Love, Not Fear

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“Fear is the cheapest room in the house. I would like to see you living in better conditions,” the poet Hafiz said.

It’s cheapest only in the sense that it is the shabbiest, least hospitable, and most uncomfortable. In another sense, fear is the costliest place to live; its price is our freedom.

We take up residence in fear in the mistaken notion that it will keep out danger, but instead it locks us up behind imagined but real bars of anxiety.

When we live in fear, we stare out a tiny and grimy window and strain to see the future before it arrives and to control it by fretting about it in advance. What if the test comes back positive, or the company gets bought out, or the kids make a mess out of their lives?  What if a tornado blows through or an earthquake sunders the ground beneath our feet, or the river overflows its banks?  What if that tightness in my chest isn’t just heartburn after all?  What if I don’t measure up to the standards, even my own?  What if I don’t have the answers I’m expected to have? What if?

Fear isolates us. Even if we’re surrounded by people, it’s a kind of solitary confinement.  We fear that the people we might trust will let us down or that we will fail them. We retreat from involvement because we fear abandonment. 

Because fear is such a miserable place, we numb-out, veg-out, pig out, and zone-out or we work-out, wear-out, and burn-out.

Fear poisons our culture. Many political office-holders (it’s difficult for me to call them “leaders”) sort into two groups; intimidators and compliers—the bullies and the bullied. Thankfully, there are exceptions, but not enough. A distressing number of them are more afraid, it seems, to lose status, position, and money, even if the price paid to keep them is their integrity and our democracy.

I am too prone to forget one of the truest things I know, which is that “there is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear” (1 John 4:18).  Love, God’s love, liberates and energizes us to live adventurously, courageously, and joyfully. 

Hafiz also said: “God wants to see/More love and playfulness in your eyes/For that is your greatest witness to the Divine.”