Don: Last week’s discussion led us to conclude that what was most responsible for the chaos we experience individually and communally is fear. It seems to be related to the loss of something important, something critical to our self-esteem. The state of not fearing loss seems to be at the root of emptiness.
Fear is a strong motivator and a strong emotion—one of the strongest. Our flight or flight response to it shows how important it is as a survival mechanism. Fear is a critical component in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (physiological, security, social, self-esteem, self-actualization needs). Successful living requires a progressive freedom from fear through this hierarchy in order to reach self-actualization.
A National Institute of Mental Health survey published in August 2012 reported that: 60 percent of the things we fear never actually happen; 30 percent have already happened; 90 percent are insignificant; and 88 percent of things we fear about our health will never happen. Seven million people have been diagnosed with a phobia, of which the most common is fear of public speaking (74 percent), followed by death (68 percent), followed by spiders, darkness, heights, people/social situation, flying, confined spaces, open spaces, and thunder and lightning.
I am struck by the triviality of many of these fears. Roosevelt’s saying that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself seems apt. I was most impressed with the fearlessness expressed by Faten in her communications as she faced her death from cancer. She expressed not a scintilla of fear about it, though she was fully aware of it. This is the kind of “emptiness” I think we have been trying to get our heads around.
There are at least 200 references to fear and its antidotes in the scriptures. Most famous is the 23rd psalm, which describes the orator’s lack of fear in the desert experience (the valley of the shadow of death) . There is absolute confidence:
The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.
He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.
Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.
Similarly in the 27th psalm (verses 1-3):
The Lord is my light and my salvation;
Whom shall I fear?
The Lord is the defense of my life;
Whom shall I dread?
When evildoers came upon me to devour my flesh,
My adversaries and my enemies, they stumbled and fell.
Though a host encamp against me,
My heart will not fear;
Though war arise against me,
In spite of this I shall be confident.
2 Timothy says God has given us not the spirit of fear but the power of self control. Yet the desert experience seems to arise out of fear, as it did when the Israelites went back into the wilderness when they were on the verge of entering the promised land. Moses was sent into the wilderness by God after slaying the Egyptian. He encountered God there. Elijah ran for his life into the wilderness. So did David, to escape Saul. In the desert experience of Jesus there seemed to be the fear of his succumbing to the devil’s temptation.
In Mark 4:35-41 we see different spects of fear:
On that day, when evening came, He said to them, “Let us go over to the other side.” Leaving the crowd, they took Him along with them in the boat, just as He was; and other boats were with Him. And there arose a fierce gale of wind, and the waves were breaking over the boat so much that the boat was already filling up. Jesus Himself was in the stern, asleep on the cushion; and they woke Him and said to Him, “Teacher, do You not care that we are perishing?” And He got up and rebuked the wind and said to the sea, “Hush, be still.” And the wind died down and it became perfectly calm. And He said to them, “Why are you afraid? Do you still have no faith?” They became very much afraid and said to one another, “Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey Him?”
Why were the disciples—all experienced sailors—afraid? Their reaction seems out of character, unless the storm was exceptionally severe. Metaphorically, we are all floundering on the sea of life, yet God seems to be asleep when we need him—which tends to be when we are afraid. In the passage above, it’s strange that the disciples became even more afraid when God actually responded, and calmed the storm.
It seems as if one of the great needs of mankind is to empty ourselves of this fearfulness; of fear that may be real, imagined, and sometimes unspoken Is chaos rooted in fear? Why did Peter fear the entry of gentiles into the church? Why do we fear change to an established order of things? Why do we fear things that are different from what we are accustomed to? Is it remotely possible to live a life without fear? To be empty enough to have total confidence in our safety? What is the relationship between emptiness and fear?
Harry: I came close to death on a small boat during a storm on Lake Erie. Our anchor line got tangled with a buoy line as the wind and waves rose and the lightning flashed around us. I was sure I was about to die and I started to pray, but suddenly a wave lifted us up and our anchor freed itself from the buoy line. I was still afraid—of the lightning, and so on. Though I didn’t die, I remained filled with the fear of death. For years afterwards I would not go back out fishing. In their storm, the disciples were just as afraid. Most of our fears are really unfounded. It is our fear of fear that inhibits faith.
David: We seem to need to be empty of two kinds of fear: fear born of knowledge, and fear born of belief. The disciples feared the storm because as sailors they knew what a storm could do. That’s fear born of knowledge.
But one wonders whether fear of the supernatural figured on the list of fears compiled in the NIMH survey. I suspect it would have been high on the list if the same survey were conducted 2,000 years ago, when people had less knowledge and more belief—including belief in the supernatural—which includes God.
Jesus’ question “Why are you afraid?” seems to question the disciples’ belief, their faith in God. He was saying “So what if we all die in this boat? What is there to be afraid of in death?” Jesus was teaching them the lesson he taught throughout his ministry: There is no reason to fear death if you have faith. Being unafraid of death does not mean you won’t die. It does not mean that God will ride in like the fifth cavalry to save you. Why should he, when he knows you have far more—namely, the kingdom of heaven—to look forward to in death, than you have to look forward to in life?
Harry: Knowledge is power. I couldn’t speak with authority about Legos, but Jay could, because he knows everything there is to know about Legos. But we should be prepared to speak our minds anyway, however imperfectly. If we hold back out of fear, we are in pseudo, not true, community.
Jay: Jesus links fear and faith together. If you have the one, you lack the other. Eb exhibits strong faith and also zero concern about what happens to him in life. What is this faith that eliminates fear, that is present in true community? To me, it’s alignment of our will with God’s. As Jesus said in the boat, why be afraid? God is in control! There is victory in death! But we lack the faith to give that much control to God, so we are afraid. If, however, we somehow manage to hand over control to God, the fear goes away.
Don: We saw this in Faten, and we see it in Eb. Does age, experience, personality make a difference? But more importantly, how can we emulate such people? How can we remove the fear and anxiety from our lives? Or must we get ourselves into the desert before we can do this?
Rimon: I am fearful of the pain that precedes death, but not of death itself. I fear the process of drowning, but not the moment of death. Process seems to be the pain we try to avoid.
Jay: Yes—we fear what we think is going to happen. Through emptiness, we can somehow avoid this fear. People who demonstrate a laid-back personality seem to achieve it. It’s as if they can say “I don’t care!” or “It is what it is!” to whatever life throws at them.
Harry: I would like to get into a place where I don’t care about some things. I have suffered serious loss, and cared deeply about it; but in the end, life goes on anyway, so was the caring necessary? [Harry, am I putting words in your mouth again?]
Rimon: Our fears are self-inflicted, and we amplify them by thinking about them. So people who don’t dwell upon their fears are not afraid!
David: It would seem that not caring means being totally open—empty—to anything that might happen to one.
Jay: Faith takes it one step further: Faith says that someone (God) does care, and that I trust God to care for me.
Don: If I were in the boat with the disciples, I too would probably want to make sure that God was awake, not asleep! But Jesus indicated that because he was in the boat, awake or not, they had no reason to be afraid.
Jay: The disciples wanted their own will to be done, by waking Jesus up and telling him what to do! But they were more fearful when Jesus demonstrated his care by calming the storm. This indicates their lack of faith.
Harry: Yes, they could not control their destiny. That hits the nail on the head.
Francine: When you reach the point of realizing you have no control over your destiny, that’s when you empty yourself. I have been at such a point, and I emptied myself. Fay got to that point, and she emptied herself.
Robin: The disciples had not developed their faith; but as well, they had not developed their understanding of who Jesus was. Perhaps part of their fear stemmed from their hope that Jesus was supposed to rescue Israel, yet he was about to die there in the boat along with them.
Emma: They expected that Jesus would get up and ask the Lord to help them. But Jesus knew what being made in the image of God meant, and what it could achieve. We lack the faith to accept that statement in Genesis, and to live by it, as Jesus did.
Alice: Would children have been afraid in the boat? Probably not as afraid as the disciples, because they lacked the knowledge of what the storm could do. Maybe the disciples were as children in their knowledge of Jesus. We are told that we are closer to God’s image when we are born, and we grow less like it as we age. So Jesus exhorted us to be like children.
Harry: In the Old Testament, you get the sense that God doesn’t want us to know who he is. Perhaps innocence of knowledge of God, as a child would possess, is what we should strive for.
Alice: When kids are sick, they are not anxious as their mother is. Because mother knows what could happen. We see images of children with cancer, in pain, with no time to have developed an intellectual faith. Yet they are happy.
David: Alice has nailed it: The concept of innocence seems to be what we really mean when we talk about “not caring,” which sounds a bit cold. We were innocent before the Fall, and the only way back into the Garden is by regaining our innocence—by losing the knowledge we gained when we ate of the forbidden fruit. Innocence is a form of emptiness.
Don: Next week we will talk more about innocence, emptiness, fear, and faith.
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