When I was young, I was afraid of everything. My family went on a trip to Universal Studios once, and what I remember most distinctly was shaking and crying in fear during the ride in the tram around the studio lot. To my (minimal) credit, there was a big King Kong and a dinosaur from Jurassic Park, but I must have been seven or eight years old already to remember it as well as I do, and I was truly petrified, like head down in my mom's lap sobbing scared, which I'm sure made the trip delightful for the other tour goers.
Looking back, I see this fear in so many places over the course of my life. I get ballooning air in my stomach and a tensing in my shoulders when I think about all types of scary things—heights, travel, really any new experiences (oh the torturous terror of the first days of summer camp and school in the fall and, yikes, college). At a certain point I began to recognize my fear as such, which is to say that I began to recognize I was afraid rather than just stay quaking in my own skin. That was an important first step. My orientation then became to accept the initial fear and push through it. I may have spent the first few weeks of college essentially hiding in my dorm room, but I did so with the knowledge that time would ease this social fear that felt so far beyond my control. And so it did, and I made friends in that dorm who are still among my closest nearly twenty years later (shoutout Carmen 10!).
I spent my twenties doing many things that scared me. I traveled through Europe my junior year, went skydiving my senior year, moved to a farm after graduating, moved to New Orleans without a job, left to write a travel blog, spent years on a farm in rural California. Part of the thrill in doing things I found so terrifying—even when I recognized that others would not be afraid, or might be less afraid in similar circumstances, and so the fear carried a touch of shame with it—was in experiencing the fear and pushing through it.
Awareness of the fear led me to devote a lot of time thinking about it, and I developed a theory of fear and love. That they were like intertwined, sensuous snakes in the heart of the heart of being. The early origin of this theory occurred to me in the basement of my parents’ house one late night I was visiting and couldn’t sleep when I was twenty-two or twenty-three. The movie Love Actually was on TBS, and as I watched, it hit me that to truly love someone or something was to fear its loss. That is, love gained its immense power by virtue of the undercurrent of fear beneath it. And so what if a kind of inverse was also true? That to fear someone or something was to hold, often imperceptibly, a deep well of love beneath the fear.
Consider that the most terrifying thing to imagine may be the utter negation of love. My theory would suggest that the more powerful and sweeping the current of love dammed beneath the fear, the worse the fear. This gave me a deep sense of optimism in humanity when I believed the most intense fear most people felt was that they wouldn’t be loved—such fear became a testament to people’s amazing capacity to love.
I still hold this understanding to some degree, but my recent transitions into being a husband and father have come with a whole new experience of fear—fear not for myself, but for my partner and my daughter. No doubt, this fear is so immense because of my deep love, and so the intertwining of fear and love is still true, and it’s also true that I have felt fear for others in the past and still feel fear for other loved ones now. And yet, given the commitments I’ve chosen to make to these two individuals, and in particular given the utter helplessness of my newborn child (though she can already almost hold up her own head!), the tenor of this fear feels different. I feel more responsibility to protect them, and so the fear is so much more intense. It can easily overwhelm. It already has on some days. Relying exclusively on my love for them to quell the fear doesn’t feel sufficient; I can’t simply “push through” when it comes to their lives, their being.
And so I’m coming to my point: while love is a suitable balm for the fears I feel for myself, when it comes to the fears I feel for others, love is necessary but not sufficient. I’ve found that I also need faith.
What do I mean by faith? To regular readers of this newsletter, I’m guessing it won’t be a surprise to learn that what I have faith in is what I’ve called the Oneness of all existence, which I interpret to be essentially the same as the Tao. This is to say that faith is not about expecting good outcomes, or wishing and praying that all will turn out well. Rather, faith is a cultivated sense that there is meaning beyond our immediate—and even ultimate—comprehension of anything and everything that happens in our lives and lifetimes. This was Abraham Joshua Heschel’s contention about God being the “meaning beyond absurdity” and is implicit in Edmund Jabes’s idea that “God” is the “rebel name of the abyss.” This is a faith not in ultimate goodness, but in ultimate continuance.
My faith is that the Tao or the Oneness is unending (or at least that its end is beyond my or anyone’s ability to comprehend), and in its unending-ness, transformations will occur.
Future posts
I’ve been thinking about the project of this newsletter lately, what I want to put forward in it. I think I want to offer an alternate understanding of religion from the way religion has been understood generally for the last few thousand years—as something rigid and hierarchical. In her beautiful (and personally relevant at this moment) novel “Gilead,” Marilynne Robinson writes in the voice of her narrator the Reverend John Ames,
“…people of any degree of religious sensitivity are always vulnerable to the accusation that their consciousness or their understanding does not attain to the highest standards of their faith, because that is always true of everyone.”
The notion that often feels so implicit to religion, that it requires a person to feel insufficient—and therefore in need of rigidity and hierarchy—is one I want to attempt to dispel. Or to put it as one of my oldest friends once told me, “I love religion, I’m just not religious about it.”
Over the next few posts, I’m planning to go into some of these ideas in greater detail. A post On Religion will be next, followed by one On Texts, and a third (and likely final for this series) On Myth. I’m writing these to clarify this project as much for myself as for you wonderful readers who come along for the ride.
I’ll end this somewhat rambling post with a return to fear and the great wisdom of Rebbe Nachman of Breslov, which feels like a nice thought to let linger for a while, even if you’ve heard it before. “Life is a narrow bridge,” Reb Nachman said, “and the most essential thing is not to fear.”
What a wonder and delight it is how much change and transformation happens on that narrow bridge.
Thank you for this thought-provoking and profound reflection. Are you familiar w the conversation about the wording of Reb Nachman’s teaching? I wonder how you understand it in this context.