"The Power of Fear"

A sermon by Dave Weissbard

delivered at

The Unitarian Universalist Church

Rockford, Illinois

03/12/06

The people of a little town bordered by the tall spruce of the North Woods avoided Old Hillside Road for decades. Children walked the extra half mile home from school to skirt the marshy bottomland of the abandoned Skinner farm rather than running the fool’s errand of walking past the Dark Cave. One icy winter, legend has it, a monstrous beast on a foraging expedition took up residence in the cave and stole food. After it wreaked havoc on the hunters who sought to kill it, townspeople came to shun its lair. Infrequently and with trepidation, they would follow an overgrown track past the mouth of the cave bearing Holy Bibles and flashlights, beating on skillets and shaking noisemakers for “monster protection.” For the most part, though, everyone kept away.

Then one May a newcomer family moved into the Skinner place. Lacking fluency in English, the two sons didn’t learn the tall tales and legends before school let out for the summer. Early one evening they ventured deep into the Dark Cave, shining the way with their flashlights. The main tunnel opened into a vast chamber, cool and musty, where in one corner their beams illuminated the sole sign of life, present or past, in the whole place – a bunch of moldering animal bones which they scooped into a sack.

Meanwhile, their sister told her new girlfriend where her brothers had gone. The friend told her brothers, who told their father. And so a nervous group of townspeople were fretting at the mouth of the cave as the boys emerged , nonchalantly carrying their booty. People were relieved to see them and astonished that they’d encountered nothing but the old bones of a small bear.

Our fears are like the monster in the cave. We squander precious moments of life on fears of objects, people, and situations that actually have no power to harm us. Fears become the basis for avoidance, detours on the maps of our existence, and sponges that soak up vital energy. By failing to confront our fears they become more real and intimidating, like the mythical monster in the cave. By avoiding our fears the way the townspeople avoided the cave, we relinquish the chance to learn whether they can truly harm us and whether we have the power to conquer them. When we confront our fears, we release the vast energy that lies hidden in their shadows. We mobilize our intelligence to discern the true nature of our difficulties and engineer ways to lay bridges over the challenging areas of our lives.

This sermon began with conversations with a number of people who have expressed fear about the future of this church following my retirement in June. Thinking about that, I had to add my own fear about my family’s future following my retirement in June. It was easier to look at the fear of others, but I found that I had to acknowledge that not knowing where I will be living or what I will be doing after 27 years as a minister here and 41 as a Unitarian Universalist minister is causing me some degree of anxiety (a word closely associated with fear.) One of the common forms of fear is the “fear of change.”

There is a drive within us toward inertia. People have long said, “Better the devil you know than the devil you do not.” Even if things may be miserable, there is always the fear they could be worse. (I have always wondered to what degree the vote a decade ago to continue my ministry was dependent upon that fear, rather than a testimony to satisfaction. We will never know.)

As I explored resources on fear, I moved beyond that fear of change, but I will come back to it before I am finished.

One of the exercises we often do in Fireside sessions is looking at “used-to-thinks,” that is, asking people to identify something they “used to think” but no longer think. I “used to think” that sex was one of the most fundamental driving forces in life. Just look at some of the stupid things people do for sex – Bill Clinton and Harry Stonecipher come immediately to mind, but I could name many more in my counseling experience – relax, I won’t.

It may be, in part, a function of my age, but I am beginning to think that fear may be a more dominant drive than sex – in our culture, at least. – Troublesome sexual behavior may be a manifestation of fear rather than the other way around.

The Buddha taught that desire was the cause of human misery – wanting things or experiences– and that insight certainly has merit, but I wonder if desire of the kind he was addressing is not also a manifestation of fear. May it not be fear of not having enough, of being second class, of missing out, that leads to desire. People who feel safe and secure do not tend to desire a lot more, even if they don’t have a lot. It is that driven need to acquire that makes satisfaction impossible – there’s never enough. Just look at the income of corporate CEO’s today – there is seemingly no limit.

As we look at fear, it is important to acknowledge that some degree of fear is valuable – in fact downright essential. One who knows no fear cannot survive. You need to know not to walk into traffic, not to play with fire, not to go uncovered into the cold. The psychiatrist Joseph Wolpe points out that:

Useful fears function largely as a signaling device, directing us to the presence of a danger to be dealt with. They prompt worthwhile action: to see a doctor for chest pain, to leave for home before the blizzard that is forecast, to slow down on the expressway, or to take whatever other protective action may be relevant. In any activity that presents a sequence of dangers, fear focuses our attention on the hazards of each moment. . . .

If you are living in Pakistan and you have no shelter because of the earthquake, or escaped from New Orleans and do not have a home or job to return to, if you live in Iraq and are in danger of being shot or imprisoned by Americans or blown up by the people we call insurgents, if you live in Mexico and have been displaced from the farmland on which you lived and eked out a living because a multinational has taken over the land and you don’t know where your family’s next meal is going to come from, it is understandable that you might be fearful: your life is in jeopardy.

It is interesting, however, that people who have comparatively much actually seem to experience more fear than people who have little. Surveys have suggested that Americans, living in the wealthiest, most powerful nation on earth, are the most fearful people on earth - in fact one writer referred to ours as “the most anxious, frightened society in history.” [David Shaw in the LA Times 1994]

Theologians have stressed the “existential” fear that comes with human awareness. As Forrest Church puts it, we know that we have been born and that we shall die. Some, like Erich Fromm, believe that the fear of death is the fundamental driving force, and that our attempts to gather riches and have sensual experiences and to create are all manifestations of our attempts to stave off death. Religion has, as Colleen suggested last week, often built on that fear.

The discourse of fear originated in religious beliefs and now pervades a secular society. Fear is an orientation to the world. God and organized religion provided salvation from fear in a sacred society. The state and formal social control promise salvation from fear in a secular society . . . Fear of God and sin were normal for me as a small boy since my family and I were “believers” in a mythology of damnation and salvation. My world was simple as a child: I was taught to seek salvation for my sins in order to be saved form eternal damnation. God could save me, but then again, if I did not do the right thing, God could also damn me. That was the sacred worldview, where faith was the goal and where commitment and “true belief” were demonstrated to fellow believers on a daily basis from church service to church service.

As I consider many of the people I’ve known, like most recently Katie McFarland, who have faced death with equanimity and even relief, I am not convinced that the fear of death is as universal as some believe. That is not to say that it is not powerful in the lives of many.

There are people who live with the driving fear that they are not good enough: not attractive enough, not smart enough, not sexy enough, not strong enough, not successful enough. I’m not talking here about those who share the level of uneasiness that many have, but those who live in constant fear, compelling fear, that they are unworthy. This fear manifests itself in phobias that restrict some people’s ability to enjoy life. They avoid taking any risks. They find fault with others in a futile attempt to reassure themselves that while they may be bad, there are worse. Life becomes a burden rather than an adventure. They face each new day with thoughts of how badly it could go for them.

I have one daughter who for years did almost all the worrying for our family. Although she started out the most confident, that changed radically and she became a textbook case of the fearful person. She couldn’t enjoy eating in a restaurant because she was afraid our car would have been towed by the time we left. She worried that she wouldn’t do things perfectly. She was certain she had flunked tests in which she actually earned A’s. I am happy to report that she has made dramatic progress and traveled alone to Australia - a feat I could not have imagined a few years before.

More common, perhaps, is the experience of Titilayo Tinubu whose story is told on the Sojourners website. She writes of the F she received in a paper she wrote for an Advanced Composition class. It was not because of poor grammar or being late, or any of the simple reasons. Her teacher told her it was an F because it was not the truth. She had followed all the rules and written what she thought the teacher wanted, but the teacher could see that it was nor “an expression of my unique voice.”

How many of us live our lives like that? How many of us work arduously to perfect the external all the while neglecting the truth of whom we are? How many of us spend the bulk of our lives in pretense, only to end up being pretty, perfect, and just what the others ask for, but not the truth?

At the heart of this and every insecurity is an underlying fear. And I believe we do ourselves a disservice when we don’t examine and judge our souls to make sure that those fears don’t dominate our lives and sabotage any real attempts to genuine community and relationship.

In a real sense, the whole business of therapy, in its various forms, is helping people to address and deal with the fears that dominate their lives.

Thom Rutledge, in his book Embracing Fear and Finding the Courage to Live Your Life, insists we cannot eliminate fear, but we can transform our relationship with it. He uses FEAR as an acronym: Face it, Explore it, Accept it, and Respond to it.

Facing the fear means that we end the running, cringing and hiding from the scary voice within us that will always find us no matter where we run or where we hide. Exploring it means that we turn and walk toward the big scary Bully. . . . Accepting it, contrary to popular misconception does not mean we agree with the fear or that we like it. To accept is simply to realize that there are some things we cannot change. . . . Responding to our neurotic fears is what it is all about, but the ability to change can only be built on the foundation of the first three steps.

It is possible to address those personal fears and to free ourselves from the bonds they create that restrict our living.

It is important to realize that beyond those personal fears, there are also socially generated ones. One of the books on my essential books bookshelf is Dr. James Gilligan’s book on Violence, which was the genesis of several sermons a few years ago. Gilligan suggests that it is important to look at who benefits from the violence in our society. It is his contention that the very wealthy benefit from having the middle class distracted from their power, and that is accomplished by keeping the middle class afraid of the lower class. He says, “By getting the middle class worried about and afraid of those below them, we don’t look up; and those on the bottom are distracted by the middle class from focusing their anger on the very rich.”

It is Gilligan’s contention that our apparently dysfunctional prison system really does work – not at preventing crime, but at maintaining it, teaching it.

Fear has become ever more pervasive in our society. David Altheide, to whom I referred earlier, has studied how the media play a central role in increasing our fear of one another. Part of it is through the news, and part is through the so-called entertainment. When you look at it through Altheide’s eyes, you become somewhat suspicious of the various Law and Order programs that run incessantly. With the crime they bring into our homes hour after hour, the inevitable impact is that they make us more fearful, and at the same time more willing to surrender freedoms to the police and courts that “protect us” from that crime.

After reading Altheide, I was more appalled just the other morning when the Today show led off with the big story about the graduate student in New York who was apparently killed by the bouncer in a club where she was last seen. She was, of course, white and he was of course black. Why was this murder worthy of national attention? Did this one murder even deserve to be the lead story on the local news in New York? With everything that is going on, this was the lead? That makes sense only if you accept that the function of the news is to make us afraid, and keep us afraid.

There was a major uproar in 2002 when the University of Minnesota Press decided to publish a manuscript by Judith Levine that had been turned down by scores of publishers, many of whom had acknowledged its excellence, but saw it as too hot to handle. The book, Harmful to Minors, was subtitled, The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex. It was Levine’s thesis that many of the things we do to protect our children from sex are more damaging to them than the sex itself.

For instance, she clearly documents that many of our fears of sexual predators are blown way out of proportion. “Everyone knows” that sexual predators are destined to re-offend as long as they live. The only problem with that is that it is not true. As a matter of fact, the studies show that sexual offenders who have undergone treatment are much less likely to re-offend than the average prisoner. And that is only one of her chapters. The Minnesota legislature threatened to do away with the University of Minnesota Press, not because of flaws in Levine’s research, but because people did not want to know what she was telling them. She was attacking our fears as disproportional and dysfunctional, and we don’t want to hear it.

I remember many years ago hearing Margaret Mead contrast her experience in visiting schools in China with visiting schools in the United States. The Chinese children would come running up to see the unusual looking stranger, while children in American schools had been effectively taught to fear strangers. Children are more likely to be killed by an automobile than to be kidnapped or murdered by a stranger, but we make them afraid.

The same is true of the current drive I spoke of two weeks ago to attack families that don’t fit the mold that some prefer to think of as divinely ordained. There have been several national talk shows that have given opportunities to the homophobes to iterate and reiterate the fact that we all know in our bones that every kid needs a mom and a dad – regardless of what the studies show us and the people who devote themselves to the welfare of children have experienced time and again. “Don’t confuse us with the facts,. Our minds are made up!”

There are people who seem to need to have us be afraid, very afraid, of boogie-men. Why? Who benefits?

During his first inaugural address, in 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt told the American people:

I am certain that my fellow Americans expect that on my induction into the Presidency I will address them with a candor and a decision which the present situation of our Nation impels. This is preeminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly. Nor need we shrink from honestly facing conditions in our country today. This great Nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper. So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself--nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. In every dark hour of our national life a leadership of frankness and vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory.

In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.

The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way--everywhere in the world.

The third is freedom from want--which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants-everywhere in the world.

The fourth is freedom from fear--which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor--anywhere in the world. [note he did not say any nation but ours, but “no nation”!]

That [he said] is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called new order of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb.

I have called for personal sacrifice. I am assured of the willingness of almost all Americans to respond to that call.

A part of the sacrifice means the payment of more money in taxes. In my Budget Message I shall recommend that a greater portion of this great defense program be paid for from taxation than we are paying today. No person should try, or be allowed, to get rich out of this program; and the principle of tax payments in accordance with ability to pay should be constantly before our eyes to guide our legislation.

I would not suggest to you that there have not been other politicians who have used fear to manipulate the American people, but none has approached the grossness of its use by the present administration. Fear has been used as the basis for suspending the Constitutional guarantees of freedom, and there are people who say they are prepared to grant those suspensions to “protect the American people” – a phrase that is being repeated time and again by administration spokespeople, just as they reiterated, time and again, before our invasion of Iraq the date “9/11" and the words “mushroom cloud” in order to produce support, although neither of those bore any relationship to Iraq – and they knew it.

In his book, The Age of Anxiety: McCarthyism to Terrorism, Chalmers Johnson makes it clear that the Bush administration’s use of fear did not come out of nowhere, but it certainly has carried it, to use a phrase familiar to us, “to a new level of art form.” The repeated use of levels of threat, increased every time the President’s actions were in question, really pushed the envelope and that was found to be too blatant to continue. [It of course, is more than obvious that the burden of the responses to those fears is being placed on the poor and middle class and not being shared equally by those who are profiting obscenely.]

I need to acknowledge that those of us who oppose what is being done also are using fear as a motivation. As I noted at the outset, there is appropriate fear as well as inappropriate fear. I believe that the basis for the fear I try to raise is well documented and is not based on lies or distortions, and the goal is constructive, not violent response.

First, not to be so overcome by fear that we overreact. We have already progressed down this road in the years since 9/11, which have been symbolized by the Patriot Act. Enacting repressive security measures, imposing security edicts for which no one is publicly accountable, and creating a climate of obsessive secrecy creates abuses against liberty rather than greater safety. These actions change the nature, and the promise, of our democracy. In allowing them, we risk becoming like the enemies we combat.

Second, not to let fear blind us to a greater task necessary for providing national security: employing our best talents and energies toward eradicating the sources of the hatred that threatens us. True security requires not merely the ability to amass weapons and launch successful combat operations. It requires working to ameliorate the conditions that breed terrorism: poverty ignorance, isolation, intolerance.

We face many fears in our lives: personnel, social and political. Dealing with them is similar in every context – not to deny them, but to face them, explore them, except them, and respond to them – to refuse to allow the primitive areas of our brain to blind us to the use of our reason so we can respond appropriately.

In the context of these very deep and serious challenges, I am almost embarrassed to return to the fears with which I began, but they are still relevant. This church serves for many of us, as a safe harbor as we are buffeted by the personnel, social and political fears that threaten to disable us. It is a place where we turn to be assured that we are not crazy as we try to apply reason to our experiences as we turn away from boogie-men and try to address the real threats we face. And now, in the midst of all of this, we are faced with the threat of change to that safe harbor.

I was deeply touched when a family in the church told me that their daughter, hearing her parents discussing my retirement, exclaimed, “He can’t go, he is one of my comfort voices!”

The threat is real, not imagined. I can guarantee you that this church will not be just the same after June. At the same time, I can honestly and sincerely promise you that need not mean a net loss: I am confident that there can be a net gain. While you cannot prevent me from going and you cannot find a clone, the point is that beyond those limits, you are in charge of your future. There are many excellent Unitarian Universalist ministers out there and this church has much to attract them. It is up to you to communicate with them and to choose wisely among them. If you do that, all will be well. It begins with your choice of a search committee that will represent you, continues with your scrutiny of the candidate they present, and then moves to your willingness to welcome and give your support to the successor you choose.

I have given you what I have to give. The change you face will be invigorating. Growth always requires letting go of the ways things were and welcoming the ways they will be. It’s discomforting, it’s unsettling, but sometimes we need to be shaken out of our comfortable lethargy.

The same is true for me. I still do not know where I will be four months from now, or what I will be doing. I promise to tell you when I know. I have some hopes, but I don’t know if they or other options will materialize. I am confident that it will not be the same, I am mostly sure we are equal to the challenge, and I believe the challenge will be good for me and my family.

We all struggle to find the right balance between our human need for security, comfort and predictability on the one hand, and our need for risk taking and growth on the other. In finding this balance, no single formula fits all – or even fits a particular individual over time. As always, getting stuck in the anxiety-driven extremes is problematic. . . .

The best we can do with fear is to befriend it. That is, we can learn to expect, allow, and accept fear, watch it mindfully, and understand that fear will always reappear . . .

We needn’t let anxiety and shame silence our authentic voices, close our hearts to the different voices of others, or stop us from acting with clarity, compassion and courage. In today’s world, no challenge is more important than that.