Fear vs. Love

Don: Beginning with the parable of the lost sheep, over the past few months we have discussed the concept of community, and the stages through which it grows. The first phase, “pseudo” community, is based on fear. How do we get beyond this and into the next phase, Chaos? We can see God himself introducing both fear and chaos: When Jesus says there are “others” who must be brought into his fold, he is talking about introducing something new into the community.

We tend to find something new to be disturbing and even horrifying. In Acts 10, Peter is horrified when told in a dream to eat un-kosher food. That was a metaphor for the introduction of non-Jews into the early Christian church. The fear in pseudo community is fear of change to the status quo. New ideas are particularly troubling, especially to a church community. People get distressed merely at the introduction of a new hymnal, or modernizing the liturgy.

New relationships also bring challenges. We are discomfited by people who don’t look, think, and act like us. The result is chaos and disruption, and therefore—by definition—pseudo community. The root of the chaos is fear; fear of the loss of our community, of our faith, of the way things were. To enter into true community, we must empty ourselves of this fear.

Family seems to be closer to true community than, say, church. Fear is less easily provoked in a family than it is in a church. The challenge of pseudo community is to eliminate, or accommodate, or set aside, fear. How do we do it?

Last week we thought the antidote to fear is faith. In the storm on the boat on the Sea of Galilee, Jesus asked the disciples why they were afraid, and why did they have so little faith? When Peter tried to walk on the water and began to sink in terror, Jesus again responds: O ye of little faith! Why do you doubt?

But scripture tells of another antidote to fear, besides faith: It is Love. 1 John 4:7-21:

Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God; and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. The one who does not love does not know God, for God is love. By this the love of God was manifested in us, that God has sent His only begotten Son into the world so that we might live through Him. In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has seen God at any time; if we love one another, God abides in us, and His love is perfected in us. By this we know that we abide in Him and He in us, because He has given us of His Spirit. We have seen and testify that the Father has sent the Son to be the Savior of the world.

Whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God abides in him, and he in God. We have come to know and have believed the love which God has for us. God is love, and the one who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him. By this, love is perfected with us, so that we may have confidence in the day of judgment; because as He is, so also are we in this world. There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear, because fear involves punishment, and the one who fears is not perfected in love. We love, because He first loved us. If someone says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar; for the one who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen. And this commandment we have from Him, that the one who loves God should love his brother also.

This is not about love in a general sense. It’s about love for one’s brother. It is a perfect love that does not allow fear to get in its way.

2 Timothy 1:7 also says: “For God has not given us a spirit of timidity [i.e., fear], but of power and love and discipline.”

Thus, the antidotes for fear are both faith and love. To what extent are these the same? Different? Can faith or love bring true community? Is faith connected to God while love is connected to humans? What will help us understand this issue and remove fear?

Harry: Fear is created when we preconceive how things should be done. We insulate ourselves within that preconception. Church communities want their members to think like one another, and even to do business only with other members of the church.

Some scriptural authors talk of an evolution toward true community, and say that true community is inclusive, not exclusive. So the message is that the “others” who are not of this fold are also not of the same mind and not of the same beliefs, yet they must be allowed in. That is very troublesome to many people, who mistake the scriptural message to mean that in entering our fold, the “other” will be transformed to become like us. That is not the case, and that invokes fear.

To love somebody who does not think and believe like oneself is the bridge that god asks us to cross in order to reach true community. The ability to love, and the recognition that god is in control, unshackles us from our attachment to our own beliefs, and therefore to our fears. Christians believe that chaos comes from evil, but the evidence suggests that god gives us chaos in order to help us escape our fears.

Don: How can one love someone who is completely different from us, different beliefs, behavior, background? It sounds like a formula for chaos, not for love!

Harry: We must realize that neither we nor the “other” possesses The Truth. Only god knows The Truth. We may possess truth with a small t, but it is subject to change. To be able to grow, to find true community, we must love people because ultimately they are on the same journey we ourselves are on, no matter how different we may be in all other respects.

Robin: To love someone utterly different from us would require the love of god to influence us first. When Jesus was dispelling prejudice among the Jews about women and Samaritans and tax collectors and prostitutes—untouchables—he reached out and touched them. In our culture, we see this very slow and difficult change, such as our acceptance of African Americans and our changing perspective on ethnicity. It’s a slow, laborious process, and it requires us to empty ourselves of our preconceptions.

Harry: Most families are dysfunctional except with regard to one thing: their children. With few exceptions, we never stop loving our children, we never stop accepting them, regardless of conflict with them. Mothers of mass murderers still visit their son in prison. In pseudo communities, that kind of love and acceptance does not exist.

Most people are afraid of missing the goal for which their community was established (for example, the goal of a church community is to get to heaven) if the goal, or the belief underlying it, changes. Or, they are afraid of admitting they were wrong to believe in the community goals and precepts to begin with.

Jay: Faith and love seem different but codependent. Faith is a huge part of having perfect love—of love for a god you have never seen.

Perhaps family love has to do with the aspect of creation: Parents create their children, and that is acknowledged (in most cases) by the children. There is a kind of faith, of belief, that results from the creation aspect.

David: This discussion is frightening! One of the problems I see with the bible is its many inconsistencies, especially between the Old and New Testaments. That’s a terrible thing. But even more terrible is that the teachings of Jesus are so relentlessly consistent. Turn the other cheek! And so on.

The perfect love that John talks of does not have pink ribbons and hearts attached to it. It is an absolutely terrifying love. It requires you to love the murderer who slaughters your family in the most horrible way. I think this is the kind of love that Jesus means. I doubt we can ever attain that kind of love as humans, but I think Jesus wants us to try.

As for love and faith: We seem to have been conflating fear of ideas and beliefs with fear of people in and of themselves. It seems to me faith may be an antidote to fear of other beliefs, but love is the antidote to fear of the other, him or her self.

Robin: I have known someone who hurt my family physically and most cruelly when I was a child. But such was the nature of the family relationship that it was necessary to continue to remain in contact. After a period of many decades, I began to feel God urging me to forgive this person. And although I did so—in my heart, before God—yet for a long time I resisted God’s urging to physically demonstrate that forgiveness by giving the person a hug. I feared it would be traumatic and creepy and awkward. I actually felt upset at God for wanting me do such a thing. It was easy to dismiss it with my own justification, at first. But the thought, or what I term “impression,” just would not be put to rest. and eventually I succumbed. The act of forgiveness was truly liberating. I felt that I had been cleansed. I don’t believe it is possible to achieve this level of love and forgiveness without god’s help. It is just not something that we can do on our own.

Forgiving does not mean excusing or justifying a wrong, it only means releasing the hurt, and maybe the hatred and desire for revenge, to God. It stops being, “I have the RIGHT to have hard feelings toward this person.” And perseverating or dwelling on that “right” actually increased my misery and fear. Now, I feel freedom from that pain, fear, and desire for “deserved” punishment.

Don: That is a stirring testimony on the power of emptiness; for the release you speak of is surely a form of emptiness. It makes one wonder: Is emptiness always a miraculous introduction? Can it only ever come from divinity—from God—as it did for Robin? Or is there something we can do to make it happen?

Fran: Robin, are you more at peace since you did this?

Robin: Yes. When God was urging me to forgive, I would make conditions—“I’ll forgive this, but not that,” etc. But it became clear that only complete, not partial, release, would do. And that took years to get to.

I would add that I hope the recipient of my forgiveness also felt a sense of release from guilt.

David: Terrible though the message of turning the other cheek is, it seems to be implied (at least, I have liked to think) that the other person will get a message from the act of turning the other check that might make them repent and decline the proffered cheek. But the terrible aspect of Jesus message is precisely that he is not saying that: He is saying that when you turn the other cheek you can expect to be hit again. I can see that in some cases, as in Robin’s, it might have a salutary effect on the other; but I don’t think that is the point of Jesus’ message.

Jay: I agree that this kind of love does not necessarily mean happiness and joy; it might mean more pain and sorrow. We always get messed up because we think love and joy are linked, and when the assumption is shattered, we blame ourselves or our faith.

Don: It is a “terrible” kind of love in the sense that it is radical, extreme, a call to something that is utterly unnatural and not of our nature. I Corinthians 13:

If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but do not have love, I have become a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy, and know all mysteries and all knowledge; and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.

The radical nature of love is contrasted here with Man’s most extreme devotions and the most extreme demands on him.

And if I give all my possessions to feed the poor, and if I surrender my body to be burned, but do not have love, it profits me nothing.

Love is patient, love is kind and is not jealous; love does not brag and is not arrogant, does not act unbecomingly; it does not seek its own, is not provoked, does not take into account a wrong suffered, does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

This is the formula for emptiness and community. Notice what it believes: All things! Everything! This is the formula for emptiness: The inclusiveness of all, the utter lack of discrimination, which addresses the whole issue of how love casts out fear. When you accept everything, what is there left to fear?

Love never fails; but if there are gifts of prophecy, they will be done away; if there are tongues, they will cease; if there is knowledge, it will be done away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part; but when the perfect comes, the partial will be done away.

Knowledge and prophecy are fundamental to religion, yet we are told here that they are ephemeral, they will pass away.

When I was a child, I used to speak like a child, think like a child, reason like a child; when I became a man, I did away with childish things. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face; now I know in part, but then I will know fully just as I also have been fully known. But now faith, hope, love, abide these three; but the greatest of these is love.

This is a terrible statement in that it evokes the highest demands and expectation on us, and can only be ultimately and truly realized by divinity.

Harry: We can’t prove our beliefs are correct, versus (say) those of the (more numerous) Buddhists.

Loranda: Sometimes it’s harder to be compassionate towards our own, compared to others. We destroy our own. I can listen and learn from and embrace a person of another religion, but my own brother…!

Harry: We are more arrogant among our own.

Loranda: We can admit to strangers things we won’t admit to close acquaintances.

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