when love casts out fear

Beloved, let us love one another,
because love is from God; everyone who
loves is born of God and knows God.

No one has ever seen God; if we love
one another, God lives in us,
and God's love is perfected in us.

There is no fear in love,
but perfect love casts out fear;
for fear has to do with punishment,
and whoever fears has not
reached perfection in love.

We love because God first loved us.

- 1 JOHN 4:7,12, 18-19


Fear is one of the most profound and powerful human emotions. Thank goodness we have a capacity for it! Fear has a remarkable power to help us focus on and respond to threats and dangers that are immediate. When we are gripped by fear our brain casts off any extraneous thoughts, our perception narrows, our mind literally closes so that we can concentrate on what is most necessary and important for our survival.

We see only the mother grizzly bear and the two cubs, and the simple but quite important fact that we are standing in between them. We've suddenly lost interest in the beautiful lupine flowers we were admiring by the trail, and the glorious clouds we were watching in the sky. Gone is any thought of what we had been doing in the past or where we were thinking of going in the future.

The fear-full brain sets off a chain reaction of electrical impulses and chemicals, preparing our body for one of three primary fear responses: fight, flight, or freezing.

Granted, we experience fear at varying levels, and it isn't always a mad-mama-grizzly-bear-sort-of-situation that sets it off. It may be something as simple as walking into a room for a meeting and seeing a person at the table whom I've sought to avoid because I've felt hurt or threatened by him in some way. That is a lower grade of fear, but it still has a direct and significant impact on how open my mind is to options in that moment, and the judgments and assumptions I may make about him and that situation. It may result in various forms of fleeing, fighting, or freezing in my engagement with him and others.

It can be an important exercise at times to ask ourselves:

What am I afraid of here?

How did I learn this fear?

When I feel this fear, how does it shape my attention, my living and my relationships?

It seems that we learn our fears in part through direct experience. For instance, I have a deep fear of avalanches because I once experienced one on the side of a mountain. But we can also be taught to fear things without ever having had a direct experience of them. I've never had the experience described above, the encounter with a grizzly and her cubs, but I've learned that it is to be avoided! I fear it happening when I'm backpacking in grizzly territory.

I have acquaintances who fear recent immigrants to this country - those with visas and those without - because they are worried they will take their jobs and ultimately "ruin our communities." This fear is not based on a direct experience of any kind; it is simply what they were taught and what they have chosen to believe.

I often wonder how much fear is really at the root of so many of our human conflicts. Certainly, when it is present in a conflict, it makes it far more difficult to see possibilities for reconciliation and peace. When there is fear in my being, it becomes increasingly difficult for me to see past my own self and my own safe havens.

I also feel an increasing sadness at the fear that is taught and nurtured in religious traditions, particularly in my own Christian stream of faith. I find no evidence that we humans possess an innate fear of God. Just like many of our fears, this must be taught and learned.

When my son was just a toddler, he and I were playing in the living room when our front door blew open. He made his way to the door and looked out onto the porch for a time. Then he swung the door shut. I asked, "Did you see anything?" In reply he said, quite matter of factly, "God came in." Then he returned to his play, as if this was a very normal and even welcome experience.

The young child knows no fear of God unless it is taught. So why do we teach our children about a fearsome and threatening God when time and again the message of God in the scriptures is: "Don't be afraid. Don't be afraid because my love is stronger than your fear"? This is the very message of the Good News of Jesus who was constantly meeting the fearfulness of people with love.

How much does our fear close and lock doorways in our being and in our communities, so that it is all but impossible for us to witness the God who wants to come in? How does the practice of love - with its patience, kindness, freedom from arrogance and rudeness, and its ability to hope all things, believe all things and endure all things - help us cast out the fears that bind us and cause us to fight one another, flee from one another, or freeze before one another?

We love because God has first loved us. It is the very fiber and breath of our being, if we will only awaken to it.