Fear and Freedom

So again we freely gather and come home to one another to forge again the bonds of friendship, to kindle and feed the home fires of community, to celebrate life, to empower people, to care for one another, to build a better world. Again we freely gather to discover who we are and to share ourselves with others for the sake of the greater good. Again we gather to seek truth and meaning, to honor and respect all people, to find unity in our diversity. No angry, jealous god compels us, no unfounded guilt ensnares us, and no mandated doctrines confine us. Instead the limitless spirit of life and love moves in us and again we come. Free people of the Free Church, whose joyous mission is nothing less than saving the world. Really. What else might save the world, but a path of reason, love and freedom? And what else is Unitarian Universalism when it’s done right, but a path of reason, love and freedom? This path is liberating and challenging and even fun. But it’s also deadly serious business. A lot is at stake here; the world is at stake here. And if you’re going to freely choose this path and this place, whether for the first or the thousandth time, you should know what you are getting into.

It sounds kind of serious, I know. But today I feel the need to be serious. For better or for worse, today I am not going to deliver that light, little welcome-back-from-the-summer sermon, the ain’t-the-future-bright kind of message — even though I really am so very glad to see you all and the future really is very bright. We are going to have a lot of fun together saving the world. But I want us to be clear about the world we’re trying to save, which really is a dangerous and scary place at times. So today I want to talk little about fear; how to face it; and how maybe even to be free from it. Because the Free Church must be a fearless church. In a culture that would enslave us to fear, this congregation is called to be fearless in seeking freedom for all.

Even though that hey-good-to-see-you sermon would have been a lot easier to write than this one, I just couldn’t ignore the fact that tomorrow is the fifth anniversary of September 11, 2001 and the beginning of the so-called War on Terror. I can’t ignore the fact that under the guise of making the world safer and promoting democracy, our nation groans — groans —under the strain of two deadly, ill-conceived wars. Under the dubious, or shall I say W-ious claim of promoting and spreading freedom, the very lives of more than 2,600 U.S. service men and women and more than 40,000 Iraqi citizens have been sacrificed upon the altar of fear. I can’t ignore the fact that this climate of fear and insecurity is being deliberately cultivated and exploited, so much that I feel even the word freedom itself is in danger of losing its meaning. And that is something no liberal person can ignore.

When the very concept of freedom is at stake, liberal religious people have no choice but to speak and march and to put their bodies and their resources on the line. As I see it, when all is said and done, liberal religion is really only about a handful of things: reason, love, and freedom. Open minds, open hearts, open hands. Now at some point or another, you’ll hear me experimenting with more modern uses, more liberal uses of traditional religious words: language like god, or covenant or salvation. But freedom? Freedom is not a word we have to re-claim. Freedom is our word. Freedom is THE liberal word. Freedom is the very heart of the liberal religious path. The word "liberal" means freedom. It’s the very definition. So I find great and bitter irony in people who decry and put down the word liberal, justifying themselves as champions of freedom.

To a religious liberal, the fact of our freedom — the FACT of our freedom —is the great blessing and in some ways the great curse of being a human being. We take freedom very seriously: freedom of conscience, freedom of belief, and freedom from oppression. To a religious liberal, freedom is humanness itself; it’s our true nature. And like nature, as boundless and open as the sky.

As many prophets and mystics and scriptures and scientists and nature and our own deep experience tell us, this great big thing is limitless in its possibilities. And in the midst of this evolving, unfolding, who-knows-where-it’s-going field of being that we call the world — our lives — we have to make choices. We have to respond to the demands that the universe and our own humanity put upon us. We have to recognize the difference between good and evil, between the true and the harmful and the false, and to act accordingly. And that’s a terrible burden. It’s too much for us most of the time. We’re free and that’s scary. This very fact of freedom, of the deep freedom of the whole universe, can provoke great fear in us. It can cause our clinging to the false sense of separateness and solidity that many mystics tell us is the very source of human suffering itself.

This horrible and wonderful fact: that our true nature and the true nature of the universe is freedom, is unbounded power and possibility, fantastic complexity and interconnectedness and uncertainty and change, leaves us living our lives in the midst of a great, big, fat question mark. We come out of it and we return to it. And so, we can never expect a sense of total security. Good and evil and harmful and nourishing things are always going to arise together out of the creation. We’ll never really live completely without fear; fear of our fragility, fear of the consequences of our actions, fear of the reality of our eventual death. And we just have to live with that, and choose the path of beauty and generosity and justice anyway. But that’s a hard demand. And many people can’t handle it. They become small and tight and they attach even to violence and oppression in order to preserve their sense of security. They have what Eric Fromm called "the fear of freedom."

But the good news about this scary, wide, open thing is that we are never completely without hope either. Because the free and unbounded nature of things means we can change – we can grow. We can always expand our boundaries outward. We can respond to life with courage and bind ourselves together to face the unpredictable reality of life.

Fear was once defined for me as an acronym: "Forever Evading Alternate Realities." I think we know that feeling. We don’t really know what is going to happen, but we know what we want to happen and when those things collide, we feel fear. When we accept that we don’t know what is going to happen, we have what Alan Watts called, "the wisdom of insecurity."

Let me be clear, accepting and playing with and responding to the fluidness nature of life does not mean we are without fear. Fear is a natural and normal emotional response to danger, and the world is dangerous. When we’re fearful, we’re getting a serious message from the web of life: "Pay attention now!" We may be one with the whole universe, but we are also this delicate bag of bones, this particular and precious bundle of memories and experiences, this individual being.

So in a universe that will never allow us to be free completely from harm or pain by virtue of who and what we are, it’s natural and normal to protect ourselves, and fear does that for us. It’s this quality that’s built right into the DNA. We seek to preserve our life force. And only great sorts of depression or pain or great acts of bravery allow us to compromise or transcend that urge.

The stress response: that’s our body saying, "Wake up." The fight or fight response; the surge of adrenaline; the pounding of the heart; the narrowing of the focus. It evolved to save our lives and in it’s right place and time, it does a fine job. Fear can be a lifesaver. However, we are not creatures who evolved to live under a constant state of stress and fear. Living in a state of constant fear constricts our natural flowering and flowing. It limits our ability to relate to other people and to our own best selves. Constant stress, whether it comes in the form of terror attacks or poverty or too much homework or too high expectations placed upon your first sermon by every person you talked to this week, that kind of constant stress is bad for you.

Constant stress, constant fear, it undermines our immune systems. It’s bad for our hearts; it’s bad for our mental health. Think of the times you were deeply afraid, maybe scared for your own life. What was your body doing? What was your mind doing then? Stomach pain, tightness in the chest, sweaty palms, racing thoughts, no thoughts at all. We can tell that’s not good for us.

So when I look on the history since 9/11 and the War on Terror, I see that experience of fear, of living under constant stress that we all know as individuals, writ large, painted over the whole culture. I think the whole nation has been in stress response for the last five years, and I think it’s making us crazy. So much so that even the antidote to the tyranny of fear, which is the brave and loving acceptance of our freedom, has been perverted into a justification for living in an endless state of fight or flight against the whole rest of the world.

At stake is the very definition of humanity that we hold most dear: that all people have inherent worth, that all people are capable of transformation and salvation, that all people are deserving of justice and self-determination. That is why I am so deeply disturbed when the president says as he has many times and as he surely will tomorrow when he addresses the nation, that our enemies are "people who hate freedom and hate people who embrace freedom." With a few simple, self-righteous words, he denies the very essence of humanity to a huge group of people with whom we must live. No lasting peace or security can possibly come from that. He has further declared that, "so long as I am the president people we will be determined, steadfast, and strong as we pursue those people who kill innocent lives because they hate freedom." Apparently, he believes that those who allow the killing of innocent lives because they love freedom are somehow off the hook.

I say otherwise, and I raise as a contrast this reading from the Tao de Ching #31:

"Weapons are the tools of violence; all decent people detest them.

Weapons are the tools of fear; a decent person will avoid them except in the direst necessity

And if compelled will use them only with the utmost restraint.

Peace is his highest value. If the peace has been shattered, how can he be content?

His enemies are not demons, but human beings like himself.

He doesn’t wish them personal harm, nor does he rejoice in victory.

How could he rejoice in victory and delight in the slaughter of people?

He enters a battle gravely with sorrow and great compassion as if he were entering a funeral."

This is the madness of the War on Terror as I see it: that with the premise of ridding the world of evil, we perpetrate evil. With the premise of making the world safer, we accept living in a constant state of danger and fear. With the premise spreading the American Way, whatever that is, we defy the very essence of it. Fear is the opposite of freedom. Just as you can’t simultaneously work for peace and prepare for war, as Einstein said, so too you cannot spread freedom by exploiting fear. The true greatness of America will not arise from this War on Terror because it depends on terror. Franklin Delano Roosevelt addressed this in his first inaugural address; you know these famous words.

"This great nation will endure as it has endured, will revive, and will prosper. So first of all let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. Nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror, which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance."

He went on,

"In every dark hour of our national life a leadership of frankness and vigor has met with the understanding and support of the people, which is essential to victory."

I don’t feel that our government is providing that kind of leadership, neither party. That’s where we come in, then — that’s where the people come in. We might not be able to banish from the world the things that threaten us. That’s not possible, but we change how we respond to them. In The Prophet, Kahlil Gibran said:

"If it is fear you would dispel, the seed of that fear is in your heart and not in the hand of the feared."

Terrorists can only have power against us if we give it to them. If we refuse to be captives of our fear, even of our fear of uncertainty and death, then what power do they have over us? We don’t’ have to yield to that temptation. We can pursue the path of the open heart, mind, and hands by joining our lives together in a spirit of love, reason and freedom — bravely choosing that way again and again even when it means taking risks, even when it means giving things up. Because, actually, sometimes in the quest for justice and truth, the worst that can happen is pretty bad. Sometimes we have to give up our lives, our comfort, and our security. But, if we’re being honest with ourselves, we don’t ever own those things anyway. They are temporary gifts from the Great Big Thing.

If this world is ever going to blossom into the realm of peace and well being that we know it can be, it’s going to come from people who refuse to succumb to fear, people who keep their doors unlocked, who welcome strangers, who sit down and have that hard conversation, who face their own demons, who plop down on the bus next to that strange guy with the funny hair. Fighting the war on terror is that mundane. The real defense of freedom begins with us and our daily choices. Harley-riding UU poet and minister Carl Nelson described freedom this way:

"To accept our world without surrender to it, that is to be free. To accept a universe rolling without aim or purpose and yet to build our purpose into it, that is to be free. To accept annihilation in the wastes of eternity and yet to savor every drop of life’s elixir, that is to be free. To accept grief as the inevitable concomitant of love and yet to lavish those feelings freely on one another, that is to be free."

Sooner or later, I believe that people are going to get sick of this bullying and fear mongering. Sooner or later people are going to get sick of this stupid war. As we wait and work for that day, our job is to demonstrate what living without fear looks like. Here, together in a community, a living testimony to what it’s like to live without being afraid of gay people; to live without being afraid of putting women in charge, to live without fear of aging, to live without fear of growing and changing.

So, again we freely gather and we come home to one another to forge again the bonds of friendship, to kindle and feed these fires of community. We freely gather to discover who we are to share that with others for the sake of the greater good. Again, we freely gather to seek truth and meaning, to honor and respect all people, to find unity in our diversity. The limitless spirit of life moves in us and again we come, free people in the free church, whose joyous mission is nothing less than saving the world.