How easily distracted we are from engaging the things that scare us. Well, that is, normally. This week, however, we will engage, coax, entice, imitate, and set aside time specifically for “fright.” Halloween is a debate all by itself within the Christian sub-culture, but the very fact that it is firmly embedded inside and oddly endearing to our cultural psyche betrays our love/hate relationship with “fright.”
Lucy, in the Peanuts classic, “It’s the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown,” has this wonderfully wry comment as she dresses in her ghastly witch’s costume that the rationale in selecting a Halloween costume is to pick one that is exactly opposite your normal personality. She, the witchiest of all the Peanuts gang, really thinks she is the saintliest!
But all the same, whether we dress up like witches or denounce participating in the pagan revelries of Halloween at all, we like to dabble in fright. It sends surges of adrenaline (which fuels the flight impulse) or noradrenalin (which fuels the fight impulse) through our moderately passive bloodstream all the other 364 other nights of the year. We like to tease the brain—which God made to expertly respond to potentially harmful stimuli with an amazingly complex cooperation of nervous, circulatory, endocrine, respiratory, and muscular systems of confront a dangerous world—without actually having to be in danger. Why else do we rent the suspense thrillers? Why else do we skydive? Why else do we caffeinate every morning? We like the rush of energy without exactly inviting the danger to come too close. Sometimes, ironically, we have even come to depend on the chemicals associated with fighting or fleeing fright in order to feel “alive.”
But fear, on the other hand, exists outside the material world; beneath the layer of "fright." What Lucy does not touch on and what Halloween cannot unfold is that we have deep fear even without the physical stimulus of fright. We automate fear in our minds and souls, quite separately from our brains and hearts. What do we do with this kind of fear—the fear of a spiritual kind? These are the fears that send us into panic, that cause us to lose sleep (or lose the desire to stop sleeping). These are the fears that color our perception of reality, feeding themselves and providing false validation that danger really exists, even when it does not—a filter through which we interpret all our experience. This kind of fear is debilitating; and it is inseparable from the human condition on this, the “dark side” of Eden.
A blog’s thimbleful of discussion on this ocean of fear is hardly worthy of the time to write or read. But may it be at least a post-sign hammered into the earth next to our journey’s pathway. We live in, with, beside fear—what will we do with it?
Gary Smalley in his book, The DNA of Relationships, provides a great starting point for this entire subject—especially when two fearful people interact with their fears and with each other in close and prolonged proximity. Fear is where we live, but will we obey it as our master? We can react to fear, which almost always takes the shape of self-protection or self-exaltation, which leads to lashing out against or withdrawing from those people who have wittingly or unwittingly triggered our hurts, which uncovers a unmet want/need, which aggravates more fear, which triggers the other person’s hurts, unmet wants/needs, fears, etc. It is a “dance”; it is a vicious cycle, and it is a graceless relationship. Sometimes, it seems like we react to our fear in precisely the way that causes the greatest fear in our “dance partner” to shout out.
But there is another way; the vicious cycle of reacting to fear can be broken. We can in faith respond to fear (with God’s power!), taking personal responsibility for our “pieces” of the situation, giving God our wants/needs, choosing to forgive and ask for forgiveness quickly and frequently, redefining what it means to “win” so that both parties can feel honored and cared for, and keep our own “batteries charged” so that fear (which never really goes away) can trigger us to greater faith (instead of flesh) during the next cycle around this "dance floor."
So, take your frights out this Saturday night, but leave your fears at the foot of the cross. “God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble. Therefore, we will not fear” (Psalm 46:1-2).
