Reaching Out with Hope

I have been pleasantly surprised at the reaction to a recent article I wrote.  I  had nearly 40 positive responses to a short piece in the Orlando Sentinel, an OpEd reflection on how we might find strength amid, and after, the current pandemic.  This reaction surprised me because I am used to receiving little feedback from whatever I write.

But people are worried, but have more time to read and reflect, and are drawn to positive messages. It's possible, as a recent article in the Guardian noted about a survey in Britain, that many people, not affected by unemployment or illness, are reacting to the self-quarantine and the general uncertainty with a surprising degree of inner peace.  Many are finding rest from stress, relief from not going into public, joy in cooking and in spending more time with loved ones...in short, after an initial decline in happiness, the survey found an overall increase in well-being.

We are stronger, more patient and resilient than we often think.

 I am pleased that the article itself has been a means of connecting me to two cousins I rarely hear from, and  to an old college friend, who forwarded the article to another old friend, not heard from in 25 years, whose response was gratifying.  A local friend emailed my article to his daughter in New York, who wrote to me that she was uplifted by my noting that our lives are not really about ourselves but about relationships.  So I've been unusually busy responding to emails and sharing mutual good wishes with former students, neighbors, and many friends, in an expanded web of interconnections, a community of hope.

One of my cousins, Patrick Fleming, a psychotherapist in St. Louis, responded by sending me a reflection on fear and the way it can make us self-centered and selfish (consider the panic hoarding of paper products).  The antidote to such fear, he says, is stay connected to others, to act from the heart, not the panic. He said my article and his were on the same wave length.

I avoided specifically religious language in my piece, but the message came directly from my Catholic background: We are never really in control of our lives, as the current crisis is forcing many people to realize. We can turn inward and find peace in simple things; that is, we can become contemplatives. For many people, being cloistered brings a kind of freedom.

And we are being forced to see our connection with the natural world and with everyone else. We see that we are not isolated individuals, despite our narcissistic society with its emphasis on comfort, pleasure and success. My life is not just about me, but about me in relationship to God through others.  It is about service and our obligation now to reach out to those who are lonely, frightened, and feeling unloved.

As Richard Rohr recently wrote, when we face our own vulnerability and reach out to those who are feeling vulnerable, we are forming a kind of community, which is essential to those who feel isolated and cut off from human contact.

It remains a challenging time, not aided by a White House that deceives the public with phony information while urging that businesses open up before it is safe to do so.  Our collective physical health must come first, along with some reassurance that we can trust in a future that will be different, but, I hope, spiritually stronger.  This is what I suggest in the article published last week (27 April), pasted below.   
_______________________________________________

WHAT LESSONS WILL WE LEARN FROM THE LOCKDOWN?   Orlando Sentinel

4-27-20

By Gerald J. Schiffhorst

 

I wonder how we will be changed by the COVID-19 pandemic—those of us who haven’t lost our jobs or been hospitalized or forced to fight for unemployment compensation or deal with inadequate health insurance.

And I wonder what we will learn. Will we be able to look back on this as a crisis that strengthened us in some way?

As guest columnist Joseph Wise says in the Sentinel (4-17), the crisis is also an opportunity. He is writing about education, but his insight applies to the economy and every area impacted by this pandemic.

The lockdown is forcing me to re-learn several important lessons.  The first is that I am not in control: the future is uncertain but need not be a source of panic, the kind of alarm that comes from too much media exposure. (I limit my news intake to fifteen minutes a day.)  The world as we know it will change, and some good things will happen. 

Second, uncertainty is always disturbing, and the present pain is a world-wide challenge, but the pain does not have to turn into suffering for those of us sequestered at home.

Pain becomes suffering, I think, when we feel alone, abandoned, and unloved. My  wife, Lynn, and I are doing what many others have been doing: reaching out to those who feel lonely and helpless, both the elderly and the unemployed. We are phoning or emailing friends, some of them too frightened to go outdoors. They feel less isolated and anxious by these daily contacts, and so do we.

We all need to be reminded that some anxiety is normal, but since the future is never known, all I can do is focus on the here and now, taking one day at a time.  So mindfulness, paying close attention to each thing I do and refusing to worry about the future, is my third lesson.

Finally, this crisis is a reminder that my life is not merely about me--my comfort, pleasure, and success; it is, as my Jesuit education taught me, about serving others. The coronavirus is a startling reminder that we are connected to everyone else on the planet in innumerable ways. 

We may be isolated in our homes, but we are not really alone since we exist in relationship with the natural world and its people. We are learning the hard way how dependent we are on one another.

In a recent interview about the challenge of being confined at home, Pope Francis quoted from Virgil’s “Aeneid.” The lesson he found in this Roman poem from 19 B.C. was not to give up in despair but “save yourself for better times, for in those times remembering what happened will help us. Take care of yourselves for a future that will come.”

In that future, we will only be as strong and compassionate as we are today.

____________________________________

Gerald J. Schiffhorst, a professor emeritus of English at UCF, lives in Winter Park.

 

 

 

The Sky is not Falling

It may seem like the end of the world if you watch the news extensively, hearing stories about how the pandemic is spreading.  But it is crucial to step back and see that fear and isolation do not have to equal loneliness and despair.

A friend forwarded a poem by an Irish priest, Richard Hendrick, "Lockdown," which reminds us that in Italy, people sing to each other through open windows so that those living alone hear family sounds and that elsewhere churches and temples are opening to help the homeless and sick, and people are learning to turn inward to read, be quiet, create, and contact one another.

We are forming a community of hope. People everywhere, writes Fr. Hendrick, are slowing down and reflecting, seeing how connected we all are despite the quarantine.  "There is sickness, but there does not have to be disease of the soul... .There is panic buying, but there does not have to be meanness," he writes.

It seems to me essential to limit our exposure to the media and take one day at a time, doing everything "quietly and in a calm manner," as St. Francis de Sales wrote in the 17th century. His advice: "Do not lose your inner peace for anything whatsoever, even if your whole world seems upset."  Right now, the whole world does seem upset, until we reflect on what Fr. Hendrick's poem says.

The present crisis also reminds me of the words of the Jewish writer Etty Hillesum, writing in her Amsterdam apartment as the Holocaust was about to carry her off to Auschwitz. "I am not alone in my sickness and fears, but at one with millions of others...it is all part of life."  She knew, as Richard Rohr recently wrote, that when we see our suffering as part of humanity's "one universal longing for deep union," it helps prevent selfishness and loneliness.  We are all in this together. We know that most people are undergoing the same hardship, or worse, and this "makes it hard to be cruel to anyone."  (Rohr)

Suffering has the capacity to teach us many things, mainly that we are all part of one reality--and that compassion and love are the only ways to deal with this crisis. We realize in these difficult times that we are not really alone but connected--and that we have great inner resources.

Of course, we can distract ourselves with reading, music, and entertainment, but deep down, we are aware that we are not in control.  For believers, this means we turn to God, who, says Rohr, is with us in suffering.  Etty Hillesum knew this in 1942. She writes (in An Interrupted Life), speaking to God, "there doesn't seem to be much you can do about our lives. Neither do I hold you responsible. You cannot help us, but we must help You and defend Your dwelling place inside us to the last."

How do we help God? By loving others, reaching out to those living alone, doing whatever chores we can for the elderly, offering hope--and by being grateful for each day as we move toward a solution of the pandemic, since we know it will end.  When it does, I believe many people will be spiritually stronger.

Black and white fear in America

Brennan Walker, 14, was luckier than many black teenagers in white neighborhoods.  He escaped unhurt when a homeowner, full of the old white fear of the black male, shot at him.

The story is told in today's New York Times and elsewhere:  Walker missed his bus and so decided to walk to high school this week but got lost in a Detroit suburb.  When he knocked on a door to ask directions, the woman who answered the door yelled in panic, assuming the kid was breaking into her house.  (Do burglars knock, usually?)

Her husband picked up immediately on the hysteria and without thinking, grabbed his shotgun and fired at the fleeing youth. Luckily the police did the right thing and arrested the man with the gun.

Much will be written about this story in relation to guns, police, and the law. What hits me is the same type of racist terror that elected Donald Trump--if you accept the plausible theory that white Americans, angry at our two-term black president who was supposed to be followed in office by an equally progressive woman, took out their rage in the election, putting into office a corrupt, incompetent demagogue who appealed to their primitive (anti-immigrant, anti-minority) attitudes.

So it was fear that struck me as the lesson in this case: white fear of black power; and of course, the black fear of the ruling majority.

If only our racism could be eradicated, but that would mean the impossible task of wiping clean the sad history of racial hatred in America and, with it, fear of the "other."

Terror, anxiety, and grace

I have saved an interview with actor Andrew Garfield from the magazine America (January 2017) by Brendan Busse because it deals with something that is part of my life and something I have written about: anxiety.

Garfield is one of the many performers I have read about (Barbra Streisand, among them) whose stage-fright has often prevented their going on stage.  The fear of being seen and watched and judged has affected me, not on the stage but in more ordinary circumstances I won't go into.

What's interesting is how Garfield, on the verge of suicide while preparing for a Shakespeare performance in London a few years ago, felt hopeless. "I feel like I'm going to die, " he said.  He had never before felt such terror or absolute dread at the idea of revealing himself.

People who hate to give public speeches can understand this common phobia.

To calm himself, he took at walk and encountered a street singer with a mediocre voice singing Don MacLean's "Vincent." Garfield remembers the imperfection of the performance:  "If that guy had thought he had nothing to offer and told himself he was not ready to perform in public, I would not have been given what I needed."

He needed a bit of outside inspiration, and it came from that song, which he considers a gift from God, just as his despair came as a moment of grace, a sign that he had to suffer before seeing that his depression was a kind of prayer, a cry for help.

Garfield then began to cry, feeling that God was telling him, "You think if you go on stage, you're going to die. But actually if you don't, you're doing to die."  And so he went on to this and other performances, always aware of the tension between the deep fear of being seen and the deep need of this.

As several self-help books tell us, feel the fear and carry on anyway.  Maybe your inner self will experience a moment of grace, as Garfield did,
when your inner self moves you from despair to participation in life.

A writer who has analyzed (in his book "Monkey Mind") his own acute anxiety is Daniel Smith, who reminds us of the universality of fear, an essential emotion essential for a full experience of life. Acute anxiety and terror are also common and can, he says, be dealt with despite their daily horrors and discomforts (by exercise, meditation, counseling, medication perhaps).

Before such anxiety leads to despair, he says, we must fight it. Keeping up the daily fight, I would add, is a holy struggle. It can be a form of prayer, a reaching out to the God outside us.  

Being violated

A week ago, at 5:30 in the morning, I was awakened by sounds from the kitchen. Surely the fridge, I thought, making ice. No, I realized, the sounds were something else, but somehow I did not get alarmed in the panicky sense.

I looked out the open door of the bedroom and there, down the hall, in our living room, was a burglar with a flashlight, opening drawers. The sight will be burned forever in my memory: a kid of 19, I later learned, who lives not far away, looking for drug money who was able to climb in through a kitchen window.

How I got to the phone I don't remember since the scene was like something from a movie, but, having called 911, the police were soon there, with dogs and helicopter and four cars with flashing lights. By then, my wife was awake and incredulous. They caught the guy within minutes nearby and retrieved what he had stolen from us (our car keys, jewelry, purse).

Having lived in this house, in this quiet neighborhood, for many years, having never been the victim of a crime, I was stunned that this invasion of my sanctuary could occur. I now find it hard to relax at night and often have trouble sleeping, even though more locks have been added, even though I know this is not likely to happen again.

But logic has little effect on primal fear. I now know what women feel around predatory men, or maybe even after a sexual assault: the feeling of being violated. My house, after all, is an extension of me.  The fact that our valuables were returned and no one was hurt does not alter the emotional impact of what occurred.

The fact that I handled the situation calmly cannot erase the memory of what happened. The space I had long counted on as safely ours has been altered. The world is not safe, not even where I live.

The reactions of friends has been interesting; most men hearing my story have tended to talk about what electronic protection I need; most women are horrified since they tune in at once to the trauma of being invaded.  One suggested I write a story about it, but, for now, writing this post and talking about it is enough.

The challenge of change

Living with major changes is never easy, and the older I get, the more of a challenge it is to have established practices upset or schedules altered.

The past month, along with the world in upheaval now that Trump is trying to run the White House, has seen the shocking death of a friend, 55, who hid her terminal cancer from everyone.  She emailed us in early January and by the end of the month was gone. We had relied on her for advice, legal and otherwise.

Soon thereafter, our long-time family physician announced his retirement, effective almost at once. More turmoil. The YMCA near me, where I have been exercising and meeting friends, is being torn down and replaced, in two years, by something grandiose, taking away from hundreds of locals a familiar "second home."   How can I adjust to all this change?

One constant in this cycle of turmoil and change are the daily email meditations from Richard Rohr, the recent ones reminding me of the importance of contemplation.  After years of reading and practicing this, it is still a challenge, but the advice of Rohr, along with that of Thomas Merton, Thomas Keating and other spiritual masters, helps me understand the importance of gazing at something I like, paying such rapt attention to the reality of the present that I can stop analyzing and judging; I can stop thinking.

To take in an entire scene or object (a tree, for example), whether attractive or not, without labeling it good or bad, is a pure and positive act that stops time, as it were, for fifteen minutes or so as I breathe deeply and relax my body as well as my mind.

For me, this silent period of calm contemplation is prayerful, but it doesn't ask for anything or require established beliefs. It implies gratitude for the chance to step back from our thinking selves and just look at what is real in front of us, but the free flow of consciousness need not include intentional gratitude.

If I don't take time to do this--and it is not as easy as it sounds--I will be jerked around by distracting information, noise, fears and worries, caught up in the turbulence of the world around me, ready to shout, "Stop, world!  I want to get off!"

As for the political madness and mayhem, my other remedy is to turn to satire (Andy Borowitz and others) and comedy to gain some detachment from the anger I tend to feel, as I remind myself of the growing resistance movements that are afoot.  The world, then, begins to look less bleak.

The end is near

Finally, after an uncommonly nasty and embarrassing election campaign, the day for voting has come here in the U.S.  Nearly everyone I know will be relieved to have it over.

What surfaced was summed up in a comment by Pope Francis over the weekend, in a veiled reference to the U.S. election:  Do not give in to the politics of fear, he said, by building walls but instead work to build bridges.

"Fear numbs us to the suffering of others. It makes us cruel."

The anger felt by many during this long, long election cycle has been fueled by the age-old fear of change (immigrants, e.g.).  I hope that fear can be replaced, more and more, by trust as the candidate of continuity (Clinton) does her best to be a builder of bridges. It is a daunting task. I pray she is up to it.

Toxic Trump

The recent "debate" in St. Louis between Clinton and Trump was, because of Trump's behavior, more like a brawl, one that I was unable to watch to the end. It was embarrassing.

That up to 40 percent of Americans might support a man clearly unbalanced by narcissism, sexism, racism, and lies as well as ignorance is alarming.  Soon it will be over.

A valuable perspective on his "locker room talk" came today in the New York Times in a piece by Jared Yates Sexton. It touches on a topic, masculinity, that has long preoccupied me both in my fiction and earlier in my teaching.

Sexton's point is that the so-called locker room talk that demeans women is a manifestation of the fear many men feel: fear of inadequacy, rejection, and (I should add) of women as controlling.  Although most men outgrow these fears, many, like Trump,the Highchair Child (as Maureen Dowd called him), never do.

Many men, with limited knowledge of the world, facing complex foreign and economic issues, take refuge in a compulsive or toxic masculinity of tough-guy domination because social forces threaten their belief that they alone control their fate.  They feel overwhelmed by the political reality and so react negatively.

The author goes on to point out that such compulsive masculinity and its posturing causes men to suffer more than they realize. I am reminded of the fine book by Frank Pittman, Man Enough (based on his years of treating wounded men who fear that they are never quite masculine enough).

This approach certainly does not excuse the vile behavior of someone like Trump but it helps us understand how troubled men like him really are, how insecure and frightened. And where there is fear, there is often anger. And hatred. And violence.

Seeing this enacted on the national stage instead of a discussion of issues that concern the world is horrifying.  Soon the election will be over. But Trump will no doubt continue to rant and rave. If only people would stop listening to him and giving him the attention he craves.

The paradox of hate

In a recent internet article, Charles Mudede asks an important question: Why do so many white Americans, mainly working class, support the billionaire Donald Trump?  What do they get out of it?

His answer, also important, is that doing so gives these people a platform in which to openly enjoy their hate.  He goes on to Spinoza for philosophical answers to the idea of hatred as the feeling you have toward a person who makes you unhappy, that is, who diminishes your power to act.
Hate is more than this, I think: it arises from the emotional life, from fear--often leading to anger--that others are a threat because they are outsiders or because they have something the hater wants.  Hate energizes, giving powerless people a reason to live. We see this in studies of white supremacists, people at the bottom of the social order in terms of education and income who feel powerless; hatred of those in government or of minorities or immigrants or gays or whoever gives them a target for their deep-seated resentment and a source of pleasure, of superiority, as if they can overcome their fear of change and injustice by racial hatred.

I remember a retired neighbor ten years ago whose hatred of Bill Clinton still raged years after his presidency. Clinton was a convenient target for resentment. By hating him, my neighbor felt stronger, more in control of his own life.  Many single out Jews for hatred because of their successes in business and many other fields, suggesting that envy is at work.  Envy comes from the Latin invidia: a form of hatred slightly different from jealousy, which I see as a fear of losing what one loves (see Othello, whose enemy, Iago, is a figure of pure envy in Shakespeare's play).

Many people, lacking a sense of history, sense that the world is such a total mess that only someone outside politics (Trump) can possible save what's left of the system they grew up with (white-dominated society). They fear losing control of their lives because of "big government" and "crooked politicians."

They fail to see, as Mudede  points out, that in turning to the Republican party, they turn to a colossal failure, whose leaders have refused to provide working-class whites a real opportunity to enjoy their hate. 

A man I met today who supports Trump says he does so because Trump is non-political, self-financed. Is that all, I wondered. Doesn't he see the dangerous race-baiting and mob violence (seen today in St. Louis) that attends Trump's rallies?  Of course not. He doesn't want to admit his own hatred (racism).

Why aren't more thinking people angry at Donald Trump and what he preaches? Because they are not thinking, but reacting emotionally, based on fear; and because they want to enjoy whatever superior pleasure they derive from hating.  Very sad, very troubling.

You are the music

The longer I live, the more I realize how indispensable music is in my life. I can't imagine a day without at least thirty minutes of something classical or popular, whether on Youtube or the radio or the CD player in the car or the usually enjoyable TV station, Classic Arts Showcase (produced free of charge and free of commercials!).

Music can take me out of myself, help me become centered in the present, detached from the usual anxieties and realities. This week it was a bit of Dixieland jazz, songs of Lerner and Lowe, Puccini in the brilliant tenor voice of Jonas Kaufmann, Gilbert and Sullivan with their comic rhymes, Chopin's nocturnes, and so much more.

The effect of music on the brain was rarely so well expressed as by a noted scientist and gifted writer who just died: Oliver Sacks.

This week, in reading about Sacks I found (thanks to Maria Popova's "Brain Pickings") excerpts from his 1984 memoir, A Leg to Stand On. There Sacks describes in often lyrical detail how he was terrified on a mountain in Norway in 1974, threatened by a bull and an injured leg, feeling totally alone and abandoned, facing death.

What came to his aid?  Rhythm, melody, music: he began to chant over and over as he hobbled along in the middle of nowhere until "the musical beat was generated within me, and all my muscles responded deliberately." 

After chanting the song for some time, he began to feel, deep within, that he had no room for fear because he was filled with music, including the "silent music of the body."  Sacks quotes T. S. Eliot: "you are the music, while the music lasts." And he becomes a creature of motion, muscle and music, all inseparable and in union with one another.

The result: a feeling of gratitude, what I would call a prayerful experience.  As in his later book, Musicophilia, Sacks reflects on how amazing it was that a remembered melody should have such a profound effect on him, that music would be so passionately alive for him, conveying to him "a sweet feeling of life. .  .As if the animating and creative principle of the whole world was revealed, that life itself was music, or consubstantial with music, that our living moving flesh, itself, was 'solid' music. . .  ."

Facing his own death in recent years, Sacks kept writing up to the very end, brim full of life.  Now I am inspired to want to read more by this brilliant writer who found what many others have felt but seldom expressed: the power of music at the cellular level, something that is part of our being and that connects us to the cosmos.

Fear: Is there a Cure?

Whenever I see a book with fear in its title or subtitle, I go for it, often skimming, as with the many self-help books out there, such as Dr. Lissa Rankin's The Fear Cure, a new book I found at Barnes and Noble.

Why this preoccupation with fear on my part?  Because it has been such a persistent part of my life and because they more I examine the lives of others, past and present, the more I see fear as the underlying motive in jealousy, greed, power, racism, and hatred, to mention the most obvious obstacles to happiness.  And because the boy I tutor has been, for various reasons, frozen by fear--of failure, of criticism--so that he needs a daily reminder that he can do various things--exercise, meditate, simply breathe deeply--to help reduce the panic and terror that seize him.

Hence my attraction to Dr. Rankin's book, the work of a physician, not a psychologist, who has seen the effects of fear on her patients and has come up with a formula that suggests a cure for the negative, crippling kinds of intense fear that damages us.

Rather than be at the mercy of fear, she says, let courage take the lead in your life. This is easier said than done.   To replace fear with trust is a goal of much of my prayer life, and it must take place every day.  Still, I have some doubts if this book, or any book, can offer a sure-fire cure.

Yet Rankin offers some valuable spiritual advice, worth sharing with my student.

The first thing, she says, is to see that there is something bigger than me: I am not alone guiding the course of my life.  If I trust only myself, and cut myself off from God (as I will call the higher power), I will invariably be trapped by fears and worries.

Learning to trust the inner light within each of us seems to be the heart of Rankin's formula: Whether we call it the soul or the hand of God, this light has the power to transform everything that can pull us down into healing, as fears gradually lessen and we learn to trust the space between fearful thoughts.

In this way, peace can take the place of fear. Many other secular writers, of course, have said similar things, and many of the spiritual masters in the Christian tradition whom I have read over the years remind us how essential some form of contemplation and prayer are to developing whatever inner peace we can find in the presence of God.

So I am glad to see Dr. Rankin returning to a basic form of an ancient wisdom tradition. I hope her book helps many people.

Why Boredom is Interesting

Boredom, it seems, is good for us: it can allow us more for altruism; and the daydreaming associated with much boredom can be a source of creativity. And yet....if we have too much time on our hands, with time to be bored, maybe we have gone off course in our lives.

So reports Kate Greene in Aeon magazine, summing up what some scientists claim. 

The more commonly heard view is that boredom is negative and leads to such things as overeating, drug abuse, poor work performance, and accidents.

I have often associated boredom with an emotional state, akin to depression, a fear of running out of interesting things to do. It is impossible to imagine people never being bored. Is there such a thing as a teenager or other student who isn't bored some time?

However we define it, boredom is interesting. There are at least two types, maybe more. Situational boredom occurs when a task or environment fails to hold our interest, like staring at a computer screen all day. Existential boredom is much broader: life itself is seen as lacking purpose and meaning.

What is interesting is why we become bored, especially when we are engaged in seemingly exciting activities. The paradox of boredom, Greene says, is that it occurs often among astronauts, explorers, sailors, firefighters, and soldiers. Here, boredom can be a real danger.

In every field, it seems, some downtime is inevitable; we must take the dull along with the exciting.  What about fear? Greene does not mention it in her article. Isn't the fear of not being fully engaged with people or ideas or activities at the root of much boredom?

Fear, trust, and happiness

I am something of a sucker for new books dealing with happiness and inner peace, especially when they present the findings of neuroscientists about how the brain works.

And so I had to bring home from the library "Hardwiring Happiness" by Rick Hanson, who says that we must learn to take in the good things around us because we are hardwired to recall what is dangerous: evolution apparently turned the brain into "Velcro for the negative but Teflon for the positive."  So it is easier to mull and review past and present hurt feelings while letting positive, even joyful, experiences pass us by.

Hanson presumably shows (I have only skimmed the opening so far) that we can change the brain itself by positive thinking: sound familiar?

Another book I glanced at is "The Truth about Trust" by David DeSteno, another psychologist headed for the best-seller list. He focuses on a topic little studied: the fact that a great deal of our mental energies are expended in determining who and what to trust. The mind, he says, is constantly trying to figure out how reliable other people are as well as the need to be trustworthy. Much of this is unconscious, such as the daily encounter with uncertainty and risk-taking, so essential to any creative process.

DeSteno does not seem to emphasize fear, yet the way trust relates to our relationship with ourselves brings up the topic of anxiety, in particular a revealing article in The New Yorker by Louis Menand: "The Prisoner of Stress" (What does anxiety mean?).  The article is essentially a review of the book by Scott Stossel, My Age of Anxiety, which I read and commented on earlier.

Menand's take on the complexities of crippling fear is that it is an illness without a cure, not a problem to solve despite the years and years of time and money Stossel and people like him have spent on various psychological approaches and medications.  Why some people seem to be fearless and others panic remains a mystery.

Are people who can speak easily in public born lucky?  Consider the comforting (to anxious people like me) reality of those celebrities who have been tormented by social anxiety, from Charles Darwin to Laurence Olivier and Hugh Grant; the latter two, like Barbra Streisand, seem to have experienced stage fright after they became stars, that is, when they were aware of being judged by a critical public whose image of them was different from the very human reality.

The more talented and creative we are, the more anxious?  Perhaps.  We can imagine the worst with a vivid intensity that paralyzes us.

Basketball legend Bill Russell of the Boston Celtics vomited before every game. So, apparently, did the brilliant and handsome operatic tenor Franco Corelli.  One might think these accomplished, brilliant performers would have nothing to fear, but reason and fear have little to do with each other.

However beneficial anxiety may be, like primal fear as a means of self-protection, it can wreak havoc on the mind and body, as Stossel indicates. How it works remains unclear.

Many things can help, but we are left in the end to deal with the mystery of the mind and of the panic button in the brain that registers alarm, requiring us, day by day, to counteract this as best we can with memories and experiences of beauty, love, and happiness.

And so the struggle with the mystery of who we are goes on.

When fear is good

Maria Popova's valuable blog recently cited several interesting books by visual artists that deal with facing fear--what in my field is called writer's block.

One of them, Steven Pressfield, says, "Fear is good...it tells us what we have to do."  The more scared we are of a work or calling, he says, the more sure we can be that we have to do it.  Shaun McNiff in Trust the Process cites Monet as saying that people should not fear mistakes but welcome them because they can be harbingers of new ideas: a mistake may represent something we never saw before.

So fear and creativity go hand in hand, it seems.  The horror of the blank page can also be a stimulant; the initial fears we have in beginning a story or painting seem directly related to the joy we experience, or at least the satisfaction, when the work is completed.

As an anxious person, I have often thought that, if I had been a laid-back guy, I would have not only written less and achieved less but explored fewer spiritual paths.  Would I have taken an interest in silence, meditation, mindfulness and prayer?

When I look at people outside the fields of art and spirituality, I see fear as the driving force in much human achievement, in the intense work that produces success in the world of business, science, academia, etc.  Would there be much comedy without anxiety?

So far all of its negative aspects, fear, even anxiety, can lead to great things; but, of course, it must be balanced with trust.

The power of fear

Fear is so pervasive that it is often not discussed.  Many writers, it seems to me, fail to address its insidious power, which can so quickly lead to anger and hatred and even violence. I am always on the lookout for writers who use fear as a motivating force in fiction or as a theme in non-fiction.

Having lived with a heavy dose of fear for most of my life, I know, too, that it can have it positive side, making us more sensitive and empathic to others who are worried, anxious, nervous--and who isn't?

The heart without fear would be less tender, writes Edna O'Brien. And anxiety can stir the imagination like little else. I have a summary of a comment she made some years ago in a journal I keep.

In general, O'Brien says that fear is a dreadful drawback in our lives because it stops us from living in the moment; it forces us to focus on an imagined future horror.  Fear happens, she says, when we don't really meet one another: one part of us meets a part of another person, but somehow we make it difficult to be our real selves with other people and so we become false, diminished, or somehow artificial.

Another perspective is from Ernesto Cardinal: The universe is expanding, but we often are not; our souls or selves are contracting. Thomas Aquinas said that where there is fear, contraction takes over. "To allow fear to take over our ways of living or our hearts or our institutions is to avoid a cosmic law: the need to expand through love and courage."

The contrast between institutional fear and a love that has no limits is captured today in the critical stance of some on the extreme right in the Catholic Church toward Pope Francis, who does not seem to fear meeting people as his real self.  He confronts others with the open, human face of pastoral love and compassion; yet his "liberal" openness is seen as a threat to some of the hardliners, making them fearful of meaningful change. They want the old institutional rigidity to remain since change is dangerous.

A final perspective on fear is from Nelson Mandela's 1994 inaugural speech: "Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that
most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be so brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be?"  He goes on to say that each of us is shining with the glory of God, so we must let our light be seen.

If we do so, if we are liberated from our fears, we give others permission to do the same. And the world becomes a better place. (It sounds so simple--yet what is harder to achieve?)

Our instinctive fears serve a purpose and must be wisely monitored: when they become too extreme, we can be crippled; when they are turned into trust and love, they can help us do amazing things for the world.

Fear and the Zimmerman case

The topic missing from most of the discussions I have heard of the Trayvon Martin-George Zimmerman trial has been basic fear.

It was captured eloquently yesterday in President Obama's personal remarks about how he sees his younger self in Trayvon Martin. And in an important article I read yesterday and will return to.

What prompted Zimmerman to shoot the 17-year-old boy? Fear, the age-old fear of the outsider, which in America has historically meant the black man in a white world. In saying this, I realize I risk simplifying a complicated legal case. But it seems important to look at the bigger picture.

Fear, which protects us, leading to the instinct to flee, can also lead us to fight because this primal feeling can provoke anger and hatred in a matter of seconds, as any study of racism or homophobia reveals.  Fear prompts Florida to allow the Stand Your Ground law on the books; it prompts white supremacy groups and other extremists to fight against sensible gun laws or immigration reform.

The antidote to fear is love, as Patrick Fleming eloquently says in an article in the current issue of America. (Note: I read the article before realizing that the author, a St. Louis-area psychotherapist and author, is a cousin of mine.)

Fleming does not discuss the Zimmerman case but the mass shootings in Boston and elsewhere which cause what he calls spiritual trauma. These events, he says, inflict "psychological wounds but spiritual injury and trauma as well." Referring to his own anxiety, heightened by the Newton massacre, he writes: "Fear becomes a soul sickness when it becomes our basic stance in and against life."

This is the kind of systemic fear that sees danger everywhere, that tells us to trust no one, change no gun laws, and build a fortress whereas, he says, the soul tells us to trust.

In a passage that seems inspired in part by Thomas Merton, Fleming writes that at the deep part of us that we call soul, at the core of our being, "there is a wellspring of energy, hope and purpose."  The soul can provide us, he goes on, with the spiritual vision to see with the light of love, which is always present, even when we feel threatened or fearful. 

Ordinary moments of "soul resilience," the result of reaching out to others in love, happen every day, often without our realizing it: they are "much more common than moments of trauma, darkness and evil.  They are so common that we fail to see them." He refers to simple gestures of aid we give the elderly or disabled, the encouraging remarks we give to nervous students. We need to be reminded of the fact that we are surrounded by little acts of love.

In this short article, Patrick Fleming has captured the spiritual dimension of human psychology.  By focusing so clearly on the basic elements of fear and love, and relating them, he provides me, and I hope others, with ideal reading this weekend, as many Americans ask why the Trayvon case continues to gnaw at our collective psyche.

Guns in America

I doubt if I can say much that is startling about the current gun control debate or the American love affair with guns--except for this chilling fact: there are reportedly 300 million guns in the U.S., about enough for every man, woman, and child.

Do we feel safe yet?

The obsession with guns and the paranoia of the NRA (National Rifle Association) in recent years is a bit of a mystery to me, having grown up in an apparently innocent time, the 1950s, when guns were only part of my fantasy world.

I played with guns, imagining myself to be a cowboy, like the ones I saw in movies and later on TV, but I knew no one who actually owned (or admitted owning) a gun. No one in my family was a hunter.  When I got to high school, there was, among all the various student groups, a Rifle Club, but I paid no more attention to that than to my cousin's BB gun.

I lived in a Midwestern city, St. Louis, with plenty of crime, but I have no memories of seeing actual guns, except occasionally on the holster of certain police officers.  No one I knew talked about, collected, or used guns.
Was I being cheated of true masculinity?

In any case, the gun-soaked culture of violence of recent decades, stoked by increasingly violent movies TV programs, and video games, continues to alarm and surprise me. This is especially true of the sale of military weapons, which have nothing to do with the legitimate right of self-protection or hunting, both of which are covered by the Second Amendment.

What bothers me most is the fear that grips people, terrified of what they imagine to be a federal takeover of their right to do as they please, whose fear turns into hatred. So last week we found the right wingers calling Obama a fascist, tyrant, king, and worse because he proposed some sensible, legal guidelines on guns.

Even after the horror of Newton, Conn., where 20 kids were killed last month, millions of men and some women in this country still resist any common-sense effort to curb the availability of handguns and assault weapons, which all too often are bought and used by those least capable of responsible action. They are terrified of change and a supposed loss of freedom, as if the president were intending to confiscate their gun collections.

It seems to me that the extremism of the NRA and the Tea Party anti-Obama folks will backfire (no pun intended): their madness will be seen for what it is by the majority, and background checks will be mandated, even if the cannot be universally enforced.  Common sense will prevail.

Clearly, something must be done by the federal government--and in a calm, civil manner that overcomes extreme fear with a concern for the common good: the safety of children in their schools, of workers in their offices, of any of us in public places.  And a realization that we have long had more than enough guns for our own protection and sport.

Common Sense about Fear

The opening chapter of Pema Chodron's book When Things Fall Apart is very valuable as a clear-eyed, very human look at fear.

"Fear is a natural reaction to moving closer to the truth." Chodron, the American Buddhist nun, says that any spiritual journey through unknown lands, such as sitting for hours in silent meditation, will naturally evoke fear.

The present moment, so important in Buddhist practice, is "a pretty vulnerable place," she writes. To be alone in silence, without a reference point, is to experience groundlessness. And so anyone who attempts such meditation needs to be cautious and able to tap into the courage of someone like Chodron.

When you encounter fear, she says, consider yourself lucky; it gives you a chance to push through a basic human emotion and act anyway.

As one who has experienced many fears, and been restricted by some of them, I welcome this chapter, "Intimacy with Fear," as well as any advice by those who have been there and are not reluctant to talk about their experience with fear.

I value the courage of spiritual seekers in any tradition who take great emotional risks on their journeys.