"When Danger Approaches, Sing to It"

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The Rev. Suzelle Lynch
January 7, 2007

“Today is the first day of the rest of your life.”

That quote from the 1960s counterculture movement pops into my mind nearly every January as I cross the threshold of a New Year. Today is the first day of the rest of your life. There’s something about a marker like the turning from one year to the next that inspires this kind of bold and paradoxical statement, and the introspection that naturally follows.

What would it mean if we truly decided that today was THE day, the turning point, the hinge upon which our past life and our future life hung? What would we do? What would we choose? What would we risk? Would we do anything differently than usual?

I wonder.

Today, our topic is fear. The first day of the rest of our lives seemed like a good day to bring it up, because fear is generally the emotion that keeps us frozen. Keeps us choosing the same as always, even when multiple options are open to us. Fear has us seek security, instead of taking any risks.

The title of this sermon is a quote I read in a women’s magazine while waiting in the doctor’s office one day. I believe the magazine named it as an Arabian proverb. “When danger approaches, sing to it.” It caught my eye that day for I was feeling vulnerable, as I often do when about to be checked over by medical professionals. Will they find something wrong? Am I healthy? Are they going to tell me I need to lose weight? The proverb’s advice seemed so counter-intuitive. Sing to approaching danger? Wouldn’t it be better to just run away?

What are you afraid of?

The fears of our time are many: Global warming... The collapse of Social Security... Terrorism... Losing our jobs... Losing our medical insurance...
Violent crime against us or our families....

But most human hearts hold other fears as well – fears that are more personal; fears that might sound small when compared with terrorism or global warming, but which are seated deeply within us. We fear things like being rejected. Being inadequate. Failing. Being alone. Not living up to what others expect: our partners or spouses, our parents, our employers, our children. We fear that we might do something that will make us look stupid or silly. Or that we will die and nothing, no enduring legacy, no positive difference, will be left in our wake. We fear that people will find out the truth about us, whatever we believe that hidden truth to be. We fear that we are not normal. We fear that we are only normal. Some of us have “functional fears” as well – like a fear of high places, or of public speaking, or of flying or driving – and we fear that others will judge us less worthy because of these. And of course the granddaddy of all fears is the fear of death.

Now we know that a little fear is not necessarily a bad thing. It’s a part of the natural, physiological systems we have that help us stay alive. Fear is meant to alert us to real dangers. Let’s say you’re lying in bed one night when a noise startles you into consciousness. “Clunk. Clunk. … You bolt upright. A shadow dances outside the window. Is it the serial killer you read about in the paper?” “When fear kicks in very specific things begin to occur in our bodies. An almond-shaped area in the brain, the amygdala … receives signals of the potential danger and begins to set off a series of reactions that will help us protect ourselves. Our breathing becomes rapid, our pulse increases, our hands may shake; (our vocal chords tighten to ready us to scream) our systems rev up.”

“Clunk. Clunk. … Additional messages sent to the amygdala determine that the wavering image (outside the window) is only a (tree) branch. This time there's no need to bolt. The fear response is snuffed out and you return to sleep.” (The preceding section is from The Rev. Patricia Tummino, in her sermon, "Emotional Couch Potatoes")

But something beyond physical self-preservation is happening when our fear response is triggered over and over again without the presence of physical danger.

Sometimes the fears that trigger our physical responses are those which declare not that we’re in danger, but instead, that we are deeply flawed … The origins of these fears are often deep in our childhood… I remember a book I read when I was a girl – “The Borrowers.” I wonder if some of you know it? It was a story about little tiny people who live in the shadows and on the margins of regular human lives. Their homes are inside the walls of our houses – they live by borrowing small items from us and eating the crumbs of food we drop…

One of the characters, a wild young man, was oddly named Spiller. Why? Because all he can remember of the mother who died when he was a tiny child was that she frequently said to him, “You are a dreadful spiller!” I remember laughing about this as a child, even as I was disturbed by it. As an adult I can see that the power of his shame forever fixed “Dreadful Spiller” as this young man’s identity. In the story, Spiller was reckless, but also host to a wide variety of odd fears. He reminds us that shame and the fear of being shamed again are at the root of many of our fears, and they can cause us to cut ourselves off from a great deal of life’s breadth and beauty.

My learned colleague, the Rev. Forrest Church, minister of All Souls Unitarian in New York has written an intriguing book called “Freedom from Fear.” He says that in his three decades as a pastor, he has listened to many fears from the people who have sought counseling with him, but that in recent years he senses a terrible tightening of fear’s grip on us. “Surely 9/11 is responsible for fear’s heightened presence …,” he writes, “but other factors are at work as well. An unpredictable economy affects our sense of future security, as do rapid cultural and geopolitical change. Fear thrives on uncertainty. With knowledge multiplying faster than wisdom, we live in uncertain times. And fear is contagious,” he continues. “—we catch it from one another.” (“Freedom from Fear,” paperback edition, p. xiv)

What is making us so afraid? In an article in the UU World Magazine a couple of years ago, author Neil Schister writes, “In my years as a television critic, I watched how the medium shapes our subliminal consciousness by framing messages in ways designed to persuade us. One fundamental approach is to render audiences frightened, making them more suggestible, as a prelude to the sales pitch of commercials.”

“But does TV make us afraid? Consider the evidence. By age 18 the average American child will have viewed approximately 200,000 acts of violence on television. … Nine years ago, the American Academy of Pediatrics issued a health warning to its doctors that ‘exposure to violence in media [poses] a significant risk to the health of children and adolescents’ and contributes to ‘fear of being harmed.’ The story is similar for adults. According to the American Psychiatric Association, ‘Individuals with greater exposure to media violence see the world as a dark and sinister place . . . and overestimate their chance of being involved in violence.’” (World, Sept/Oct 2004 “The Fear Patrol.”)

Forrest Church believes there are five basic types of fear: fright, worry, guilt, insecurity and dread. Fright is our instinctive fear from physical danger, and is centered in the body. Worry is fear centered in the intellect – driven by our imaginations. He quotes Mark Twain, who said, “I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.” Guilt is fear centered in our conscience – both authentic guilt, which arises when we know we have done something wrong, and dysfunctional guilt that arises from moral perfectionism. Insecurity, the fourth kind of fear, is centered in our emotions – in feelings of inadequacy that make us self-conscious to the point of being unable to see beyond ourselves. Dread, the final form of fear, is centered in the soul. Its brothers are anxiety and depression, and it emerges when we cannot bear the inherent human condition of not being able to fully control our lives.

Whatever the nature of our fear, it’s easy to be philosophical about it when you’re not feeling it. When I sat down to write this sermon, however, I found that I was full of fear – the fear that I didn’t have anything useful or interesting to say about it. This is a common problem for ministers -- there we sit on Saturday night, with Sunday morning looming...) And, as the Reverend William Sloane Coffin warns, “You can't think straight with a heart full of fear, for fear seeks safety, not truth,” I found myself seeking the safety of words about fear written by others more exalted and expert than I am, rather than speaking to you from my own knowledge and experience of fear, and my own sense of what it might mean to sing to approaching dangers, rather than fleeing them.

I hesitate to tell you my truth about fear, because I want my primary message today to be one of hope and courage, yet my own experiences have taught me that there is much to fear in life. You see, during the decade after I graduated from high school, I was physically assaulted twice – once by a stranger, and once by an acquaintance. I was threatened with physical assault two other times. My home and my car were burglarized on separate occasions. And I had two car accidents that left me emotionally stunned and physically injured. Let me assure you that I did not live in any extraordinarily risky way for a young woman out on her own. I didn’t live in bad neighborhoods. I did lock the doors of my home and my car, and I always buckled my safety belt.

What I can tell you is that after each of these experiences, for a time, I was extraordinarily fearful. I did not trust people, especially new people who were physically bigger than I am. My fear generalized -- I did not want to visit new places or try new things – especially at night. I stopped following my career goal of working in a public relations agency and went to work for a corporation called -- I kid you not – SAFE-CO. More than anything else I wanted to be safe. I wanted the security of the known and the predictable. I was plagued by a terrible feeling – fueled by a certain kind of new-age thinking common at that time – that somehow I’d brought all my troubles on myself, and that they meant that something was wrong with my life’s direction – or worse – with me.

And so I armored myself, both consciously and unconsciously. I curtailed many of my activities. I began carrying pepper spray in my purse for a time at one point, and, at another, I undertook a serious weight-lifting regimen to make myself physically stronger and more confident. I thought these things would help me be less afraid.

But the truth was that they made me more fearful. I knew there was a much greater chance that the pepper spray would end up being used against me by an assailant, than vice versa, and the very fact of building my muscles and hiding out at home felt like I was predicting more trouble. And working at SAFECO eventually became more like a prison than a haven. But, as poet Anais Nin writes, “There came a time when the risk to remain tight in the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” At some point I had to learn the lesson that every skydiver must face: fear is part of life, and courage does not come from overcoming fear. Indeed, courage emerges hand-in-hand with fear and is dependent upon it.

These weren’t things I learned overnight, of course. Living creatively with fear is an ongoing challenge for me – one that requires love, forgiveness, and a willingness to let go of anger and resentment so that I can live in the present moment. Gradually, very gradually, I have learned to appreciate that fear is my teacher – that the natural human cycle that pairs fear with courage so that we might take risks is meant for our growth – that without fear, without risk, we do not grow. And I learned that it’s when we make fear our master that we die a little, over and over again. There is death in each thing we refuse to try, each relationship we allow fear to squash, each dream we abandon because it is too terrifying. The truth is that in this world there is no such thing as living without risk. Our human vulnerability is partly what makes our lives so precious. There will never be a guarantee against getting hurt, against the devastations of rejection and despair and embarrassment. We cannot control even our own little corner of the world. To grow, we must somehow find the courage to risk loving others, being fully ourselves, and taking action for the greater good.

Psychoanalyst Rollo May writes (in “The Courage to Create”) that courage is not the opposite of despair – it is the capacity to move ahead in spite of despair. He says that it “requires a centeredness within our own being, without which we would feel ourselves to be a vacuum.” He tells us that “Courage is not a virtue or value among other personal values like love or fidelity. It is the foundation that underlies and gives reality to all other virtues… Without courage,” he writes, “our love pales into mere dependency. Without courage our fidelity becomes conformism. … a man or woman,” he continues, “becomes fully human only by his or her choices and his or her commitment to them. People attain worth and dignity by the multitude of decisions they make from day by day. These decisions require courage (which is why theologian) Paul Tillich speaks of courage as ontological – … essential to our (very) being.” (May, pp. 13-14). And thus fear, too, is ontological.

The best illustration I know about all this is the story of a village where all the people were happy and content. Everyone was friendly and neighborly. Even the dogs and cats played together.

Then one day a stranger was seen walking toward this village: a tall, broad-shouldered stranger – indeed, the stranger was a giant! A fearsome giant, too, who carried a huge club studded with spikes. As the stranger approached the village, all the people ran into their houses, and cowered there.

The giant neared the village, stopping just outside its walls. He was enormous, and towered over everything. Despite the fact that he could have easily stepped over the wall, or bashed it down with his club, he just stood there, and shouted, “Let me in to your village! I am your destiny! I want to live with you!”

All of a sudden a little girl stepped out on her porch and looked. She jumped down from the porch, and began to walk toward the giant! Her family yelled, “STOP! COME BACK!” But the little girl didn't stop. She just kept walking.

And that’s when the strangest thing happened. As the child walked toward the giant, he grew smaller and smaller. Soon he was the same size she was. There they stood, face-to-face, looking at one another. Then the little girl quietly put out her hand to the giant to shake hands and asked, “What's your name?”

The giant whispered, “My name is Fear, and I need your help. I have a terrible problem. I am supposed to live with people, but every time I go to a village to meet them, they are afraid of me. And when they run away, I suddenly grow large and terrifying.”

“Ah,” said the little girl. “I have been looking for you, and I think I can help you.” “You can?” said the giant, “what is your name, little girl.” And the girl replied, “My name is Courage.”

And so it was that Fear, the giant, who was not-so-giant anymore, and Courage, the little girl who was not-so-little anymore, walked hand-in-hand into the village, and all the people were amazed. And it is said that from that day forward, the name of the village was Wisdom. (Adapted from Skipping Stones, an international multicultural magazine, Vol. 16, no. 5, November -- December, 2004 http://www.skippingstones.org/sample-23.htm Further research reveals that this tale originated in an Egyptian story.)

Forrest Church writes, “As human beings we are sentenced to death and sentenced to life at the same time.” I say that we know this, perfectly and poetically, every time danger approaches. And that when the danger is not a mugger or a terrorist or a hurricane but the more personal, imagination-generated kind of danger – when such danger activates our amygdalas, making our breathing rapid and shallow, making our hearts race and our hands tremble and our vocal chords tight as we get ready to scream – we must have the wisdom to stop, and call up a deep centeredness from within ourselves. We must stop, and take a deep, diaphragm-centered breath – the kind of breath that singers take. We must stop, and instead of screaming through tight vocal cords, we must open our throats and our hearts and sing out the song of our soul.

Fear, as J. Ruth Gendler wrote, has a large shadow, but she herself is quite small. Once you make it past her dragons, and speak to her close up, it’s amazing to see how fragile she is. Courage, on the other hand, is both stern and kind. He’s not afraid to week, and not afraid to pray, even when he’s not sure who he’s praying to.

I hope that you will accept these two as your traveling companions this New Year as you navigate the roadways and pathways and waterways of your personal life, your professional life, your family life, and especially your church life. Never forget that fear and courage walk together, hand-in-hand with each other and with you, and that today is the first day of the rest of your life.

Amen.