Fear

Students are working, resting, or pursuing internships this summer, and I will be among the multitudes of college kids warding off the anxieties of the coming year, seeking to address my areas of lack, growing in responsibility and confidence, and cultivating disciplines which permit focus, grace, and peace to reign in and dwell within the ordinary contours of life. I love to write. I wish I would have taken this simple exercise with greater sense of opportunity; with writing comes a love for language, for the complexities of form and the puzzlement of clauses which interact to make meaning. The only obstacle to the love of the craft, I’ve found, is the fear of failing to do it well, and the same goes for learning a language. The same goes for knowing God, or another person.

I’ve committed this fear, though by God’s grace it’s lessened as faith in goodness, grace, and providence have made their reappearances. In fearing to fail the language of Spanish, for instance, I procrastinated its basic practices which might have incrementally led me to excellence. If you are consumed with the anxiety to do well, you will only end up doing comfortably, or miserably, and the interest you once had in the world, mathematics, boats, unicycles, human beings, Jesus, will be taken over and replaced by image of what “should” be. The tension is inevitable. With great interest, great desire, comes great fear of falling short, and the balance must be overridden with an absolution of those anxieties. This is the challenge. This is a weight we have to  To accept your degree of ignorance is not a failure. To confess your sin is not a failure. Claiming knowledge and expertise and perfection when none exist is true failure, and we can see how the Pharisee trap extends beyond the fold of the temple and dresses up in academic robes and books stacked from bed to ceiling. I started getting an idea of all this stuff when I realized there was a period in my life when I hadn’t actually laughed in perhaps a year or more. The laughter I had managed was false and forced and came from a soul so interested in pleasing that it had become disinterested in pleasure. What a trap!

Philosopher Roger Scruton once said in an address titled “The Consolation of Philosophy” that the day he realized people were “subjects,” entities and selves who operate in “I-You” relations, instead of “objects,” mere things to be exploited, he’d found the meaning of purity and love: we are ends in ourselves, and this presents a couple ways to live. One option is to look at oneself through the eyes of the other, for validation, and in the process create a world of potential interrogators who you assume are judging you, and so whom you judge in return, and yourself. This is the life east of Eden, the land of expulsion where violence and shame deplore the landscape. Perhaps another choice is to live as an isolated atom who sets up the self as their only legitimate master, but is there anyone who claims this who wouldn’t also die for praise? That’s why the devil flees when you mock him. He can’t stand it when folks don’t take him seriously. And finally, there’s the way out, which is the way in: we look at the other through a self already validated, and this allows all our attention to rest on the soul we encounter. There’s no exploitation here, only delight. There’s no fear here, only love. This is the way of Christ, who was so secure in His life with the Father that He was able to literally give it away. Dying to self, then, is the expression of the strongest self imaginable, one that’s fortified in the arms of God Himself and approved by Him with no questions asked. So now the admonition of Christ to “fear not” now houses a universe of depth in its punctuation. I know my battle against fear isn’t over. It has cost me relationships and produced seasons of profound loneliness, for fear creates false selves, and false selves bump but don’t bond. But the little by little I’ve received the love of Jesus, who loves me more than I thought anyone ever could, my eyes go from self to you, and that’s better than staying here. We were made to be open and confident, not enclosed and afraid. Open and confident, not enclosed and afraid.