"Living Courageously"

My title this morning is “Living Courageously,” but I want to start off by talking about fear.

You see, for quite a while now, I’ve been thinking about fear and the role it plays in our lives.

This thinking started last summer in August, when many of us watched the movie One here at church. If you weren’t with us that Sunday, this movie was a documentary in which a couple of amateur film makers go around interviewing both well-known spiritual and religious leaders as well as lots of ordinary people and asking them some of the big questions of life. One of the questions they asked was, “What are we all so afraid of?”

This question intrigued me, and it got me thinking about how truly big a role fear plays a role in our lives.

In fact, one of the things that I want to suggest for your consideration this morning is that fear is one of the biggest factor that keeps many of us from leading fuller, deeper, richer, more abundant, more satisfying lives.

Of course, I’m not the first one to say this. The psychodynamic model of psychotherapy, from Freud until today, is based on the idea that many negative behaviors result from maladaptive responses to inner anxieties. In other words, according to this model, anxiety is the fuel of psychopathology.[1]

When I’ve asked people what they’re most afraid of in life, most people respond the same way - - something bad happening to somebody they love.

This is true for me as well. When I was a child, what I feared most was something bad happening to my parents. Now what I fear most is something bad happening to my wife. I’m sure that after I become a parent, what I will fear most is something bad happening to my child.

Many of us, I’ve observed, seem less afraid about something bad happening to us. For example, most of us, I’ve observed, at least say that we aren’t afraid of dying ourselves. Paradoxically, we are deathly afraid of “The Big C.” When I was a hospital chaplain in Chicago, a physician once told me of having to tell a patient she had a terminal disease. “That’s a relief,” she said. “I thought you were going to tell me I had cancer.”

Many of us, I’ve observed, are afraid of getting older and the possibility of losing our independence and no longer being able to do the things we enjoy.

Many of us, I’ve observed, have huge anxieties regarding money. It’s my observation that this is one of our biggest day-to-day worries. Living in the United States seems to be like a double-edged sword. You can have a higher standard of living than in almost any other country, but you can never quite enjoy it because of the fear you could lose it at any time.

Many of us, I’ve observed have fears about dealing with conflict - - within our families, in our workplaces, or even here at church, and as a result of this fear, many of us are conflict avoidant and put up with nearly intolerable situations for a long time rather than dealing with them head on.

We worry that we’re not good enough, not likable enough, not lovable enough, or not competent enough. We worry that other people will discover that we are far, far less perfect than we pretend to be. In general, we worry much, much, too much about what other people think of us, in effect giving other people control over our lives.

In the movie One, I remember the answer that one man gave to the question of what we’re so afraid of. He said, “We’re afraid we’re broken and failures and we’ll be discovered and then we’ll be shamed and shot.” By the laugh that got when we showed the movie here at church, I knew there was some truth in what he said.

Let me tell you about something that happened during my first year of ministry at this congregation, after I had only been here a few months. I got here early on a Sunday morning to get ready for the service, but as it got closer and closer to the time the service was supposed to start, nobody but me was here.

I started to panic. I started to think, “They’ve figured out I’m no good as a minister, they’ve figured out I’m nothing but a worthless fraud, and strangely enough, they’ve all figured it out at once.”

This painful agonizing went on for several minutes before I eventually figured out it was the end of Daylight Savings Time, and I had forgotten to set my watch back an hour.

Of course, I don’t wish to suggest fear is always a bad thing. If it weren’t for fear, I wouldn’t lock the door to my house at night, I wouldn’t wear my seatbelt, and I certainly wouldn’t floss.

Fear motivates me in other beneficial ways as well. The Unitarian Universalist minister Victoria Safford wrote, “Every day I stand in danger of being struck by lightning and having the obituary in the local paper say, for all the world to see, ‘She attended frantically and ineffectually to a great many unimportant, meaningless details.’

Like my colleague, I worry at times about ending up with a similar-sounding obituary, and this motivates me to focus more of my time and energy on what is truly important rather than what is only apparently urgent.

However, fear, like most things in life, is not good in extremes. When we live with too little fear, we act foolishly, but when we live with too much fear, we lead far more limited lives than we might otherwise, and as I said earlier, my suspicious is that many of us live with too much fear rather than too little fear.

Did you know that the roots of the English word “worry” are in words that mean “to strangle” or “to choke.”? And this is what fear, worry, and anxiety do to us. They choke the life out of us.

President Franklin Roosevelt, who famously said, “We having nothing to fear but fear itself,” knew that fear was more crippling, more paralyzing, and more debilitating than the polio from which he suffered.

How should we respond our fears, worries, and anxieties? I want to suggest three things we can do. First and most importantly, we can recognize and name our fears. But why is this helpful?

Fear is a sly, sneaky, surreptitious thing. Fear most powerfully affects us when we don’t even know its there. By unmasking it, recognizing it, and naming it, we rob our fear of its power over us.

The other day Hiromi sent me on an errand to H Mart, the new Korean supermarket in Federal Way, to buy some noodles. H Mart sells a lot of Korean food, but it also carries Japanese brands, and Hiromi wanted a particular brand of Japanese noodles. She even gave me the left-over plastic wrapper from the old noodles so I would get the right brand.

I got to the store, and I wandered around for a while, up and down aisle after aisle of strange-looking food, looking for the noodles. And I wandered, and I wandered, and I wandered.

I then thought to myself, “Maybe I should ask somebody where to look,” but then I decided to look some more by myself, because after all, noodles shouldn’t be that difficult to find.

After I while longer, I thought to myself, “You know, I really should ask somebody,” and that’s when I realized it. For whatever reason, I was afraid to ask. I’m not quite sure why. Maybe I was afraid of looking stupid. Maybe, since most of the other shoppers were Korean, many of them immigrants, I was afraid whomever I asked wouldn’t understand me, which might be embarrassing for both of us. I had this vague fear of the possibility of somebody yelling at me, “What are you doing looking for Japanese noodles in a Korean supermarket? What kind of sick, depraved person are you, after all?” and then being chased out of the supermarket by a mob of angry shoppers, swinging purses and throwing gobs of kimchee. Finally, I said to myself, “This is ridiculous. What am I so afraid of? After all, I’m bigger than everyone in the store!” Then I walked over to a woman and asked, “Excuse me, do you know where these are?” holding up the old plastic wrapper Hiromi had given me. “Yeah,” she said, “right over there.”

I want to suggest an exercise for everybody here, just for the rest of this week. During this next week, every time you find yourself not doing something you want to do, or doing something you don’t want to do, or just hesitating about doing something, just ask yourself, “Is there something in this situation that I’m afraid of?”

Naming a fear is half the battle, because naming a fear weakens its power over us and strengthens our power over it.

After we recognize and name a fear, I want to suggest the second thing we can do is evaluate it. We can ask ourselves, “How realistic is this fear?” “Is it rational?” “How likely is this to happen?” “Is there anything I can do about it, or is this something that’s out of my control, like the possibility of a meteor crashing into the earth?”

It might do us good to reflect on the words of Mark Twain when we said, “I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.” Or we might also reflect on the words of that master of fear, Alfred Hitchcock, who once said insightfully, “There is no terror in the bang, only the anticipation of it,” which I take to mean that even when our fears are realized, they don’t turn out to be quite as bad as we anticipated.

Or we might also reflect on the words of Jesus, who asked, “Can you add one hour to your life by worrying?”

There was a cover story in Time Magazine last month titled, “Why We Worry about the Things We Shouldn’t…And Ignore the Things We Should.” The article pointed out that many Americans worry endlessly about the avian flu, which has so far killed no one in this country, but have to be cajoled into getting shots for the flu, which kills 36,000 Americans every year. There were no terrorist attacks on American soil last year, but 600 people did die falling out of bed.[2]

Barry Glassner makes a related point in his excellent book, The Culture of Fear, and warns us to be skeptical about our fears, saying, “The short answer to why Americans have so many misbegotten fears is that immense power and money await those who tap into our moral insecurities and supply us with symbolic substitutes.”[3]

So the first thing we can do is recognize and name a fear, and the second thing we can do is evaluate a fear, and I want the third thing we should do, in most situations, is make a decision.

But the decision we have to make is not whether to be afraid or not be afraid. Even when fears are overblown or even irrational, we can’t just will them away. That’s not what it means to be courageous or brave.

In a sequel to the Wizard of Oz, Dorothy returns to Oz and is upset when she hears the Lion still referred to as cowardly. “But the Lion is not really cowardly,” Dorothy says. “I have seen him act as bravely as can be.”

“All a mistake, my dear,” the Lion replies. “To others I may have seemed brave at times, but I have never been in any danger that I was not afraid.”

To be brave or courageous doesn’t mean not to feel afraid. Courage and bravery are not synonyms for fearlessness. As John Wayne said, “Courage is being scared to death - - and saddling up anyway.”

Fear, to a certain degree, seems to be inevitable, so our choice is between giving in to our fears and allowing them control over our lives, or not allowing them to control over our lives. Our choice is between living as a slave to that which frightens us or liberating ourselves from its bondage by doing something even though we’re afraid.

Or, here’s another way to think about it…Broad, sweeping generalizations are always risky to make, but I’m going to make one now anyway: When it comes down to it, one might say that everything we do in life, every single action we do or don’t take is, either motivated by fear or by love, and the decision that each of us has to make for ourselves is whether we are going to let our lives be dominated by fear or by love.

Or here’s another way to think about it…Fear is always about the possibility of loss, and the decision we have to make is whether what we love in life is more important to us than what we fear losing.

Of course, if we make the decision to let our lives be guided by love rather than by fear, there’s a pretty good chance that we may get hurt. But there’s a price to pay for not taking any risks too.

In a short story by Henry James we meet a character named John Marcher. “Marcher,” as the author Judith Viorst tells us in her analysis, “is convinced that there is nothing he can do about the specific fate for which he is destined, a rare and strange and possibly prodigious and terrible fate that will one day spring like a crouching beast in the jungle. While awaiting the arrival of his unknown, inescapable destiny, he detachedly goes through the motions of existence, as his voided days become decades and he becomes old. It is only at the end of his passive, passionless, empty life that Marcher understands the fate he was marked for: that he has been destined to live out his entire life as a man to whom nothing whatever has happened.”

The Nobel Peace Prize Winner Aung San Suu Kyi, still under house arrest in Myanmar today, once said, “The only real prison is fear, and the only real freedom is freedom from fear.”

If you’re going to let you life be dominated by something, don’t let it be fear. Let it be love. Love of one another. Love of yourself and the things that make you happy. Love of life itself and all its glorious possibilities.

My friends, my hope for all of you in this New Year is that you discover freedom from that which makes you afraid so that you may live your life as fully, as richly, as deeply, and as abundantly as possible.

[1] Yalom, Irvin D., Existential Psychotherapy, 10.

[2] Kluger, Jeffrey, “Why We Worry About the Things We Shouldn’t…And Ignore The Things We Should,” Time, November 26, 2006.

[3] Glassner, Barry, The Culture of Fear, xxviii.

[4] Forrest Church tells this story in Freedom From Fear, 131.