Penny Mawdsley writes about Fear.
Idly reminiscing recently, I remembered how my sister and I dared Granny to climb a tree in her garden. She had already won our bet to skip 100 times over my skipping rope without stopping (she was then 76) but, very sensibly, she drew a line at tree-climbing. She had used a quaint phrase from her girlhood in the 1890s to turn us down, namely ‘No fear!’, it by then being an expression which had lost any connection with staving off the evil eye.
Fear is a basic emotion which takes many forms, often overlapping with more precisely described mental states. What they mostly share is the ability to impinge on the smooth running of our lives – from distorting our reasoning and causing us to hold back on action we should take, to causing us to take action that we should not.
Simple situations can be blown out of all proportion. Fear can spread rapidly through a crowd, causing hysteria and panic. A recent article in The Inquirer (Unitarian publication) mentioned ‘Chicken Licken’, the classic children’s story in which an acorn falling on the chicken’s head convinces him that the sky is falling in. He panics and tells others about it and they all get caught up in the fear, which leads to disaster as they are all lured into the foxes’ lair and eaten up. The lesson of the story is how easy it is to get caught up in irrational fear, especially someone else’s.
The trouble is that there are numerous ‘fear’ stories swirling about us nowadays, especially via social media. Some can justify our concern, like a fear of the many real and likely irreversible consequences of climate change, which should stir us to action, or a fear of what might transpire and affect us all as a result of the forthcoming US election, but there are many others that we should be more discerning about, particularly if we are not party to all the facts.
The fears of the economically better off in the West are different from those of their compatriots who are struggling to find a decent living wage and safe accommodation. For those relying on state benefits, food banks and help with fuel costs, there are permanent anxieties about day-to-day living for themselves and their children. For them, especially those with young families, there is real dread – the worst kind of fear – of developing long-term illness, disability or death, of losing the support of a partner or their home.
It’s all very well when our spiritual leaders cite 1 John 4:18 about perfect love driving out fear etc, and encourage us to develop a deeply engaged love of life to counter dread. The two forces of love and fear push and pull us constantly, and whichever one we feed is the one that consumes us. Fear can stop us functioning and can lead us into making the wrong life choices, but when we are beaten down and mentally exhausted by worry and fear, I would argue that it is nigh on impossible to ‘tune in to love’ and be of service to ourselves and others.
I haven’t yet touched on existential fear, which is very real for many people. The idea of personal extinction is for many an abhorrent concept, which seems to invalidate everything about how they’ve lived this life. It is presumably existential fear that has led to so many cultures developing forms of belief in an ‘after-life’. These emphasise everything from a Last Judgment, reunion with loved ones, reconciliation with those with whom they never ‘got on’, to experiencing bliss in a new physical body (along with harmonious musical ability) in aesthetically beautiful surroundings – for eternity. For others a real fear of divine judgment for wrongs and shortcomings in this life is enough to keep them ‘on the straight and narrow’.
Finally, the ‘awe and wonder’ type of fear that we get in the Bible is not often explored these days. Is this because scientific knowledge has progressively underplayed the dramatic sights, sounds and mental revelations that folk have experienced as mere heightened emotion?