Fear

For L.D. because he said I should...

After I asked my last question last night, I started thinking about where the horrible things we do to one another come from. My current obsession with CI undoubtedly fueled this pattern of thought as well since the writers of that show often utilize things that I fervently hope they had to strain a mental muscle to create but fear actually happened somewhere in some form or another.

Whenever I get interested in a topic, I pretty much chew it to pieces until I feel like I've reduced it to whatever truth I can find and keep. Now, as to whether or not these truths I dig out of situations that confuse or horrify me are universal or not, I wouldn't attempt to judge. All I can say is that they work for me. With that caveat in mind....

Pondering the motivations behind the horrors we humans so gleefully perpetrate on one another, I came to the conclusion that the motive behind all these actions is a type of fear. I'm not talking about monsters-under-the-bed fear here. I'm talking about fears that go down to the bedrock of our identities. Some examples might be: Robbery: the fear that one will never be able to possess the things one desires without taking them from someone else; Rape: the fear that one will never be respected or seen as powerful or desirable so one decides to use violence to simulate these things and fulfill an image of potency; Racism: the fear of something different from what one is used to by way of appearance, language, or cultural norm causing one to strike out rather than to reach out for understanding. I thought about it for a long, long time last night, and I feel that fear is at the bottom of it all.

I believe these fears start small: tiny seedling doubts that whisper in the ear of the soul. At first, it's easy to shrug them off or to pretend they're not even really emotions we have. All of us have to struggle with those doubts. I don't know of anyone who could truly say they never have to fight those insidious whispering fears. Those thoughts must drive down their hair-like roots and then lead to words: words of hate, racial epithets, angry arguments, and expressions of dark desire. Once they've been talked about, the thoughts take on a terrible physicality. They lose some of their abstraction and begin to seem reasonable, even arguable. Words blossom into action and another fear-born sliver of humanity's worst is the fruit.

I John 4: 18 talks about the opposite of fear: "There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love." I John 4:18 Note the use of the phrase "drives out." That says to me that once those tiny doubts get going, they send deep roots into us that something has to come and remove to prevent them from maturing into great evils. That also says to me that my fumbling efforts, my search for truth, aren't enough. There has to be an outside force, love, that can kill the fear.

This passage defines that fear-killing love as God (see the chapter linked above for the exact wording). For me, personally, I have found that to be the truth. I don't think this to be a pat answer or an easy solution to a Gordian problem. To receive that love, one has to go to God and be honest. There's nothing that is so difficult as to confess these fears because I think they're tied to us in a very personal way. I also don't think that coming to God is a one-time panacea. I think this coming, this taking of love and killing of fear, must be a daily thing. In the same way that an invasive plant springs up unexpectedly after being sprayed with "weed killer", I think these fears can come back if we don't constantly apply love from the source of love, God.

As I said above, these are just my thoughts on an issue that troubled me. This is the truth that I'm working on right now, that I'm trying to come to a deep understanding of to help myself move forward. You may take it with the proverbial grain of salt, si quiere.