Listening to Fear by Doug McCusker Once we got up about 10,000 feet fear grabbed me by the gut. I’d held it back and ignored it up until then, but when the door to the plane opened it announced its presence. There was no denying that I was terrified. My mind was racing through a dozen scenarios of what could happen and I tried to formulate a graceful way to chicken out. I looked at my Brother-in-law, the one who talked me into this crazy mess. He had that “here we go!” expression on his face. You know, the one you make just before the roller coaster is about to plunge down the screaming hill. But then suddenly a thought came over me in that instant. I realized that everyone else on that plane, even my instructors were also scared. It was subtle, but there was something behind his eyes that was almost like a respectful fear. Suddenly I was not alone. It was time to jump and trust in things beyond my control. Fear is a common emotion that we all experience. Sometimes it motivates and sometimes it freezes us. Whenever we are challenged to act or see things in a way that feels different, we encounter fear. Fear amplifies our energy and can trigger bodily responses like rapid heartbeat or goose bumps on our arms. We are hardwired for fear. But we have a conflicted relationship with it. We chide ourselves for being scared, but yet we love roller coasters and horror movies. It is a widely held view among psychologists that there are only two things which we as humans instinctively fear – loud noises and falling. I would have thought that were more, but those two make sense because they involve sudden changes to our bodies. There isn’t time to think in those situations so our bodies contain the fear. All other fears are established in our minds. Deep down, below our conscious awareness is a fear that as individuals we are on our own, separated at birth. This feeling of being disconnected tells us that we must fend for ourselves. We compare ourselves with others and develop a gnawing fear that we are not good enough, or that we don’t have enough happiness, prosperity, you fill in the blank. It is this egoistic, base fear of “not enough” that breeds a perception of scarcity. In the story of Adam and Eve, Adam experienced fear shortly after eating from the fruit of knowledge. As soon as his eyes were opened to his own existence he felt vulnerable. When God called for him, he hid because he realized for the first time that he was naked. One of my recurring nightmares is that I am in an ordinary crowd of people who are moving around and doing their ordinary things, and I suddenly realize that I am completely naked. Like Adam, I look for a place to hide, but I can’t. I must face my vulnerability. In those dreams I’m actually having a conversation with my fear of being judged by others who I have no control over. At one level of perception we and everything that makes up the material world appear as objects with boundaries and limits. But at another, deeper level there appears to be an interconnected web of all existence; a primordial energy of constant change; a contradiction to our senses and a conundrum for modern physicists. Thankfully we have the capacity to understand that we are connected to the universe and that much larger forces hold all of creation together. In our first reading this morning, we are told that blessing is the force of well-being active in the world, and faith is the awareness that creation is the gift that keeps on giving. We form community and worship those mysterious forces out of an aching desire to transcend our isolation. The spiritual journey from isolation to a reconnection with the totality of existence is the quintessential spiritual experience. And along the way we develop an awareness of the abundance of life. While working on this sermon, I was also preparing for the class on the Bhagavad Gita, which will be held at 11:30 pm. How’s that for a shameless plug. A passage in chapter two of the Gita lept out at me while I was thinking about this awareness of the abundance of life. “As rivers flow into the ocean, but cannot make the vast ocean overflow, so flow the streams of the sense-world into the sea of peace that is the sage. They are forever free who renounce all selfish desires and break away from the ego- cage of “I”, “me”, and “mine” to be united with Brahma. This is the supreme state. Attain this, and pass from death to immortality.” Two years ago when I was a chaplain intern at the National Institutes of Health I had a patient on my unit with an aggressive form of lymphoma. He was scheduled to receive a stem cell transplant which would give him a new immunity system to fight the cancer that was raging through his body. He was scared of dying but he was also scared of the treatment. No one could tell him exactly how his body would react to the stem cell transplant. The uncertainty paralyzed him. As the date of his transplant grew nearer, he drew tighter and tighter into himself. One day I came to see him and this time he didn’t throw me out of the room. The feeling of being utterly alone had worn him down and he was ready to speak to someone about his fear. I asked him if he had ever been as afraid as he was at that moment. And he told me about a time when he was asked to speak in front of his congregation. He was terrified, but he mustered the strength when he realized that the people facing him actually loved him. They ceased to be a threat when he focused on their connection rather than his isolation. So I asked him to visualize that feeling of being in front of a loving community held by their support. He closed his eyes and after a few minutes a smile came over his face. I told him that I loved him and that his family and the medical team all loved him. We were his community and that in our presence he was not facing his transplant alone. I wish I could tell you that there was a happy ending, but he did die after receiving the transplant. Listening to our fears doesn’t guarantee happy endings or safety. But it allows us to move forward and live each moment of our lives in spite of no guarantees. I was deeply moved by what he said about the power of love. By reframing the congregation from those who were judging him to people who loved him he was able to stand in front of them with all his vulnerability. I am reminded that this is a sacred space where our covenant to love one another transcends our separation. This is a place where we can bring our fears of not being enough and all our struggles and know that we are held by community. In our second reading, Pema Chodron instructed us that our purpose is not to eliminate fear but to get to know it, be intimate with it and look it straight in the eye so that we can sense the world in new ways that will continually humble us. In her book When Things Fall Apart, she recounts a story that a man told about his spiritual experiences in India back in the 1960’s. The man was determined to get rid of all his negative emotions. In his spiritual practice he struggled against anger, lust, laziness and pride. But above all he wanted to conquer fear. His meditation teacher told him to stop struggling, but he took that as just another way of overcoming his obstacles. Finally the teacher sent him to the foothills to meditate in a little hut all alone. He shut the door and began to settle down into his spiritual practice. When it got dark he lit 3 candles. Around midnight he heard a noise in the corner of the room, and in the shadows he saw a very large snake. It looked to him like a king cobra. There it was, right in front of him swaying and watching him intently. All night he stayed alert, keeping his eyes on the snake. He was so afraid that he couldn’t move. There was just the snake, himself and fear. Just before dawn the last candle went out and he began to cry. He wasn’t crying out of desperation but from tenderness. He felt the longing of all the animals and people of the world. He knew their alienation and struggles. He accepted with all his heart that he was angry, jealous; that he struggled and resisted; and that he was afraid. He also accepted that he was wise and foolish, rich and poor, limited and unfathomable. He came to know that he was precious beyond all measure. He felt so much gratitude that in the total darkness he stood up, walked toward the snake, and bowed. Then he fell asleep on the floor. When he awoke, the snake was gone. He told the audience that he never knew if he imagined the snake or if it had really been there, and that it didn’t matter. As he put it at the end of the lecture, that much intimacy with fear caused his drama with life to collapse and the world around him finally broke through. I think of fear as a spectrum of emotions from caution to terror, but typically it arises when we feel threatened or sense a danger to our well-being. The last things that we want to do are move toward it and listen to it with everything we have. But that is what we must do. I’m not talking about listening to the danger, but to the fear. What you will find in those precious moments is that you are truly present. By accepting your fear, you accept yourself and that is the first step toward courage. The truth is that we don’t know what will happen in the future. Trusting the present moment is probably the hardest thing we can ever do. Avoiding our fear takes us out of the world and into our heads where our egos tell us we are not enough. Embracing our fear opens our lens to what the world needs and what we have to give. At the finish line of the Boston Marathon stood a man who whose son had been killed in Iraq in 2004. He was there to cheer National Guardsmen who were running with full backpacks in honor of fallen soldiers. His name is Carlos Arrendondo. Nine years earlier when the Marines came to tell him that his son had died, he went berserk. He took a sledgehammer to the Marines vehicle, jumped inside and set himself on fire. For a long time after that incident he feared living without his son. It was as if a part of him had been ripped out leaving a big hole in his heart. His healing had been long and hard, but he found a way forward by working with other families who’d lost loved ones in Iraq and Afghanistan. At the Boston marathon he was handing out American flags to the runners as they finished the race. Carlos was standing across the street from where the second bomb blew up. Police were telling people to leave and people all around him were running away in fear that other bombs might detonate. But Carlos, who had gotten to know his fears in intimate detail after losing his son, ran toward the bomb where the wounded and dying were laying on the ground. He found a young man on fire with one leg blown off and the other badly injured. Immediately he put out the fire and applied a tourniquet to the young man’s leg. Someone showed up with a wheel chair and he picked the man up and put him in it and rolled him to an ambulance. All the while he was talking with the victim assuring him that he was going to be okay and that he would stay with him. Carlos was one of many people who ran to help when others fled in terror. Each one had their own reasons, their own sense of connection to the victims of that senseless tragedy. Pema Chodron says “the trick is to keep exploring and not bail out, even when we find out that something is not what we thought.” So I got out of my seat, walked to the airplane door as I felt the rush of adrenaline course through my body. Just then, I was thrown into the great beyond. What an unbelievable feeling. The time for fear was over. All around me were majestic mountains and patchwork fields of purple and gold. All I could do was float and take it all in. I was flying! Once the parachutes opened the sublime became even more awesome. We glided peacefully through the air. Everything that I saw etched itself into my mind. I was ageless, an adult child, experiencing the world from a new perspective. With every new discovery we become more intimate with fear and closer to the universal connective tissue. When we listen to our fear we learn so much about who we truly are. Fear can actually be your spiritual guide. Listen to it and it will show you the abundance of life. Amen and May it Be So?