Fear and Flourishing

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button above.

Rev. Chris Jimmerson
October 29, 2023
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

So often, we think of fear as a feeling to avoid. Why then, do we also sometimes revel in it – like during this time of Halloween or through horror movies, extreme sports, or scary amusement park rides? We will examine how fear is probably necessary for our survival and how our response to it can either sabotage our well-being or enrich it. In a world that can so often seem frightening, how might a spiritual practice of listening to our fear turn that fear toward flourishing?

Chalice Lighting

This is the flame we hold in our hearts as we strive for justice for everyone. This is the light we shine upon systems of oppression until they are no more. This is the warmth that we share with one another as our struggle becomes our salvation.

Call to Worship

I WILL NOT DIE AN UNLIVED LIFE
Dawna Markova

I will not die an unlived life
I will not live in fear
of falling or catching fire.
I choose to inhabit my days,
to allow my living to open me,
to make me less afraid,
more accessible,
to loosen my heart until it becomes a wing,
a torch, a promise.
I choose to risk my significance;
to live so that which came to me as seed
goes to the next as blossom
and that which came to me as blossom,
goes on as fruit.

Affirming Our Mission

Together we nourish souls, transform lives, and do justice to build the Beloved Community.

Reading

BELOVED IS WHERE WE BEGIN
– Jan Richardson (from Circle of Grace)

If you would enter
into the wilderness,
do not begin
without a blessing.

Do not leave
without hearing
who you are:
Beloved,
named by the One
who has traveled this path
before you.

Do not go
without letting it echo
In your ears,
and if you find
it is hard
to let it into your heart,
do not despair.
That is what
this journey is for.

I cannot promise
this blessing will free you
from danger,
from fear,
from hunger
or thirst,
from the scorching of sun
or the fall
of the night.

But I can tell you
that on this path
there will be help.

I can tell you
that on this way
there will be rest.

I can tell you
that you will know
the strange graces
that come to our aid
only on a road
such as this,
that fly to meet us
bearing comfort
and strength,
that come alongside us
for no other cause
than to lean themselves
toward our ear
and with their
curious insistence
whisper our name:

Beloved.
Beloved.
Beloved.

Sermon

Well, here we are, just a plain ole regular Sunday service. Nothing unusual happening.

Nothing to worry about. Nothing to fear. What?

Oh, right. It’s the Sunday before Halloween. We have little ones dressed as ghosts and goblins running around. As well as a few adults. But, other than some irregular attire, nothing else major going on.

Well, there is that whole vote thing happening this afternoon.

If you are visiting with us this morning, I should explain that the members of the church will gather after the service today to vote on whether to call a new settle minister. The candidate for that being me.

Now, some folks have shared that they are feeling at least a bit apprehensive this morning. And that’s OK.

I’m right there with you.

I love this church, and I love this ministry.

We can let that apprehension inform us though that something of consequence is happening in the life of this church and our faith.

And knowing that, if we go into this afternoon informed by our love for this church and this faith, no matter what happens, we will all be OK.

“There will be an answer.”

I wanted to start by getting that out there, because ya’ll need to know that I am TERRIBLE at the elephant in the room thing.

Maybe because I grew up in a culture that discouraged verbalizing uncomfortable issues, these days, I am no good any more at leaving important matters left unspoken, even if speaking them can sometimes be scary.

Our topic today is fear and flourishing, so it felt only fitting to go ahead and get that out there.

So, now let’s talk some about fear on this Sunday before Halloween.

In his inaugural address, Franklin Delano Roosevelt famously said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself … “

Now, even though I personally am a great fan of FDR, my hope this morning is to convince you that FDR was wrong about that.

I know, blasphemy, right? Bear with me.

You see, while I agree that depending upon our response to it, fear can either paralyze us or lead us down perilous pathways, I also think that paying attention to our fear in a centered, mindful way, can set us on a journey toward flourishing.

Fear serves an evolutionary (and perhaps, thereby spiritual) purpose in our lives. Ignoring or suppressing it can lead us into harm’s way.

Fear is centered in the older parts of our brain, from long ago days when we humans were much more subject to predators and environmental extremes. It helped us protect ourselves by generating an automatic and autonomic response.

When we feel fear, that older, subconscious part of our brain, largely the amygdala, causes a number of stress hormones to be released into our body, our heart rate and breathing to quicken, our blood pressure to increase, our blood flow to supercharge our limbs.

In other words, without even thinking about it, we are ready to start throwing punches or run for our lives!

The problem is that in today’s world these automatic responses that got embedded into our unconscious so long ago – fight, flight, freeze or fawn – these responses can work against us these days if we just engage in them reactively, without thinking about them, without choosing how we respond.

Here’s something that happened to me that both illustrates how fear can be extremely valuable, perhaps even lifesaving, and that contains examples of how I went through every one of those four fear responses!

When I was about 19 years old, I went to dinner one evening with a group of my friends from the Lamar University theatre department in Beaumont, TX.

We went to Bennigan’s – gourmet eatin’ in Beaumont back in those days.

All of the guys in our group except one were gay. We were theatre students.

I don’t think we were particularly inappropriate that evening, though we may have gotten loud and obnoxious. We were college aged theatre students.

When we walked out to the parking lot to go back to our cars, a group of guys who were several years older than us and much bigger than most of us followed us out and quickly surrounded us. They were yelling gay slurs at us. They accused one of my friends of having flirted with them.

My first instinct was to try to run to the car, the flight instinct, but we were surrounded.

One of them grabbed my friend’s shirt and raised a clenched fist in the air as if to strike my friend.

Without even thinking, I moved toward them, the fight response. A couple of them grabbed me and pushed me down over the hood of car. I started to struggle, but then I remember thinking that we needed to try to calm this down or thing might get really bad.

I stopped struggling and froze – the freeze response.

The guy who had grabbed my friend snarled at him, “Apologize you … and called him another gay slur I will not repeat”.

My friend said quietly, “I’m sorry”.

After a moment, I said, “We didn’t mean anything.”

That was really hard. That fawning. It felt terrible and humiliating because we hadn’t done anything wrong.

It seemed to calm them a bit though.

More people were coming out of the restaurant, and they finally released us with a few more grumbled warnings and slurs.

Later, as they drove away, I saw rifles mounted in the back window of one of their pickup trucks.

Oh, and my friend they had accused of flirting with them was the one straight guy.

Fear may have served its purpose and saved us that evening.

Now, it may also be instructive to think about common childhood fears, some which may be innate. Loud noises. Large animals. Monsters under the bed. Or the common phobias. Fear of heights. Fear of spiders or snakes. Claustrophobia.

It is fascinating that so many of these represent things that actually could cause us harm – loud noises can mean a storm is coming or a locomotive bearing down us; large animals, spiders and snakes can sometimes be dangerous; we can get hurt if we fall from a large height or get trapped in an enclosed space.

Those monsters under the bed might be warning of threats lurking just outside of our awareness.

So we need these fears, even though there is also this risk of them becoming exaggerated and taking over.

In fact, being without fear is dangerous itself, as a group of scientists who have been studying a woman I will call Samantha have documented.

Samantha has a rare condition which causes calcium deposits in her amygdala so that she no longer has a fear response, though she still feels other emotions.

Samantha has been held at knifepoint twice, gunpoint twice and was nearly beaten to death as result of not have our built in danger warning system called fear. She has had to be restrained from playing with poisonous snakes.

Samantha tells the story of walking to the store one time when a man beckoned her to sit beside him on park bench.

Having no fear response, she did.

He grabbed her, held a knife to her throat and said, “I am going to cut you.”

Absent any fear, she replIed, “Go ahead. I’ll be coming back, and I’ll haunt your ass.”

Samantha’s lack of fear has gotten her into dangerous circumstances. It has also sometimes helped her survive those circumstances, similar to how being able to manage and channel our fear might benefit all of us.

In fact, scientists have discovered that Samantha also does not experience trauma, which in some ways might be thought of as a tremendous fear response that fails to turn back off.

This has led to using alternative therapies for trauma that help diminish ongoing fear, like the meditation we did earlier.

Which matters, because not being able to manage our fear responses can be dangerous to us also, as writer Shel Silverstein described in his poem called “Fear”:

Barnabus Browning
Was scared of drowning,
So he never would swim
Or get into a boat
Or take a bath
Or cross a moat.
He just sat day and night
With his door locked tight
And the windows nailed down,
Shaking with fear
That a wave might appear,
And cried so many tears
That they filled up the room
And he drowned.

We can’t allow ourselves to drown in our fears AND neither can we deny our fears or try to heedlessly just fight our way through them.

A Buddhist Wisdom parable tells of a young warrior who has been told by her instructor she must go into battle with fear.

When the day comes, she approaches fear with respect and asks permission for the battle and asks how she might stand a chance against him.

Fear replies, “My weapons are that I talk fast, and I get very close to your face. Then you get completely unnerved, and you do whatever I say. If you don’t do what I tell you, I have no power. You can listen to me, and you can have respect for me. You can even be convinced by me. But if you don’t do what I say, I have no power.”

In that way, the student warrior learned how to dance with fear rather than try to defeat it.

I love that image of dancing with fear not trying to battle it.

I think that sometimes that’s why we find ways to revel in our fear responses like extreme sports, horror movies, scary amusement park rides – Halloween!

We are learning to dance with fear in smaller steps with less risk involved, similar to how we often treat phobias by starting with small doses of exposure to them.

And so much of what we do together as a religious community also helps us dance through our fears communally.

Our rituals, our rites, our spiritual practices, the community of care and support we nurture.

I love that in our story for all ages, the witch asked for help. They ran off the dragon together.

We are not alone. We can ask one another for help. We can lean on each other.

Let’s face it, on top of all that we encounter in our individual lives, we face some very legitimate communal fears these days.

A climate crisis that seems to accelerate with every sunrise. Mass shootings. Two simultaneous wars, one of which threatens to engulf an entire region and potentially spawn violence well beyond it. Another waged on one side by a malevolent narcissist with nuclear weapons.

A U.S. political system plagued with an ever growing strain of authoritarianism – a quarter of our public now believing violence to achieve their political ends is justified.

And don’t get me started on the short sighted, mean spirited, theocratic harm and injustice we are witnessing here in our own state.

Well, I could go on. And probably will sometime very soon.

There is a lot in our world right now that is harrowing because it is telling us that something important, something consequential is going on.

And so together, we can help each other listen to what that fear is telling us without letting it tell us what to do.

Together, we can counter the dragons of war, greed, injustice, oppression and hate, with courage, solidarity, and love.

Together we can dance through our fear and show up over and over again for justice.

Together, we can meld our story for all ages and our anthem from earlier, proclaiming to those dragons, Iggety, ziggety, zaggety, zoom – We won’t back down.

Together, we need not fear even fear itself.

My beloveds, we do not journey through the valley of the shadow alone. We have one another. We have an entire religious community.

We are rooted in a sacred web of all existence, nourished by a great river of love which flows through it.

We are Beloved.

And from within that interconnectedness, something divine emanates. On this, just a plain ole regular Sunday.

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