NO GOOD REASON TO FEAR

 In the midst of the Great Depression, which ended before many of us were born or were too young to remember, when many people wondered if things would ever get better, President Franklin Roosevelt reminded the nation that there was nothing to fear but fear itself. Nineteen hundred years before that Jesus reminded his listeners that they had no reason to fear those who could kill the body. Rather, Jesus said and Roosevelt hinted, we need only fear those who can kill the soul.

We need to be reminded of such these days, it seems to me. We are being told either directly or indirectly that we need to live in fear: fear of terrorists, fear of immigrants (the illegal kind), fear of inflation, fear that our safe little world is no longer safe, fear that “they” (whoever “they are) are taking over or planning to take over our country; fear, fear, fear. To further inflate this fear we are pummeled with bad news, so much bad news that one is led to believe that there is no good news anywhere.

But we know, we know, we know differently. Let me emphasize that: WE KNOW DIFFERENTLY. We know there is more good news than bad news because we know there are more good things going on in our lives than bad no matter how bad the bad is at the moment. Every minute of every hour of every day more good things happen than bad. We know that to be a fact without having to prove it scientifically. For if the bad so outweighed the good, we would not be here to even reflect about it.

None of this is to downplay the evil in this world or that we should not fear those who would do us harm. It is to say that much harm is being done already, harm where it really matters, harm to our soul: the soul of our country, the soul of our church, the soul of our being. It is being done by those who want us to be afraid, who count on our being afraid of whatever fear it is they can instill in us.

I am not afraid of the terrorists of whatever ilk they may be. They cannot take away my soul because I will not allow them to do that. They cannot take away the soul of this country or the soul of our church. Oh, they can, as Roosevelt opined, if we allow them to do so. If we allow the prophets of doom and gloom, if we allow the fear mongers to have their way with us, we will indeed lose our very soul.

We won’t. That is the good news. They can’t. That is even better news. The reason they won’t is that we will not allow them. They cannot because we have one another and we have our love for our country and love for our church and love for one another. As Jesus reminds us in John’s Gospel, perfect love casts out fear. We are not there, of course. We do not love perfectly. But we do not not love. As imperfect as our love is, it is enough to waylay fear.

We cannot avoid the bad news nor should we. To believe nothing is bad or everything is bad is to live in a fantasy world. Our role is to overcome evil not with other forms of evil but with good. At the same time while we cannot escape the fear mongers, we can refuse to allow them to capture our soul. So we must.