Fear is a Stopper

        Joan Chittister, my favorite Benedictine nun, whom I have not met, always writes something I find insightful.  Chittister is a part of the fairly large Benedictine monastery in Erie, PA.  I have been there.  In fact, I was invited a few years ago to speak to what turned out to be a rather large gathering of religious sisters and some community folk.  Immediately, I thought of Vatican II and how that changed the religious landscape of the 1960s.  Before the wonderful church council convened by Pope John XXIII, no Quaker would have been invited into a monastic setting to share with the nuns. 

            Chittister wrote a piece on why people join monasteries.  On one hand, this issue should be of no concern for a Quaker.  We don’t have monasteries and most Quakers probably have no clue why anyone would want to be part of a monastic community.  On the other hand, I appreciate knowing about monasticism, becoming friends with quite a few religious women and men and learning so much about spirituality from them and their traditions.  It turns out, there are many points of connection between Quaker spirituality and monastic spirituality. 

            Spirituality is a complex word which has a wide range of definitions and meanings.  One direction I like to take a discussion about spirituality is to suggest it has to do with how human beings make sense of their lives.  At some point most of us realize we can live our lives, but discover no point to our life.  We can be busy, but do it without any purpose or meaning. We can bounce through our days, but make no commitment to anything deep and profound.  This is the kind of thing that has driven human beings to look for a way of life where these kinds of answers might be found and a way of live available that addresses this human desire for “more.”

            Interestingly, Chittister focuses on fear and shows how fear so often stops us from moving into places where we can explore meaning, purpose, depth and profundity.  We can do this exploration as secular humans, too, but things like busyness and fear can stop us as well.  Let’s hear what Chittister has to say and then apply it to our own lives.  What she has to offer is important for all of us---not just nuns and monks.

            She begins with a truth, as I see it.  She says, “Fear of making a mistake holds more people back in life than we like to imagine.”  I know something about fear in my own life.  I know fear has often been a stopper.  It makes me cautious and reticent to go outside of the norm.  Fear of failing or fear of the unknown makes me settle for being average or sticking with the status quo, when everything in my cries for something more.  They say of folks on their death beds, their greatest regret is what they did not do, rather than what they did do.  That makes sense to me.

            Reading Chittister’s focus on fear and how it stops us from engaging life reminds me of the wonderful work of Gerald May, the psychiatrist and spirituality writer.  In his book entitled, Will and Spirit, he devotes an entire chapter to fear.  When he writes about fear, he also has in mind its role as a stopper to engaging the spiritual life.  He opens that chapter with words about our spiritual longing.  He notes, “Spiritual longing is a somewhat special force, for it is the one that can give meaning and purpose to all the rest (of our longings).” (91).

            May then takes the focus on fear into an interesting direction.  He deals with the distinction between what he calls our self-image and distinguishes it from our self.  He contends that our self is different from our self-image.  Of course, for most folks we have never even considered both of these.  I know I was taken aback when I initially encountered this distinction.  He challenges even more when he declares we create our self-image---our way of seeing and understanding ourselves.  But our self-image is typically made up of surface kinds of things.  For example, athletes see themselves as athletes.  They don’t consider what will be true if they get injured or old. 

            This is where fear meets us.  We can feel threatened when our self-images are challenged.  Oddly, even those who have a negative self-image can feel committed to it.  They assume that is “just the way I am.”  They can’t imagine their real self is something other than this.  May writes a telling sentence when he declares, “Most of all, as long as I mistake self-image for reality, I never need to fear losing myself.” (112)

            All this made me stop and think, when I read it the first time.  I shuddered to realize I could live my entire life and never know myself---my true self.  I realized how much time I had committed to a self-image that I assumed was true, but now recognize was a fabrication of my own mind with the help of some others around me---like family and friends.  It is easy to spend time trying to be someone you are not.  I now realize that fear threatened me, but it also provided an opportunity, if I would but go through fear.

            For the first time, I began to grasp the admonition of Jesus that we have to die in order to be born again.  Our death is death to our self-image---the old self---so that we might come to know ourselves as we truly are---the new or true self.  I now understand that people who entertain going with a monastic community are probably on some version of their own journey---a journey through fear to discover and become the true self.  I am also on that journey, which can be done also by not joining a monastery.  And I don’t want to let fear stop me.