First Unitarian Universalist Church “We Are A Welcoming Congregation!” 2434 East Battlefield, Springfield, Missouri  65804-3980 phone: 417-883-3922     fax: 417-883-7680 e-mail: springfield@springfieldunitarians.org

The Places That Scare You: Facing Our Fears by Nancy McShane
presented October 31, 2004, at the 1st Unitarian Universalist Church of Springfield

        When I was a little kid, I was afraid of the dark. Why? Because you couldn’t recognize danger when it was dark. You couldn’t see the tall, gaunt man dressed in a black tuxedo, even if he had a deathly white face and fangs that seemed to glow with dripping blood. A vampire like Dracula could move so fast he’d disappear with a flick of the cape before you could even turn your head. I had learned all this from watching the horror movies on the “Friday Night Fright Night” feature that aired at 10:30 p.m. on Channel 10, opposite Johnny Carson.

          If vampires could do all this, how were you supposed to know they weren’t following you down the hall to your bedroom at night? How could you tell they weren’t under your bed, ready to reach out with a bony hand and pull you from beneath your covers? 

          Let’s have a show of hands. How many of you used to be afraid of the dark? How many of you used to be afraid of vampires? And how did that fear work out for you? Well, you made it through the night with no puncture wounds to the neck, didn’t you?

 Some of those early fears were designed to help us survive. For instance, infants are born with a wicked startle reflex. I’m sure you’ve all seen it; a baby will be lying there, calmly asleep, and all of a sudden he will throw back his arms, legs and head at the same time. Something has triggered his instinctual fear of falling.

The fear of the dark is also one of those instinctual fears hidden deep in our pre-human psyches. The fear made a lot of sense to our early human ancestors. It just didn’t do to wander too far from the fire at night, when very real predators were on the prowl. OK, so maybe we’re not well served in our human evolution by the fear of vampires but, well, we made it through last night with no puncture wounds to the neck, didn’t we?

          We humans generally outgrow our fear of the dark and of monsters by adolescence and puberty, when they are replaced by other fears: Do I smell? Do I look funny? Am I fat? Does he like me? Am I normal? Is she really my friend? Is it the right size? Are my parents going to get divorced? Am I gay? Am I going to flunk the test? As the list of fears grows, and gets more specific, the fears start to exert a bigger influence on our behavior. Our perception of our fears, both the rational ones and the irrational ones, begins to affect our decision-making process.

It seems to me that once upon a time, humans left this fear-driven stage of life once the hormones quieted down and one entered adulthood—that safe “Father Knows Best” stage of life epitomized by Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s firm belief that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” I imagined that people in my parents’ generation soldiered on a while through safe young adulthood before succumbing to the fears of early parenthood—but I imagined even those subsided with the arrival of subsequent children. As my dad Rufus is fond of saying, “Hell, we didn’t have car seats or seatbelts, but we managed to keep the six of you alive well into adulthood.”

I suppose that next for my parents’ generation came the midlife crisis, when the fear of death reared its ugly head for the first time—when my parents faced the deaths of their parents. They way they handled that fear had a great bearing on the way they will handle the ultimate fear…the fear of their own death.

But that was them, and this is now. Something has changed in the ensuing generation. Something—and it wasn’t 9/11—caused fear to grow exponentially, as if it had been exposed to nuclear radiation on a Pacific Island atoll, much in the way Godzilla had been. Fear grew fast and fear grew large—like a cancer—so much so that by the time I was in my young adulthood fear was all around us like so much acid rain and smog and greenhouse gasses.

         And it’s still with us. Fear is everywhere these days; on TV, radio, in newspapers and on the cover of the September/October 2004 issue of the UUWorld Magazine, available downstairs in the library. An article entitled “The Fear Patrol: Unitarian Universalists Offer Insights Into the Cultural and Personal Sources of Fear,” by Neil Shister, examines the differing media of fear in post-9/11 America—from election coverage to commercial advertising.

          In the article, Forrest Church, minister of the Unitarian Church of All Souls in New York City, and author of the book Freedom From Fear: Finding the Courage to Love, Act, and Be, classifies fear into a five-part taxonomy:

·       Fright, he writes, is our most direct experience, and instinctive fear from physical danger centered in the body.
·        Worry resides in the intellect.
·        Guilt is fear rooted in a troubled conscience.
·        Insecurity is centered in the emotions.
·        Dread, the most amorphous, has no fixed object but rather a general anxiety of not being in control.

          Fear, in Church’s scheme, is very much part of the human condition. “We’re more afraid of failure than we are eager for success,” he said. “More afraid of pain than eager to seek pleasure. More afraid of embarrassment than willing to take chances on new experiences.” In sum, fear suits what he calls “our timorous personality.” Yet it is precisely when we overcome those fears that “all of the amazing things in our life happen.”

          The other side of fear is freedom. And freedom is driven, finally, by faith in the future. “We’re typically balancing competing claims of security against liberty.” Church said. “But ultimately you have to sacrifice safety.” There is no such thing as absolute security in his vocabulary. “As human beings we are sentenced to death and sentenced to life at the same time.” The option Church advocates: choose life.

 But how do we do that? How do we choose life? How do we make the conscious decision to give up fear as a guiding force in our lives? I don’t know how Forrest did it, but I know how I did it. Or rather, how I took the first step in the right direction.

It would be cool for the purposes of this sermon to say that the moment I chose life took place on Halloween, but actually it happened to me on another holiday, the unlikely holiday of Presidents’ Day. This was back in the late 80s, before I had kids, when I was married to my first husband, who was a very nice human being whose life was ruled by the very nasty fear that he wasn’t going to get his next fix of drugs.

I had a lot of fears at the time also: that I was never going to get pregnant after having had a miscarriage, that I wasn’t trying hard enough to keep my husband clean and sober, that he didn’t love me enough, that there was something wrong with me, that I didn’t try hard enough, yadda, yadda, yadda. The thing is; neither of us admitted these fears to ourselves or each other. We had them stuffed pretty far down inside our psyches.

Anyway, that Presidents’ Day back in the late 80s was unseasonably warm and I had the day off from the library. I don’t know where my first husband was. He could have had the day off from school or he could have been working; whatever the circumstance, he chose to be absent from my life a lot during this time and he wasn’t around that particular day.

During the warm afternoon, I put my black lab, Toby the Wonder Dog, on the leash and walked him up to Maple Park Cemetery to sit in the sun. I let him off the leash to romp while I sat on the steps of the gazebo and watched the grounds crew use a backhoe to dig a grave not far from the front gravel drive. Toby and I left before they finished and walked the few blocks back home.

I fed Toby then waited as long as I could before finally conceding that the dog would be the only male in the house who had the courtesy to show up for supper. I spent the evening doing whatever it was that I filled up my days and nights with back then—reading a book, I suppose. Just before heading upstairs to bed, I looked out the window. As the warm, moist February day cooled into night, a dense fog had formed outside. I don’t know what possessed me, but I got the leash out again and walked with Toby up to the back gate of the cemetery.

I don’t know how familiar you are with Maple Park Cemetery, but the graves along the east side, bordering Jefferson Avenue, are more than 100 years old and many of the headstones are shaped like angels and obelisks. The large branching maple trees helped hold in the fog, and it drifted and banked around the graves and made the place look like a scene from Victorian London. I was thinking about Jack the Ripper and Stephen King and the old Night Gallery show as I stood on the gravel path at the back of the cemetery. I thought about Dracula. I thought about turning around and leaving by the back gate and going home and going to bed.

But something made me tell myself to stop being such a big baby and just walk calmly up the gravel path through the cemetery and out the front gate. I told myself that if I could do that then I had won a big prize. I would be a grown up and nothing could scare me again. So I walked, in measure steps, making myself look to the left and to the right at the old headstones. Making myself look at the fog and at the trees and making myself listen to the muffled noises. I walked on, growing closer to the big white gazebo which I could just make out in the fog ahead of me. But I had forgotten about the empty grave.

It would be cool for the purposes of this sermon to tell you that I fell into the empty grave, and from six feet under contemplated my fear of death. But I had Toby the Wonder Dog with me, and he was a black lab and had a great nose on him and he wasn’t stupid enough to walk into a big hole in the ground. He stopped, and I stopped with him. He sniffed around and peed while I just stood at the edge of the grave and looked in. I didn’t see Dracula. I didn’t see Jack the Ripper. I didn’t even see a faceless black-robed figure holding a scythe. I just saw the bottom of a hole and the pointlessness of holding on to made-up fears. I knew that I was using those made-up fears to mask my real fear—the fear I felt every time I turned the corner to my house and I could see whether my husband’s truck was in the driveway or whether he was gone, out using drugs. That was the real fear I lived with every day for ten years, the fear that pulled at my gut and dumped endless gallons of adrenaline into my system.

I’d love to be able to tell you that I marched back home, kicked the bastard out and lived a fearless life to this day, but that’s not the way the story goes. The experience of that foggy night in the graveyard only served to set my feet on a different path, in a different direction from the one I was originally heading. I stayed with him several more years, though those years did give me my kids, Andy and Ellie, and introduce me to my neighbor, Laura Caruso, who introduced me to a matchmaker, Denise, who introduced me to an engineer, Earl, who introduced me to the UU church and later married me here, so I’m not complaining.

I did eventually leave the first husband. I did eventually stop looking for his truck every time I turned the corner, but I unfortunately replaced it with the fear that my house was going to burn down, so I started looking for smoke and flames instead of a pickup truck. I held on to that irrational fear even when I moved to a different house in a different town.

See, what I didn’t know then that I do know now is that fear changed me. I had developed post-traumatic stress disorder from surviving my first marriage. My daily exposure to fear for ten years causes me to have flashbacks, when I will experience an adrenaline dump in my system for no apparent reason. And the daily exposure to fear chemicals for so many years has changed my brain chemistry, so that now, years later, I suffer from migraines and depression and fibromyalgia because my dopamine and serotonin levels are all out of whack.

So what does this have to do with you? Well let’s just update some of the characters in my story. Let’s put all of you, all of America, in my role. We’re walking down the path, whistling in the graveyard. Let’s put George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and Fox News and all the other fear-mongering neo-cons in the role of my first husband. Trying to convince us we’re scared alright, but it’s not them we’re scared of. We’re scared of being poor, or being childless, or being attacked in our homes by faceless terrorists. Standing in for the vague fears represented by Jack the Ripper and Dracula we have Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein and faceless terrorists in general. The fog represents all the hype that the media and all the obfuscation that the government has been heaping on us since 9/11 (orange alerts, plastic and duct tape, anyone?)

We’re walking in the graveyard and we’re getting close to the edge here, people. We’re pumping ourselves so full of fear and adrenaline that we’re making ourselves sick as a society. We are going to permanently alter our collective brain chemistry to the point where trading away our hard won civil liberties for a false sense of security is going to start making sense. To the point where no one is going to raise the cry when harmless citizens are treated like criminals and kept from getting anywhere close to their president, much less being able to voice an opinion to him, dissenting or not.

Let’s have another show of hands. How many of you are afraid that our YoUUth joining us for the service today will be subject to the draft if the war in Iraq continues with no clear exit strategy? How many of you are afraid that the concept of one person, one vote is a thing of the past? How many of you fear the return of back-alley abortions? How many of you fear you will one day have to choose between buying prescription medicine and buying food?

Right. We’re pretty damn close to the edge. But there is still one role in my story we haven’t filled yet. Toby the Wonder Dog. We need someone to pull us up short and keep us from falling into the grave. We need someone to recognize that it’s just a hole in the ground, and make us realize that if we’ll just recognize it as such we can turn and set our feet on a different path, and head in a different direction. We can then make a decision to change the way we react to fear.

          In his book, Church suggests we apply the golden mean when deciding how to change our reaction to fear. In ethics, the golden mean for correct behavior falls equidistant between extremes, the right amount of any given quality perceived as ethically superior to too little or too much. Aristotle introduced the golden mean to Western philosophy 2,500 years ago. Weighing fear according to this ideal, the preferred alternative to panic is not fearlessness but prudence (the half-way point between the two.) The word prudence today suggests fear, but originally it signified “right thinking.” Numbered among the seven classic virtues, it meant knowing the good and acting accordingly. In terms of the familiar Serenity Prayer—“God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference”—prudence is the “wisdom to know the difference.” So understood, far from being a drab virtue, prudence invites us to be bold, not timid, as long as we aren’t foolish.

           In our country’s infancy the virtue was so important that many colonists named their daughters Prudence. I’m not suggesting it should make it back into the baby name books, but maybe we can append the name Prudence to Toby the Wonder Dog, for it was prudence that was beside me that foggy Presidents’ Day, nudging me into right thinking. Helping me turn from fear, helping me to know the good and act accordingly. It is prudence that brings me before you today, helping you to turn from fear, to know the good and act accordingly. And with any luck, it is prudence that will send you out into the world this afternoon to help others turn from fear, to help them to know the good and act accordingly.

           Are you with me? Let’s have a show of hands.

 

Last update: 05 May 2005
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