“The angel of the Lord stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them. They were terrified. But the angel said to them: “Fear not!…I bring you good news and it shall be a great joy to all peoples…To you this day is born…a saviour.” (Luke 2).
Before a perceived danger, it is natural to feel fear for one’s personal safety and well-being. Fear alerts us, readies us for defence. Fear, however, like all things, can possess us. We can allow it to possess us. In this, fear turns inward upon itself. It becomes not a sentinel of danger, merely fear itself, a fearing of no-thing actual. It is fear unleashed from its protective moorings, scanning the abyss of sheer potentialities. It is here, in this inwardness, that fear reveals its roots. The soul, in its depths, “knows”[i] the boundlessness of being, the cosmic scale of possibilities, and as well, its individuated limitedness, its finitude, its mortality. Man may with trust, with a grounding self-confidence, plot in fortitude, prudence, and hope to extend himself in every direction, but never can he do so without end. Ultimately then, every fear encapsulates that one primal fear—death. The Hebrew scriptures say no man may look upon God and live. They say also the “fear” of God is the beginning of wisdom. It is sin which eyes God as a threat, that denies the trustworthiness[ii] of God, that refuses to see in him the care and love of either father or saviour. It is sin that would defend itself before God, seek to defeat, to neutralize God. But the wise man fears God not as a threat but as the unsurpassable power that defines his and every other fleeting moment. Wisdom knows the sheer power of the Font of all being is so beyond comprehension, so, before the mind and heart of man, tremendous in majesty that man must draw back in awe, quiver in astonishment. Wisdom knows words—those definiens of communicability, internal and external—fail. Here man arms himself not. He kneels. He worships. The biblical notion of the fear of God, of the immortal One, is the obverse of the fear of death for fear here bows to the infinite, accepts finitude as gift, and trusts in the giver. It humbly appreciates infinity’s dwarfing of the finite. It embraces its concrete factuality, its pointed, blunt, and ultimate ultimatum: freedom or fate, thou may seek to conquer one or the other.[iii] Thus, wisdom knows its freedom, and hopes beyond fate. Man supplicates God to save him, spare him, release him, redeem him from his fated end and from every form of death. Man prays to partake of divine boundlessness, to have of God’s aid, his grace, in the moments of challenge, and to rest in immortality. To whom else can man make such fervent prayer? If fear, however, is part of the nature of man, why does this angel in Luke’s telling tell us to fear not?
Any potential change to one’s values, institutions, traditions can be perceived as a danger to self, and thus, be naturally met with some degree of fear. Any change entails a compromise within the self. It can be received as a challenge toward growth or it can be taken as a threat to the integrity of the status quo, the status with which one complacently identifies. If there exists a positive attunement that sees opportunity to grow in understanding and integrity, fear dissolves. In the base of self-love, trust and hope proceed toward something richer. A degree of uncertainty may reside, but the element of a threat to self is neutralized. If, however, the possibility of having to change is taken as a personal threat, whatsoever the perceived ground of the threat, be it nature, another individual, a group, or some amorphous mixture of these, it is not received as a positive. It is seen as destructive, personally negating, an evil. It is here, however, not that which confronts that constitutes the threat but the response to the item of encounter.
If there occurs an entrenchment into the status quo, into a blind embrace of the “this is how it has always been and always must be”, then a battle line in life, internal and external, has been drawn. There is made to appear an enemy, and the enemy must be eliminated. There occurs here the surrender into self that defeats the self, for the self is alive only as it is oriented outward, integrating into and with its environment. The integrity of self is not about inwardness, but sociality. The vitality of self is not about interiority or world escape, but about connectivity with other. Because man is social, a naturally connective being, the excluding of the other—be that other one, a group, or the totality of the world shared—resounds in the depths of the soul with the awareness that a destructive error has been made, a lie has been said to the truth of self. There arises within the soul a hatred of this deception. The internal conflict that spews from this deception seeks to expel the hate. It does so by externalizing the hatred, placing it upon another—another person, a group, an institution. The dogs of war are let loose. Self-righteousness rains down upon the “enemy” all the fear, terror, anxiety—all the death and destruction—it cannot face within itself, it cannot come to comprehend within the self, integrate into something wholesome within the self. Those things that make us human, that make us community—trust, openness, sincerity, honesty about self and hopes and fears, dialogue, in brief, all the instruments and powers of communication—are tossed aside, and the otherness of the enemy is concretized by the denial that this enemy has any such quality of communion, any such openness to community. The “other” is rendered the unutterably other, the unspeakable, the foreign, the barbarian.
Here fear is transformed in the overriding of its bounds. It is something beyond a phobia. It has distorted to seemingly infinite status, a power excited without object. It is now an unnatural, unhealthy, dis-integrating force. It is become anxiety, a blind and blinding fear. In contrast to that starry night when the glory of God shone bright, we live in an age wherein anxiety flames around us, and as in Götterdämmerung, not even Valhalla stands exempt. This community fears the dress, the language, the look, the colour, the religion, the values of another community; it threatens the integrity of the group, “my” group. Rather than try to exchange ideas and words, rather than reach out in that gifted ability we call language,[iv] rather than be open to dialogue, there is a retreat into the fortress, a hurling of words from the parapets of self-righteousness and pseudo-indignation. Any thrust toward mutual understanding and embrace is eradicated with all the vehemence arousable. The subject of possible love becomes the object of hatred. In hating, the hater himself becomes the diminished person, and the trek of social progress, evolution, sustainability is lost to the anxiety about self-preservation. This, in itself, makes only for the loss of that self-preservation, for the enclosing of self—be it as individual or some group—is extirpating, asphyxiating. The truth of self, curetted from its sociality, from evolution in trust and care, withers, festers, becomes gangrenous, and perishes. “Hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions, and envy–those who live like this will not inherit the kingdom of God.” (Galatians 5).
Many in the Christian West, having in large part lost trust in its churches, fear the rise of another cult and culture–Islam. They dread the prospect of minarets displacing a skyline of steeples, of veiled faces erasing a not yet won secularism. Here, as in too many other situations the world round this day, the response is not reasoned, investigative, considerate. It is wild, bellicose, hysterical. There is, in truth, no response, merely reaction, a reflex of erethismic, minatory obnunciations. “I enisle myself, my tribe, and we shall bomb you, bombast you, end you.” There is here nothing mature, nothing adult, nothing integral. It is all childish fear and tantrum. It is mindlessness lashing out for self-defence against an objectless, a phantom, enemy. Here, on grander scale, is the lone gunman finding random target for his sociality’s disconnection. Here is the festering rot of self-deception, self-lie, in which arises the bully, the liar, the con-man, the thug, the whatsoever identity that can exalt the belittled-feeling “me”, be that ‘me” one or that “me” collective, the tribe. We are encountered daily with the ill fruits of this deepening anxiety. Nations that once aspired to the ideals of egalitarianism and freedom increasingly make way for leaders too ready to excoriate and exclude, and because this is felt to be a “defense”, too ready to assume dictatorial attitude and militaristic action. The moral compass of nations teeters and pivots. Values are set aside without understanding. Around the world peoples flee in all directions—internal and external–from the insanities a basic loss of trust and community disembogue. Such behaviour is not a novelty in the history of humankind, but in its present form it is of such scale as to endanger more than the species. Not since the fall of Rome has so much of power and peoples been in play and afoot. They that would have some magic spell to set all back in order live in a fantasy, for history tells us that from Rome’s implosion to the scintillate light of the thirteenth century, the West had to grope its way through the anfractuous turbulences aroused by the cravings and pretensions of an assorted variety of potentates. It was a time in so many ways so bleak of peace and brotherhood that historians have commonly dubbed it the “dark ages”.
Saints, confessors, counselors of sundry type consistently tell us anxiety is the breeding ground of debilitation and destruction—of both self and other. St Augustine, ever fond of playing with sounds, contrasts the Latin cura (anxiety) with securitas (security) and caritas (caring love). Augustine was not without insight into the workings of the human soul. Man, adrift in the vastness of uncertainties that daily confront, seeks security. Man, however, does not always, and this keeps religion and psychiatry both afloat, go about finding that through authentic and healthful means. Soren Kierkegaard, that indefatigable soul-searcher that gave rise to modern existentialism, regarded anxiety as the groundwork of all sin, all self-destructive behaviour. Anxiety gives man the ground to be dishonest with himself and his world. Man deludedly seeks to rid himself of anxiety by securing himself against others. He seeks to exert power over others. He shrewdly utilizes whatsoever abilities he may have to do so—acumen in business, intellect, artistry. Even the standards of moral behaviour and spirituality are not immune from his arsenal. Perturbation regarding things past can haunt the present and distort the future. Guilt can kill the soul because a man refuses to trust in God’s love and forgiveness, in the love and forgiveness of others. Man distorts himself, seeks to annihilate himself, or to evade himself in indifference or adiaphora. Man looks to obliterate anxiety in escape—from self and world. He becomes the hermit, the stoic, an austerity of being beyond internal conflict. The thrust is not to be or be with, but to be without—feeling, companionship, personhood, personality. All such endeavours represent escapes from being an integral and integrated being. They are abdications of humanity.
While anxiety rises out of fear gone mad, security does not of itself appear. It is the resultant of something other—knowing oneself not alone, not in-it-by-myself. More positively put, security is the fruit of knowing oneself belonging, being-with, having an environment of others who accept, care, love.[v] Augustine’s securitas (security) arises out of caritas (loving care). Luther says the man who knows and accepts himself loved in the depths of himself is the man who can do good, who can act authentically human, can even be a sacred, an integrating, healing force within life. Knowing oneself loved, accepting oneself caringly loved, creates the security which allows the soul to in its turn transmit caring love outward. If such love is not known within, all that which one ought in the truth of humanity embrace in love becomes objects to possess. If I cannot love you, if I cannot accept love, I will make you my possession. I will own you, and this, and that, and in ever widening grasp, everything.
There are two elements at play here below the surface of accepting oneself loved—our connatural sociality, and that stereobate psychic power: trust. We are social to the core.[vi] The cosmos is social to the core. This is not merely a matter of psychology, mysticism, or philosophy. It is basic physics. Everything is interconnected— organs within organisms, communities within communities, systems within systems—and all building out into one vast living uni-verse. We are called, summoned, commanded from depths within more ancient than the species to be at-one within self and with one another and with the worlds we share. The profundity of this sociality Christianity recognizes as flowing from the very sociality of the Font of all. It proclaims God is an inconceivably integral sociality, a society so interlinked as to be not simply one, but the verity of unicity, The One Itself,[vii] from whose self integration the entirety of being, the universe, is externalized and given out as caritas in purist and potent-most form. Aristotle may not have captured this sociality of the godhead in his analysis, but he is of a mind that love, a self-giving, is the power that motivates the cosmos. Self-giving, self-sacrificing, freely given love, embrace, acceptance, cherishing is the connective medium of life. One may question how it is universally so, how it underpins the vitality of the quantum realms, but that it is the very vitality, spirit, ichor, ambrosia, nectar, and soma of human existence cannot be doubted. And, thus, is disclosed that second aspect or window of the psyche at the base of love, its self-acceptance and its ability to transmit itself outward in freedom—trust. Trust is always a leap, the connective leap of embrace, be it to embrace the truth within or the other without.[viii] There is no handbook on the acrobatics of this simple-most humanizing power. Love nurtures it, and without love it withers. Trust is simply love knowing itself, its power, its capacity. Love is a mystery. We may discuss it until the end of time, but like sin, it defies concrete definition. Love and sin are both known only in and by their effects. Love creates life, opens new vistas, while sin diminishes the powers of personhood and demeans the other and the world shared.
Christianity claims we must meet the other with caring love. That does not mean we make the other to conform to our ideals and ideas. It means we enter trustworthy communication, an honest, living, thriving, evolving communion. We do so because we confess love changes everything. Love made the universe. Love turned God into man. Love redeemed man and cosmos. Love takes the solitary soul and makes it a person, a being freely open to self, other, world, God, creative, caring, and unburdened before the new, therein reflecting from depths within the fleeting as the momentary face of the One ever with and within who bears with us as his everlasting own all of our sufferings and joys, our crosses and triumphs.
Let us return to those epigraphic verses from Luke’s gospel. First, the angel announces the message is “to you”. The recipient “you” is not a singular. It is plural. Second, to underscore the sociality of the recipient of the salvific revelation the text adds it is a cause of “joy for all”. Joy commands itself be shared. It is itself something social, contagious, transforming. Third, there is a child to be encountered. Every child is a new beginning brimming as a nascent presence of creativity and its Creator. Fourth, we are given the synaptic arc that brings us to the why there is such a joy. In this newness is enclosed salvation. Salvation saves. It gathers together and preserves. Here resides the reason for this being a glad tiding, for what is the universal joy, the “joy for all”, other than mankind’s truth, its sociality, fulfilled, a communion of God and man and cosmos enriched and Spiritedly ever moving toward its completed satiation from this new beginning? The saviour is the ransoming from isolation and division, the evocation into dialogue, into Word. As latter texts of the sacred canon will teach, in a communion about wholeness and the Holy One, the distinctions of individuality, ethnicity, colour, even creed are supplanted, transcended. The communion is defined not by this faction or that, not by anything mundane, but by God in his eternal avatar of Love. (Galatian 3, 1 Corinthians 1).
Christians delinquently forget they are chosen only in Christ, and that Christ is the word in which all that is is made, by which all that is is saved, through which all that is is made whole and at-one with the Holy One. To retreat into oneself or one’s self-defined, self-delineated world is to sin against both nature and the Spirit that is poured out on all creation. The Christ[ix] is the leaven, the light, the salt, the illumination, the ripener, the preserver given for all peoples—all cults, all cultures. Jesus did not proclaim a church. That is the missionary endeavour of his followers.[x] Jesus proclaimed the rule, the sovereign reign, the kingdom of God, a kingdom whereto all are summoned to allow God, to allow creativity and love, to transform them and their worlds. Christ and Christ-hood are not confined to the church which enshrines Jesus’ message. The Word is greater than the church. The message is more than the mission. The church exists to serve the message, to announce to all the inheritance of peace that is the cosmos redeemed, the cosmos transfiguring in the promise of integral resurgence, in “resurrection”.[xi] That peace, that truth, that love ever pouring forth transcends cults, cultures, individuals, moments of time. Christianity is about a Spirit released by Jesus for the conversion of the world to the loving, creative, caring heart and mind of God—not to the dogmas of this or that religious group, not to the notions of this or that philosophy. It is broader than any such, for the Spirit blows where it wills, and it flourishes wheresoever openness, creativity and love transform life toward its wholeness, its fulness.
Luke tells us in a narrative that which John delivers in a simple declarative: “There is no fear in love.” (1 John 4). Love is come to redeem fear, anxiety, sin, and bring joy, a beginning anew, a saving moment, a saving momentum.
Postscript: As I write these pages the first flurry of snow falls outside my window heralding, to my mind at least, the approach of Christmas. I pray that as that great festival nears we will all lift up and out our arms, focus our hearts, and humbly hope that indeed the king of bread, brotherhood and peace will come to reign in every soul, that we will not like Herod enclose ourselves in a fortress, and set out arms against an imagined adversary, but like those wise men, take up the journey to find a child, a new beginning, and to before its dawning light, kneel, worship, obey. Pax Christi vobiscum. CV
[i] To feel, intuit, or know are inadequate to capture the nature of soul’s self-comprehension. There is no external object being sensed, internalized, comprehended, conceptualized. The situation here touches upon a unity, the unicity of the life force, the essential oneness of psyche.
[ii] The term righteousness is the term traditionally used here. However, it has a convoluted history in theology. It needs be understood as the basic quality of personal inter-relativity: being “right” with one another, being conjoined openly, properly, correctly. Such relationship is founded in trusting one another, and thus, trustworthiness more clearly and precisely conveys to the present the idea intended without the baggage of times past.
[iii] Christianity rises above this ultimatum of nature, the disjoin between man’s freedom and his fate. It claims God, the totally free, becomes man, the fated one. God becomes incarnate, knows human form in its totality. The abstractness of infinity is therein “mediated”, and fate (the sum of man’s finitude and mortality) is supplanted by and in the freedom, the “grace”, of the immortal God.
[iv] Scripture tells us “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, the Word was God” (John 1). This is more than theology. This is our own apotheosic evaluation of language. Language creates us. It is the milieu out of which are disclosed self, other, world. We may make music, paint pictures, build shelters, but we step back from them and ask: “what does it say to you?” We think in words, we act in words. What are we saying when we speak of “body language”? We incarnate words.
One might well think then that we would be disposed to be reverent about words. There have been times when words were plied with care. There have been times when ostentation seemed de rigueur. In this day, we seem rather slovenly about words. We talk in clipped bits and bytes. Emojis proliferate in a rush to announce to the world one’s latest sensation. Slang becomes the accepted form. I confess I shudder every time I receive an “invite”. Must we make language so ugly? Is writing an additional four letters or pronouncing two syllables more such a burden upon being that they must be deleted? Has a thirst for connectivity deformed into a fallacious form of familiarity, has it become im-polite, a negation of civility?
Communication was once understood a two-way street, an aspect of dialogue, an aspect not simply of personal externalization, but as setting a foundation of mutuality, a venture always ideally and hopefully toward some degree of inclusion, care, love. Communication is at root about reaching out in trust to build communion, community. Correctly or not, here is the basis for the traditional disclaiming of “casual sex”. It is a seen as an inauthentic usage of communication. It violates the grammar of sexual inter-course (read: dialogue) by making the intimate the casual. It is slang body-language. We have, unfortunately, become “casual” about something more primal than sex. Communication is now merely announcement. Hear me. See me. In 140 or 280 characteries is there personality, a personal openness to connectivity, or are the throngs merely engaging in a type of verbal masturbation in front of an audience? Has communication become exhibitionism?
There are some souls seeking to single-handedly change the structure of language. They feel obliged to insist they be referred to not in the singular of “he” or “she”, but “they”. I do understand the search for personal identity and the pain it invariably brings, but language is a social creation, not the diktat of an individual. In my lifetime I have seen a host of feminine nouns disappear into the masculine. Actress, aviatrix, executrix, comedienne, equestrienne, are now actor, aviator, executor, comedian, equestrian. The pronoun “he” has virtually become the person-neutral, as “it” is the object-neutral. We do, however, still give gender to sundry naturally epicene items. Most notably, Nature, automobiles, ships, and a host of machines remain feminine, and God is still masculine. I doubt not their day of neutrality will come.
We need to honour language, words, meanings, grammar. They are instruments of speech, and speech the matrix of our being. They are a serious business encapsulating our thoughts, ideals, hopes, desires. They make us, evolve us, socialize us. They ought not be abused by being tossed about shabbily. As Christian theology claims God is his Word, so too we are our words. When I say: “I give you my word”, I assure you I offer you my trustworthiness, and I do so in the hope you will both receive it well and offer to me your trust. Words make us. They ought not to be used to destroy us. They ought not to be so used as to demean us.
[To them that might well critique my use of words, I offer my apologies. I am beholden to my education, to the writers of Latin sixteen centuries past, Augustine chief among them, to that great writer of prose whose work I encounter daily in prayer, Cranmer, and to the novelists and poets of the nineteenth century who informed my budding adolescence. I write in night’s wee hours with bifocals properly set and page magnified to 200%. I know I miss a bevy of errors, but I write without editor, and to date, neither I nor the computer’s automatic correction of spelling and grammar have reached infallibility. My readers in Rome may here make a sigh of relief.]
[v] We hunger to belong to, with, for another. To this end, lest we be starved of affection, we make friends, find lovers, join teams, embrace organizations, become fans and followers of varied type. In the pursuit of satisfying this psychic need, as with physical hunger, there are both wholesome and healthy means, and deleterious and poisonous means.
[vi] Cf: Spirituality, Part 6, January 2018.
[vii] Christian theology has always defended the unity of God. Traditionally, the three “persons” (technically, personae, CF: on “Masks”, February 2013) are spoken of as being in intimate and unceasing inter-relatedness (perichoresis). Yet, common talk and representation has yielded the idea of three individuals sharing the throne of heaven. Process theology has captured the transcendent, immanent, and dynamic aspects of the trinitarian concept, but the issue of personhood and singularity has not been adequately re-coded. The early church fathers recognized talk of the triune nature of God reflected the operations that make man social—self-knowledge, communication, will (specifically in its highest form, the will to be with and for, that is, love). The Father was depicted as the self-knowing so profound as to issue his own substantial reflection, the Word, and their mutuality was so intense and pure as to issue a Spirit of internalizing and externalizing perfection. Thus, God is the One who so perfectly knows self as to be able to purely communicate self and do so freely and perfectly without boundary. As in man, the “powers” of self-knowing, communication, and will are not separate from the Godhead except logically, except as one begins to examine Logos. In the early church the pressing issue was how to speak about how God was present in Jesus. Within the context of Greco-Roman thought and culture, the idea of three persons as loci of power, purpose, and mission seemed proper. That solution, however, has long posed a difficulty in upholding the singularity of God. Perhaps we need to return to the old understanding of the term persona (a mask, a locus of legal action or power). Perhaps we need look upon Word and Spirit as the personalizing powers that arise in total self-knowing. Tradition has always endeavoured to underscore the analogical nature of talk about God. God is One and is in that unicity—analogically–the seat of all authentic personhood and its integrating powers.
[viii] Trust resides at the foundation of authenticity. Our self-assurance, self-acceptance, and connatural sociality hang upon trust. The ancient serpent raised doubts about God’s intentions in the mind of Eve. She trusted not God, and sin entered life. Cain trusted not Abel and murder entered life. Lot and his daughters trusted not the strangers about them. Israel could not wait for God and turned to its golden calf. Moses doubted and hit twice the rock. Saul and David were far from paragons of fidelity. The list of distrust in others and God fills the chronicles of Hebrew scripture with prophet upon prophet calling for repentance, and summoning faith. Few can touch the simple elegance of Isaiah’s: “Do not be afraid…I will strengthen you. I will hold you up with my trustworthiness.” (Is. 41).
[ix] Although I have discussed this topic in a multitude of articles, it bears here repeating. The title of Christ is fused to Jesus as the initiator of the revelation that God is parent, love, and committedly ever with us. While Christ is used of him as a type of surname, it is in fact a title indicating one who acts as God’s creative and loving presence to his time and place. Hebrew scripture marks Cyrus the Great, the gentile king of Babylon, a “Christ” (God’s anointed embassador or messiah) in his decreeing an end to the exile and the rebuilding of the temple. Christian scripture asserts one is Christ-ian only as one lives for his moment as Christ, embraces the office of Christ. Luther was at times of a mind that there were few such souls, but I think we ought not demean any soul for being not consistently proficient in the exercise of that sacred office. We are all, as Luther was wont to note, a confluence of graciousness and self-indulgence. The object is to commit to the office and to strive, humbly trusting in God, to carry it through to the end of our days. Repentance (making a purposeful turn around) did not enter church discipline because every soul embracing the work of Christ was a perfection of performance. Salvation, redemption, holiness are attributed to God precisely because they are not attributable to man, except analogically, second-handedly, and by God’s grace.
[x] The works of the divine Word and Spirit are termed their missions. The church carries forward the missions as the Spirited resurrection presence of Christ, as the Body of Christ. In brief, the fulness of the divine Word and of the holy Spirit exceed the church. The divine de-fines (spells out the boundaries of) church, not the other way around. Thus also, the kingdom of God is something more than the church which indicates it.
[xi] Scripture has a very concrete view of reality. It speaks, rather presciently, of the cosmos as having been disjointed and misaligned in the sin of man. It also speaks of resurrection being the handsel, the first installment on the totality of creation being restored to its inseparable proper orientation (propitiated righteousness) and dynamic (trusting exteriority, faith), the “new” and inseparable body and soul. The resurrection, therefore, is about not resuscitation, not spiritualization, but the glorious integrity, the oneness, of body and soul. The fulness, the completeness of man and of cosmos is the object of salvation. The unfolding of this salvation moves forward until all creation is satiated in, enfolded into, at-onement in God. Resurrection means the disintegration of man and cosmos is halted, an about-turn (repentance) has been graciously given, and the dynamic of integration is restored and secured—by grace, by, as Jung might have delighted to translate it, “that power that worketh in us and can do immeasurably more than we can either verbalize or dream” (Ephesians 3).