Fear and Faith

Fear and Faith
Zeus Yiamouyiannis
4/14/06

Fear can incite the exercise of belief, but it cannot evoke spiritual empathy, awareness, or excellence. Fear, like self-control, can have temporary virtue for the reckless or tempted. Fear of being killed can still the impulse of the daredevil teen. Fear of getting fat can sometimes check the urge to stuff one’s face with sweets. But fear cannot show the way toward connection with God, self, and neighbor, nor toward a keen intrinsic awareness of the good. At its best, fear merely diverts actions that might have catastrophic consequences, and at its worse fear might actually intensify negative consequences, as panic so often does.

Fear of God can be useful as one is tempted toward sin, just as fear of the law or social recrimination might be a deterrent toward exploiting or harming others. But fear of God cannot connect one with the Great Creator, even as it might stop you from harming God’s creations. Fear is also unreliable. Like laws, fear can be used to excuse and inflame prejudices and unjust treatment of others as it can to avert ill treatment.

Love of God is required for connection, for a deep, intrinsic understanding of the sanctity of all creation. And love, in its constancy, has an entirely different set of requirements.

Fear of loss and abandonment may inspire a certain spiritual humility, may pull you back from the deepening hell of moving further apart from God and God’s creation. Fear may inform you of painful consequences of idolatrous choices, the metaphorical and actual, “lakes of fire.� But fear cannot help you enter heaven. Neither can duty or blind obedience or other forms of externalized responsibility. To love God is to bring God inside, to enter into God, to know God, to choose God. Fear may keep you from walking too far off the path of decency, but it cannot inspire the walk deeper into the forests of faith.

Fear, even fear of God, is a dangerous instrument, a two-edged sword. Whatever it’s expedient merit, if fear becomes a habit it can prevent one’s being from connecting with God at all. It begins to serve itself and it’s own designs—dramas of alienation and conflict, formulas of the ego. As with self-control, it can result in a pathological need to control, rather than embrace, spirit-in-the-world. Even reasonable fear can be unreasonably projected upon the world, creating constant anxiety and occupation of the mind, soul, and body. Fear tends to establish itself long after its temporary usefulness is past, creating stress and eroding peace of mind.

There is freedom from fear in Grace and the love of God and each other as children of God. Jubilee is upon us, freeing us, not only from debt but from bondage, fear, and want. Whatever their challenges or uncertainties, let us embrace the requirements of love, and let fear lie down upon the hearth of faith.