Hello Family,
I hope these moments between Pastor Katie’s Courageous Faith sermon series and the start of the Advent season are granting you the space and grace to hold yourself and your fear with gentle hands. I hope this series has worked you over in ways you didn’t know you needed, and that the message of our resurrection faith’s deep hope surrounds you as you move from one season into the next.
Delving into our fears is a worthwhile venture. It is also a heavy one. It is a tough word to deliver – a word of hope amongst fear, a call to courage not as a magical elixir to wash away the pain and paralysis of some major fears, but instead as a practice of faith. Fear of being alone, of a meaningless life, of the world, of not having enough, of loss – these fears can lead us to some hidden corners of ourselves we would really rather ignore.
But —
Ignoring something doesn’t mean it’s not there. Moreover, if we keep on ignoring it, we might not hear the “good news” about our fear, specifically our fear of loss. As Pastor Katie said this week:
“If you fear loss, it means you are a wonderful human being. It means you want to connect and love the world and creation. You fear losing something because you love something. And that’s a wonderful thing. The fear of loss actually teaches us that deep within us, there is care and love. Love is at the core of our being. And even when we act in unhealthy or even harmful ways out of fear of loss, it means we are trying in some way to figure out how to love.”
So what, then, is our task? In Pastor Katie’s words, it is not “to solve anything or to fix the pain of loss. That’s not our task and it’s not our task with fear. And it’s not even what Jesus wants us to do — we are not to fix the pain. We are to move through loss, by grieving. We can only love and connect better if we mourn our losses. So this is not a faith that fixes pain, it is a faith that holds us through it. My prayer for us is that in the places of our fear of loss… may we go even deeper beneath the fear — beneath the love — to the hope that comes from our resurrection faith: That all is not lost, nor will it be.”
I can’t even put a number to how many years I’ve spent believing all was lost, or worse yet, that I was, or the world was, or both were – lost causes. We all make choices to survive the blows life dishes out to us sometimes. One of the choices I made at some point was to commit myself to the idea that “this is it” as I gestured at a life that made me miserable and to a world that would rather see a queer, trans, disabled, fat person underground than to see them in love with themselves and the world, basking in the joy of the seeming coincidence of being alive.
Now that is not to say the hits I’ve taken were simply a figment of my imagination, or that the multi-billion dollar industries committed to shrinking and obliterating my body are somehow unreal or “don’t matter.” It’s all very, very real, and it all matters. Our fears are real in that they exist. They are valid in that all feelings are valid. Our responses might not always match the facts, and our actions might not always be justified, but our experiences of fear are not just make-believe. They are lived, embodied experiences.
It is instead to say: these blows dished out by the world, these hits we take, the ways in which we stand in our own way, the ways we contribute to our own suffering, the petrification of our chutzpah – none of that is the end of our story. We are not just a dumpster full of lost causes and false starts and coulda-woulda-shouldas.
We are all just figuring it out. And thankfully, in Jesus we are shown that we don’t need to have it all figured out, or somehow be some fully actualized, 125% perfectly well adjusted, A+ extra credit people in order to receive grace, peace, love, and mercy, let alone in order to cultivate a practice of courageous faith amidst an interior and exterior world of fear. As we are soon to find out after a season of waiting — God comes to us as one of us in an act of pure love, bringing a message of hope, in a vulnerable, soft, unknowing body of an infant. Though, maybe that’s getting ahead of myself.
One of my favorite lines about fear comes from a poem by Audre Lorde called “A Litany for Survival.” It goes like this:
“and when we speak we are afraid
our words will not be heard
nor welcomed
but when we are silent
we are still afraid
so it is better to speak
remembering
we were never meant to survive.”
And yes, I do believe our survival is miraculous, and that we must not undervalue that survival. But I think what Audre Lorde is talking about here is a self-preservation that limits us, at least that is how the poem speaks to me, as someone who has bitten their tongue one too many times when faced with opportunities to give and receive love, support, and feedback. We all bring our own contexts to every text we encounter.
What’s your context? What words about fear do you find yourself returning to? I’d love to know.
Blessings on the rest of your week,
Taylor
