This is the second of two parts.
By Donald Schell
Though the attacks of September 11, 2001, had been a continent away, they had hit close to us in San Francisco. Two of our parishioners lost relatives who worked in the World Trade Center. Another parishioner’s best friend whom she’d just seen the week before was on one of the planes flown into the twin towers. ‘My best friend was killed by a terrorist,’ she said. ‘I’m frightened and I’m crying all the time, and I’m so angry I haven’t got the patience my kids need. And they’re frightened too.’ My cousin Bill was on the plane flown into the Pentagon. Bill was just my age. His younger sister Julia Caswell Daitch wrote about his death and the bitterly slow healing of angry grief in Not to Worry, I’m Just Collateral Damage.
The question persists – how do we live and love and serve without defining our lives by terror or a war on it? Don’t we really need to be afraid?
Another parishioner, an Israeli and former Israeli Air Force officer who had married to the daughter of an Episcopal priest, told us that San Francisco friends who knew he commuted to work across the San Francisco/Oakland Bay Bridge kept asking him why he wasn’t afraid to cross the bridge. “Don’t you think it might be the terrorists next target?” they asked. He replied, “I’m from Jerusalem. You learn that you simply can’t live in constant fear.” My Jewish parishioner was speaking Gospel to us. ‘You can’t live in constant fear.’ And you can choose faith, hope, and love instead. I pray Ittai’s Jerusalem wisdom for us all.
Remember how often in 2001 we heard that ‘everything has changed.’ But what changed? Fear is so pervasive and deep for us humans that ‘Don’t be afraid’ seems to be the standard greeting for angels even bringing good news. Dare we protest that we’re more realistic than people two millennia and more ago, people who lived in cities that had been destroyed again and again by conquering armies. People whose babies died of simple, curable illnesses. People whose experience of the threat of every day life was as raw as our neighbors in Haiti or Somalia or Sudan or Thailand. Yes, we’ve always had really big things to fear. And probably there have always been people to make profit on our fears and use our fear to amass power. But when we accept fear as our baseline, defining condition, and as Clouzot and St. Paul suggest, our unconsciousness of the wages of fear will cost us dearly. And maybe that’s what ‘everything has changed’ meant it we accepted it. That fear become our postulate, the basic assumption underlying everything.
Fear fuels our country’s polarization. We’re so reluctant to trust one another that my good friend continued to suspect I’d re-written a national hymn for my own partisan purposes (and I have to acknowledge that I wished I had written those words). Fear undercuts friendship. Fear makes us xenophobic, anti-Islamic, anti-Republican (or anti-Democrat). Fear exults in the sloppy labels we paste on our enemies – Socialist! Fascist! Revisionist! Fundamentalist!
At worst our polarized church only offers its members and the broader society a different, more ‘Biblically’ or ‘theologically’ formulated list of fears from our polarized society’s politicians, public personalities and advertising firms.
In the early 1990’s our daughter Maria had a wonderful Croatian architecture teacher. She was a passionate, inspiring teacher though everything she had ever designed had been bombed to rubble in the methodical destruction of Sarajevo. She said she was finished with designing new buildings. “For me,” she said, “teaching the next generation is the only work I can do with integrity, that and telling anyone who can hear that what happened in Sarajevo could happen here.” She wasn’t afraid, and she hadn’t given up, but she knew that danger was real and that the chaos of war can eventually cross any border. So her teaching work was like Julian of Norwich’s ringing affirmation in the days of the Black Death, “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.” Or as our twenty-two year old son says, “It’s all good.”
Neither Julian nor my Joshua imagine that ‘everything’s going to be fine.’ Their ‘well’ or ‘good’ are bigger than the simplistic security of gates communities (and our illusion that we can make the U.S. a continent wide gated community). Josh and Julian know that we live in a world where really hard things can happen.
In 2010’s continuing culture of fear, too often the church simply offers new fears for old, not inviting us into courageous trust and hope grounded in love, but the stern counsel that we’re fearing the wrong thing. Shouldn’t we fear the demise of our church? Global warming and other impending ecological disasters? Who wouldn’t fear tyranny and the loss of our liberties? Or priests who practice Buddhist meditation? Or leaders who mess with our Prayer Book? If perfect love casts out those fears, what will we have left?
Why are we so attached to our fears? And just what are we actually afraid of?
We might guess that the obvious answer is death, but my own experiences seems oddly distant when real threat of death presented itself –
– like when death on a bare ridge in Colorado was as close as the lightning hitting the ground all around us,
– or when I crested the hill in Idaho winter, saw the interstate traffic stopped dead for the jack-knifed big rig that blocked all lines, touched my brakes and felt the wheels lock on black ice, praying the Jesus prayer as I steered the icy 60 mile an hour slide from rear-ending a tiny sport scar and we skidded into a big, stopped truck,
– or when I was robbed at gunpoint walking home from the church one night.
In those moments the knowledge that death might come in the next moment only focused my praying. God felt alive and present in the trust or whatever could come (including death), the trust that’s sometimes hidden within or alongside faith.
So I don’t think it’s actually death that we fear.
We fear failure. We fear letting people down. We fear losing control? We fear that someone else may be right and we may be wrong? We fear getting found out or being judged or shunned. We fear decisions that may bring us and those we love suffering. We fear not knowing what to do.
In the moment he spoke it, and in that one phrase, Franklin Roosevelt wore the mantle of Anglican lay theologian – “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.”
The Rev. Donald Schell, founder of St. Gregory of Nyssa Church in San Francisco, is
President of All Saints Company.