a speech on Fear, given to the Honors Society at UNCG earlier this year. When I told Michael I was preaching on this subject, he sent the whole address on. This excellent description of fear is from “One Step at a Time,” by Barbara Brown Taylor, The Preaching Life (Boston: Cowley Publications, 1993), 93.

[3] See “Bracing for Trauma's Second Wave” WSJ (Tuesday, March 5, 2002) Marketplace Section, B1 and B4. I've also summarized the other article “FDNY Tries to Rescue Its Own” on the same pages.