Bridgeport
Some of you may remember Farmer John in the sensitive novel The Cathedral by the late Hugh Walpole. Somewhere in that story the hero, Farmer John says, speaking of the people who lived in the cathedral town of Polchester, “We are not bad people here, but like people everywhere else, we are lazy and selfish. The two hardest things in the world are true altruism and honest clear thinking... but we are afraid, you and I like the rest – afraid of our safety, afraid that some one will rob us, or laugh at us, or hurt us physically, or make us feel small. We are not – most of us, cowards about big crises, but is the little things which destroy us.”
I want to speak for a while today about fear. Who would disagree that fear can haunt our lives with nameless as well as known apprehension and alarm. I am not going to dwell on the fact this day that there are real dangers of which we should be aware. For the moment let us define these threats, such as the traffic hazard that is presented to a child, as “concerns.” In our sermon fear will be considered as feelings of dread and terror which are more likely to destroy us emotionally than to preserve [sic] us physically.
These fears would seem to have no reliable base. You may have read or heard from children themselves about some of these imaginary dangers that are so frightening. There was a little boy in Nantucket (reported NY Times) who was “terrified solely (according to his mother) by the beach bus and would scream and cower under the seats during the whole of a ten minute ride. There was recorded also the four year old of husky size who would refuse to walk over sidewalk gratings for fear of slipping between bars set not more than an inch apart.” Our hearts go out to the little ones with their irrational but, to them, very real dangers.
But fear menaces more than children. One doctor in the field of mental health (Boston Globe, Dec. 1952) says flatly that the majority of Americans are unhappy and that the chief reason for this unhappiness is fear. Fear is responsible for the stale, empty lives so many people live; “fear is responsible for weakness, weariness, aches and pains.” We Americans on the surface fear the loss of our money and financial security; we fear that we will fail, we fear not being liked by the people we know. Below the surface there are other fears born in our childhood and buried beneath the layers of day to day happenings. When times of crisis come the grip of fear on us maybe so confining that we will not measure up to demands that our age may demand.
Another example – the TV stars are the new elite of the entertainment world. They display their talents before the largest audiences in the history of the world. Their lives are pitted with the corrosive acid of fear. The physical strain caused by fear is causing many of them to limit their appearances on this new 20th century marvel. One physician speaking of the numerous top-liners who skirt the brink of physical and emotional breakdown says “the cause of the afflictions of the stars can be summed up in one word, fear.” “It is the fear of the unseen audience and fear of the unknown reaction that seems to assail them. They work themselves into a terrifying state of mind because of the horrifying realization that once they say or do something on television it cannot be recalled.”
The TV star cannot hear the applause from your living room, so he lives in fear of the unknown. This fear of the unknown leads us to one of the great unspoken fears of many people. The fear of death. Death is an unknown. As has been pointed out, we in our American life take part in a conspiracy of silence about death. (see Eric Fromm Escape From Freedom p. 245-46). In Ancient times the Greeks paid little attention to the fact of death, placing all their emphasis on this life. On the other hand the Egyptians of thirty and forty centuries ago built their whole civilization around death and their belief in the afterlife and the preserving of the human body.
Our Jewish forefathers in religion admitted the fact of death realistically and prayed for the eventual achievement of a state of justice in this world. In our day somewhere we tend to repress the fact of death. Our ceremonies and customs try to repress the fact of death. We even speak a special language at the time of grief in which the word death is not even mentioned. We speak of “the departed,” cemeteries have become “burial parks,” and we have begun to think that an atmosphere of quiet luxury for a few hours helps us meet the human crisis. Thus we not only “do our best” to the person who has died, but we manage to keep our fear of death from being expressed.
Yet suppress it though we will, nevertheless that fear of the unknown lives among us.
It was said of Pope Julius II that vanity and fear of death and destruction caused him to engage the greatest of sculptors, Michelangelo, to design and make a magnificent tomb for his body when it should die. Michelangelo’s artistry was so breathtaking that Julius decided that the old Basilica of Constantine was not splendid enough to house this glorious tomb. So he decided to build a new church to house the tomb. So in order to defray the enormous expenses to build St. Peter’s, Julius and his successors encouraged the sale of indulgences to a larger extent than ever before. The resulting scandals from these sales precipitated a young monk into challenging the biblical authority of the pope of Rome and that young monk Martin Luther sparked the Protestant revolt. So fear of the unknown was at least one of the reasons for the splitting of the Latin church.
No previous generation in all history has more reason than ours to hope for a better and fairer world and community. Science, medicine, and communication promise that if we will there can be less disease, more comfort, more interesting lives than has ever been possible.
Yet fear is holding us back. The twentieth century has been a “journey into fear.” We live in dread of atomic destruction, economic depression, and in the shadow of nameless fears. We whistle shrilly but cannot drown out the sound of our fears. We turn eagerly to the books that will quiet our fears, “peace of mind,” “peace of soul,” “guide to confident living,” and perhaps the most pathetic clue to strivings is the book title, “how to win friends and influence people.”
And perhaps the most crippling of all fears is the fear of ridicule.
There is no great secret about our fears. Our fears are born of ignorance and uncertainty. We fear the unknown and we are uncertain because we are in terror that we have no safe base on which to face life. Fear is corrosive. Fear so overwhelms our senses that veritably in times of terror the smell of fear is in the air.
But there it is an even more sinister result of ignorance. Ignorance gives birth to fear – and hate is holding a lighted match to the fuse of the powder keg of our tense and puzzled world.
Unless we find a safe base our fears will destroy us, individually and as communities. What can liberal religion offer [to] remove the poison from the fangs of ignorance, fear and hate?
Of all the definitions of faith, one of the most challenging is found in the dictionary. I think it is the fifth in the series, and goes something like this: “faith is fidelity to one’s promises, or allegiance, or duty, loyalty, a strict adherence to duty and the seeking of fulfillment of promise.” Tolstoy thought that the “function of religion is to give to life a meaning which death cannot destroy, a significance and a meaning which is not bounded by our three score years and ten.”
Basically we can compress these definitions into this: fear can be transformed into faith by experience. Faith is not what the child once said, “believing something that just isn’t so.” Tertullian, the early Christian, once said, “I believe it because it is absurd.” But for those of us who would like to see our religion become vital, [we] cannot stand with him. We are aware that “faith in holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for the lost faith in ourselves.”
Our experience must seek to explore the unknown and throw light upon the ignorance that gives birth to our fears. The explorers here vividly illustrate this. Columbus sailed on, and on, and ignorance became knowledge and today the journey from Europe to America holds few terrors. Faith is an experience like that. Faith is not stumbling along with the eyes shut and lips muttering prayers; faith is determination to push back the frontiers of our ignorance whether that ignorance be of continents, international affairs or of our own inward strivings.
In one of the most famous of sermons ever preached in this country, Horace Bushnell of Connecticut spoke of the expulsive power of a new affection. He took as his text, Peter’s visit to the tomb on the Sunday after the crucifixion. Peter, still in the grip of the terror and fear that had caused him to deny that he ever knew Jesus, was told by Mary that the Master was not in the tomb. So Peter and John ran to the tomb and Peter went in. The Peter that came out was no longer the terror-stricken coward. The Peter that came out was the brave preacher who fearlessly preached what he believed about Jesus, even though the end was a martyr’s death in Rome. The experience there had the power to replace paralyzing emotion of fear with the serene energy of a man who had been completely won to a new idea.
Perhaps this is what the ancient prophet Isaiah was talking about when he said (35:3 ff.) “strengthen the feeble hands, and the tottering knees make firm; say to those whose hearts beat wildly, Courage! – fear not!” “Then shall the eyes of the blind be opened and the ears of the deaf shall be unstopped; then shall the lame man leap like a hart, and the tongue of the dumb shall sing.” What Isaiah is saying in the beautiful imagery of his poetry is that when fear is expelled there is a sense of confidence and fulfillment and somehow the world is clean, fresh, and peaceful. That sense of release and fulfillment can come through the experience of exploring that which has been hidden from us.
That sense of experience is also our answer to that jagged fear of the mystery of death. You remember how Shakespeare has Julius Caesar say, “cowards die many times before their death, the valiant never taste of death but once.” The late Catholic philosopher, George Santayana expressed this same thought this way, “but the radical fear of death, I venture to think is something quite different. It is the love of life. The love of life... is the original impulse by which good is discriminated from evil and hope from fear.” Thus it is in experiencing all the good things of life that we expel the fear of death.
It is in sharing life’s experiences together that we throw light on ignorance and the feeling of fellowship has the expulsive power to root out our fears. It was on the occasion of an automobile trip in which several men riding together found common ground of which they had been unaware. There is little said about this, but to me the most far-reaching effect of the United Nations, even in their disputes is if there are sitting together in the same room for hours at a time. Almost inevitably, whether the hostile delegates admit it or not, there is constantly new light on old ignorance and with that light there will be a lessening of old fears.
The faith that transforms fear is a living experience.
There is an old obscure legend surrounding the ancient story of the parting of the waters of the Red Sea so that the Hebrews escaping from bondage could elude the pursuing Egyptian soldiers. As in the ancient Bible story, Moses waved his wand over the waters. But in the other legend, the waters did not part until one Hebrew slave had the courage to leap into the waters. Before he could sink, then the waters parted.
Thus sometimes our fears become faith through the courage act experience. [sic]
In addition to seeking the experience that will open the door on the dark closet of ignorance, the liberal in religion will say that we must apply reason to the circumstances that vex and frustrate us. Some pessimistic theologians proclaim that the age of reason has passed. Man has demonstrated, so these people say, that he does not use his reason. Man is a creature of irrational emotions and it is futile to expect him to apply common sense to his problems. Man’s only salvation lies in throwing himself on the mercy of Almighty God.
We live in times where there is some evidence to support this view of our helplessness. We seem almost powerless to halt the tide of events that is bearing us toward disaster.
Yet, as a professor of philosophy at CCNY (NY Times) remarked, “our reason may be a pitiful candlelight in the dark and boundless sea of being, but we have nothing better, and woe to those who willfully try to put it out.” And the poet told us, “it is better to light a candle than curse the darkness.”
There is less need to feel helpless we fear. We need to remind ourselves continually that history is filled with men and women who have enriched the lives of their time and all lives since because they were willing to apply thoughtful observation, and reasonable inferences to the facts of their experience. That is how the great discoveries are made whether they be continents mastered by the explorer, or antibiotic drugs [by a scientist] who has had faith to experiment and the willingness to apply judgment to his findings.
(Erich Fromm, Man for Himself, p. 205) “Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton were all imbued with an unshakable faith in reason. For this Bruno was burned of the stake, Spinoza suffered excommunication.”
We journey from fear to face when we seek experiences that will replace ignorance with knowledge, when we apply reason to our judgments, --and one thing more. We need a vision of the truth that is founded in perfect love, in unselfish good will and fidelity to people. This is the inescapable dimension. A movie can be either two dimensional or three dimensional, but if a religion is to provide a way of life that will enrich our lives and those around us with meaning that “death cannot destroy,” then religion must have that deep dimension of human love.
That was the central message of the New Testament. (1st John 4:18) “There is no fear in love, but perfect love drives out fear. For fear suggests punishment and no one who feels fear has attained perfect love.”
Is that not what Paul affirms also when he says in Romans (8:15) “for all were guided by God’s spirit are God’s sons. It is not a consciousness of servitude that has been imparted to you to fill you with fear again, but the consciousness of adoption as sons, which makes us cry “Abba”, that is, father. The spirit itself testifies that with our spirits that we are God’s children, and if children, heirs also, heirs of God and fellow-heirs with Christ.”
I know of no better way to sum up what I have been trying to say about the subject then to tell you an event some of you may know. In a way I think it’s a parable about this journey from fear to faith. It’s the story of man against the sea. If you like you can think of the wild, angry ocean as the world in which we live and the man as all humanity trying to keep alive and afloat until he can find the security of a safe harbor.
About a year ago a French professor, Dr. Bombard, was interested in finding out if men could survive on the sea without any supplies. There have been so many cases of shipwreck or plane crashes where the survivors either starved or were swamped as they attempted to use small boats or rafts to reach safety. Dr. Bombard was convinced that there were ways of living off the sea itself and preserving life. But the only way to demonstrate his beliefs was to experience the hardship himself.
So he built a crude raft, placed some emergency provisions on the raft but sealed the containers, determining not to use them unless he was on the point of death. So we set out on the raft to go from Europe to America. The journey was fearful. Living off fish and birds, was he was almost overwhelmed by the mighty, surging power of the open sea. He made the discovery that all sailors must make to survive. In order to conquer the sea he must first conquer himself. This was his greatest battle. Dr. Bombard told how he won this fight against fear, this trial of terror by using such devices as carrying on imaginary conversations with a codfish and following a rigid discipline and painstakingly keeping a log. More than two months later he staggered ashore on Barbados. The sail of the raft was limp and bedraggled, he and everything on the raft were encrusted with salt, but the seal was unbroken on his emergency rations. He had demonstrated his faith. He had conquered his fear; and his vision of goodwill toward his fellow men was made real by his willingness to perform a redeeming act so that by his experience others might suffer less, others might live. That is the real triumph of faith over fear.
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