David Benner: Love and Fear

Einstein stated that one of the most important questions facing every individual is whether or not the universe is friendly. It would appear that for the majority of human history most people have not believed that it is. The gods seem to be either indifferent or hostile to humans. In either case they seem to require appeasement—something to get their attention and earn their favor. 

 

Religion based on appeasing the gods is not restricted to less developed countries and non-Western cultures. If you look at how people actually relate to their god, it becomes apparent that large numbers of people live in a universe they consider to be unfriendly.  Even among Christians, the love they believe to characterize God often does not seem to translate well from theory into practice. Their God is still a God who requires appeasement—gestures and beliefs to earn favor and escape wrath.

 

My own spiritual journey began with frantic steps to ensure that I escaped God’s punishment. After several years of hellfire sermons, I did what any reasonable ten-year-old child would do under the circumstances—I accepted Christ into my heart and began seeking to live a life that would please God. My motive for doing so was predominantly punishment avoidance. I was told that salvation was a gift of love, but it seemed strange to ask me to accept a gift at gunpoint.  I tried to believe that God was a God of love, but what was prominent in my mind was his justice and holiness. I saw little that invited surrender. My obedience was out of duty, not devotion, and my earliest steps on the spiritual journey involved covering my bases to minimize risk; they were not steps of surrender to love.

 

Thank God my story didn’t end there. The hunger God had planted in me for him left me longing for a relationship with him, not simply a way to avoid hell. Slowly a shift in my experience of God began to take place as I learned to meet him in my emotions and senses, not just my thoughts. This process was helped by the prayer practice I recommended at the end of the last chapter.  Slowly but steadily, fear of a God whose wrath was primary began to be replaced with surrender to a God whose love was primary. It made all the difference in the world for me.

 

Love and fear stand in a complex relationship to each other.  Ever since Eden, the human struggle has been “to escape from the grip of the spirit of fear and to be open to the embrace of love.”1  The words of John that perfect love casts out fear (1 John 4:18) communicate an absolutely profound psychospiritual truth. But how are we to understand the fact that so many people who bask in love continue to slither in fear? Surely this suggests that love is overrated as a transformational power. How else could we explain why we sometimes seem to love our fear and fear the loss that would be involved in giving fear up?

 

Christianity seems to give mixed messages about fear. On the one hand, the Bible repeatedly tells us not to fear. In fact, “Fear not” is one of the most common greetings of an angel or our Lord himself to humans. It seems God understands that fear is a natural response to a god. Telling us to set aside our fear should therefore comfort us, reassuring us that God is not as we expect. But on the other hand, we are also repeatedly told to fear God (Deuteronomy 10:12; 1 Peter 2:17). We are also told that the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom (Proverbs 1:7) and the most appropriate response to one who can kill not only the body but also the soul (Matthew 10:28). So should we be afraid of God or not? Is fear the enemy, or is it a spiritual virtue?

 

Some Christians bristle at the notion that love, not fear, should characterize their response to God. It overturns everything they have learned about how to position themselves in relation to the cosmos and the divine. In a strange way they have actually become comfortable with an unfriendly God who should be feared. Not settling for awe or reverence, they live with a fear of the God who keeps them in their place by ensuring their continued distress. 

 

Is this the response that the Christian God invites from us? I am convinced it is not. The Christian God wants the intimacy of our friendship, not our fear. The Christian God comes to us with gestures of breathtaking love, hoping to eliminate our fear, not manipulate us through it. And he offers his love as the one thing in the universe capable of making an otherwise hostile cosmos into a friendly home. He offers his love as the one thing in the universe capable of freeing us from our fears.

Face of Fear

 

One of the things that block us from gaining freedom from fear is that most fearful people don’t think of themselves as afraid. Untext. less their fears are focused on something external (such as snakes, heights or crowds), most people in bondage to fear fail to recognize the true nature of their inner distress. 

 

Phaedra, a young woman who contacted me after reading one of my books, would have never described herself as fearful. But when we got together to chat about her spiritual journey, it was quite apparent that fear was a massive impediment to her surrender to divine love.

 

What first struck me about Phaedra was how apologetic she was about taking my time. Though I assured her she was taking nothing that I was not freely giving, she told me several times how busy she knew I must be and how concerned she was not to take advantage of my willingness to meet with her. I also noticed how careful she was to craft her statements in a way that would avoid misunderstanding. When I commented on this, encouraging her to relax and simply tell me her story, she replied that carefulness in speech and life was deeply ingrained. I sensed that she spoke the truth.

 

Phaedra lived her life within narrow boundaries and in measured doses. Caution and control were her watchwords. They were comfortable parts of the only self she knew. They were also masks of fear—fear of being misunderstood, fear of making a misstep and fear of being out of control. 

 

Beneath her well-controlled exterior I sensed enormous passion and energy. But she feared her longings and held them in careful check lest they disrupt her equilibrium. It was, however, becoming increasingly hard for her to ignore her spiritual restlessness.  Her spirit was responding to God’s Spirit, and she was being wooed to relinquish control and surrender to the divine Lover of her soul. It was this deep longing that brought her to me. More important, it was this deep longing that gradually drew her into a love relationship with God.

 

Fear that has not found a way to attach to external sources is very hard to identify. It has many faces, all of which mask its essential nature. Some people fear intimacy while others fear solitude. Some fear loss of control while others fear a loss of image. Some fear the strength of their feelings while others fear the loss of some comforting feeling. Some fear attention while others fear neglect. Some fear life while others fear death. Some fear pleasure while others fear pain. Some fear loss of love, while others fear love itself.

 

But fear can be even more elusive than this. Sometimes it can have no face at all. If it is successfully avoided, it leaves almost no trace of its presence. And so those of us who are good at avoiding our sources of fear may come to conclude that fear has no part in our story. But we are mistaken. Fear—though not experienced—is still present and a source of bondage.

 

It took me a long time to become aware of the presence of fear in my life. I had virtually eliminated fear by investing enormous amounts of energy in avoiding failure and criticism. I didn’t think of myself as fearful, because I was generally successful in avoiding what I feared. But doing so required compulsive overachievement. It also required that I stay on the treadmill of earning respect by surpassing any reasonable expectations anyone could have of me. Obviously I was paying a very high price for my avoidance.

 

I found my fears when I experienced a significant personal failure in my mid-forties. Suddenly I was confronted with the ghost I had run from all my life. Its name was failure. It was shocking to discover how much I feared it. But it was also liberating. Acknowledging my fear has helped me to meet God in my places of deep vulnerability. And it has helped me meet others with greater honesty and humility.

 

Fear works in such a way that the object of the fear is almost irrelevant. Fearful people are more alike than the differences between the foci of their fear might suggest. Fear takes on its own life.

 

Fearful people live within restrictive boundaries. They may appear quite cautious and conservative. Or they may narrow the horizons of their life by avoidance and compulsion. They also tend to be highly vigilant, ever guarding against life’s moving out of the bounds within which they feel most comfortable.

 

Because of this, fear breeds control. People who live in fear feel compelled to remain in control. They attempt to control themselves and they attempt to control their world. Often despite their best intentions, this spills over into efforts to control others. Life beyond control is unimaginable, even though their efforts at control have only very limited success.

 

Fear also blocks responsiveness to others. The fearful person may appear deeply loving, but fear always interferes with the impulse toward love. Energy invested in maintaining safety and comfort always depletes energy available for love of others.

 

 

Dynamics of Fear

 

This interaction between fear and love was noted by the Danish philosopher and theologian SØren Kierkegaard.2 Kierkegaard devoted much of his life to the study of fear. He also spent most of his life struggling with it. Even though his insights did not provide him much personal help, they were profound.
Kierkegaard makes three invaluable contributions to our understanding of fear. He suggests that (1) fear occurs when the human spirit is afraid of itself, (2) fear is often a substitute for guilt, and (3) guilt always results in an inhibition of love.

 

These insights were discerned only in embryonic form by Kierkegaard. A more complete understanding did not come until the rise of psychoanalytic psychology after his death. Kierkegaard was on the right track, however, and well ahead of his time in understanding the nature of fear.

 

The notion of being afraid of one’s self points to the inner conflict that lies at the core of fear. Although the object of one’s fears may seem to be external, the real source of the fear is internal. The danger is within. The enemy is one’s own self—or at least some aspects of the self.

 

Often the part of self that is most disturbing for people plagued with fear is their emotions. Typically they fear the strength of their feelings, particularly those feelings associated with impulses to action.  Anger, sexuality, and any of the inner urges and desires all feel disruptive because they are all capable of leading to action. Consequently, people may attempt to shut down all feelings and thereby eliminate the urges that lie behind them. But this only compounds the sense of danger, because now they also fear a lapse of control. 

 

This was clearly the case for Phaedra. What she most feared was the strength of her feelings. She worried that if she allowed herself to really feel anything strongly she might have to act on it.  And she intuitively knew that doing so would force her to abandon the self-control behind which she hid.

 

One particularly important feeling that often lies at the root of fear is guilt. The part of self that is dangerous in this situation is the self that is felt, in some nonspecific way, to have failed or done something dreadfully bad. These feelings are not usually conscious.  But they tend to seep into consciousness as fear.

 

Graham told me that fear had been a lurking companion for many years. He had been sexually abused by an uncle as a child and had trouble feeling safe in relationships with men since then. But he also felt somewhat inadequate and uncomfortable with women, and over time this led to a generalized fear of all social interaction. Most people had no idea that he experienced so much fear, as he took great pains to not give in to it. But he knew it was destroying his life.

 

Graham’s sense of guilt was rooted in his experience of having been sexually abused. Although it was not rational, he had a vague feeling of being responsible for what had happened. His fears helped him defend against these deep-seated feelings of guilt. By avoiding people, he managed to distance himself from his inner torment. Fear was the price he unconsciously chose to pay to eliminate the guilt.

 

When this happens, the displaced guilt tends to be betrayed by compulsions. Compulsive niceness might, for example, reflect a neurotic sense of guilt associated with not being nice enough—perhaps being too aggressive or selfish. Or compulsive busyness might arise from guilt associated with feelings of being lazy. The problem is not real, objective guilt. The root of the fear lies in unrealistic expectations of the self—expectations, for example, of always being loving or always being productive. Such expectations lead to increased efforts to perform and inevitably result in performance failures.  This then only serves to reinforce the neurotic feelings of guilt.

 

If these feelings are faced directly, their unrealistic nature is quickly identified and their effects dissipated. If, however, the guilt is repressed, it is easily transformed into fear.

 

Graham’s compulsions centered on avoidance of anything that had the potential of reminding him of his sense of guilt. Although his fears were painful, his avoidance of intimacy with people protected him from something even more painful—the sense of being a person who was so dangerously powerful that he could cause others to behave irresponsibly and abusively.

 

But as noted by Kierkegaard, unresolved guilt always damages the capacity for love. The reason for this is that the guilty self feels that it deserves punishment. It also feels like a dangerous self. Unconscious guilt makes me feel that I have to withdraw from others lest I damage them by my love. This leads to self-preoccupation, and the result is always a serious impairment of my ability to give or receive love.

 

In Graham’s case, the disturbance of his ability to love was dramatic.  Although he longed for intimacy and surrender, he feared the ways he might poison any love relationship. Love itself had become dangerous because unconsciously he perceived himself to be dangerous.

 

But let us return to the words of John. For in a single verse (1 John 4:18) he summarizes these insights, anticipating by a millennium and a half the best psychological understanding of fear developed in the last two hundred years: “In love there can be no fear, but fear is driven out by perfect love: because to fear is to expect punishment, and anyone who is afraid is still imperfect in love.” I know of no more succinct summary of the dynamics of fear.

 

These words also point to love as the antidote to fear. A later chapter will take up this truth. For now, however, we need to further explore the way love itself sometimes becomes the object of our fear.

 

 

Fear of Love

 

Graham is not alone in his fear of love. Millions of people fear intimate
relationships because they have experienced rejection or abandonment by a parent, friend or lover. They avoid getting close to people because they fear they will be hurt again. Such a reaction is tragic, even if quite understandable.

 

Love is dangerous precisely because it invites surrender. Although we may try to give and receive love in measured doses, both our own deepest longings and the very nature of love bid abandon.

 

But abandon brings us right up to the edge of an inner abyss. We are suddenly confronted by a series of “what if” questions, all of them pregnant with potential peril. What if I surrender to this love and am again hurt? What if I abandon myself to this lover and he or she fails me? What if I reveal myself and am rejected? What if I am overwhelmed by the strength of my own need for love? Or what if I am overwhelmed by the devouring nature of the love of
the other?

 

Adult love inevitably reconnects us to the earliest experience of infantile dependence on our parents or caretakers. And no parent is perfect, and no one’s earliest experiences of love are consistently and absolutely positive. These and later disappointments in love sometimes surface when we are faced with love as adults. As a result, some people find themselves unable to let go; they seem to prefer the familiarity of their fears to the potential danger of the unknown. 

 

Some caution at the point of abandon is always appropriate.  Crippling anxiety that makes commitment to love impossible is, however, always sad. And saddest of all is when this anxiety stops us from encountering Perfect Love—the one thing that has the potential to heal us of our fears.

 

 

Perfect Love

 

The Christian God is unlike any god humans could ever imagine.  In fact, the Christian God operates in a manner so often unlike what we even want or are ready to receive that it is obvious that such a God is no mere projection of human imagination or desire.

 

The great distinctive of the love of the Christian God is that there are no strings attached to it. God simply loves humans. He created us for a love relationship with himself, and nothing that we can do—or not do—changes the love he bears us.

 

The notion of God’s loving us unconditionally is absolutely radical. As Philip Yancey has written, “The Buddhist eight-fold path, the Hindu doctrine of karma, the Jewish covenant, and Muslim code of law—each of these offers a way to earn approval. Only Christianity dares to make God’s love unconditional.”3 The God Christians worship loves sinners, redeems failures, delights in second chances and fresh starts, and never tires of pursuing lost sheep, waiting for prodigal children, or rescuing those damaged by life and left on the sides of its paths.

 

The Christian God of grace stands in stark contrast to the vindictive, whimsical, threatening and often capricious gods of other religions.  Only the Lord God unconditionally cherishes human beings.  Only the Lord God forgives all our offenses and teaches us how to forgive ourselves. Only the Lord God provides everything he demands.  Only the Lord God offers the life of his own Son for the salvation of his people. The Lord God’s persistent habit of relating to humans with grace is the best news the human race has ever received.

 

The good news of Christianity is something that we would have never discovered if Jesus had not come and shown us the character of God.  Everything within us tells us that the universe must be organized according to a principle wherein we get what we deserve.  But quite unbelievably, God is not simply the projection of our own image on the cosmos; he is different from anything we could have ever imagined. He offers us something we could never deserve—forgiveness of our sins and his embrace of love.

What makes grace amazing is that it and it alone can free us from our fears and make us truly whole and free. Surrender to God’s love offers us the possibility of freedom from guilt, freedom from effort to earn God’s approval, and freedom to genuinely love God and others as the Father loves us.

 

 

"Thanks, But No Thanks"

 

While one might expect humans to receive the news that God is unequivocally for us as good news, in reality we do not. We have such an inborn tendency to run our own life and to pay our own way that unconditional love is both unbelievable and terrifying. In short, we want nothing of it. 

 

Grace is totally alien to human psychology. We want to get our house in order and then let God love and accept us. The psychology of works-righteousness and self-certification is foundational to the human psyche and totally at odds with grace. 

 

The deep-seated way humans resist divine grace helps us understand something about the fear of love. While some people fear any love, what most of us resist is unconditional love—perfect love. The reason for this is that such love demands surrender. 

 

A familiar Christian hymn states that as I come to God, “nothing in my hands I bring, simply to thy cross I cling.” How deeply I resent this fact. How desperately I want to be able to contribute something to the deal—my faith, my effort, my love, my belief. But the bottom line is that Perfect Love meets me where I am and asks only that I open my heart and receive the love for which I long. 

 

It is surrender to love that I really resist. I am willing to accept measured doses of love as long as it doesn’t upset the basic framework of my world. That framework is built on the assumption that people get what they deserve. That’s what I really want. I want to earn what I get. And for the most part I am content to get what I earn. Nothing grates more than a handout. If you doubt this, just ask someone who lives off charity. What humans want is to earn
the love we seek.

 

The Christian God comes to us as wholly other—so different from the gods of my imagination, so far beyond my control. Encountering such a God is terrifying because encountering perfect love is an invitation to abandon ego. A god of our own making would be much less terrifying. But such a god could not offer me what I most deeply need—release from my fears and healing of my brokenness.

 

 

Love Overcomes Fear

 

The Christian God understands all this. He has a big advantage.  He created us and knows us intimately. He knows how we respond to anything that threatens our need for control. And he knows how we fear the abandonment that perfect love invites.

 

This is the reason God’s first words to us are “Fear not.” This is not a command but an invitation. God understands our tendency to fear. And in gentleness he invites us to let him rid us of our fears and heal us by love.

 

The story of Moses and the burning bush illustrates this well.  According to Exodus 3:1-12, one day while tending his sheep, Moses noticed a bush that was on fire. Approaching it, he saw something strange. In spite of the fact that it was burning, it was not consumed. Now his curiosity was really piqued. He began to go closer. Suddenly an angel called out a warning—“Moses, Moses!. . . Come no nearer.” Curiosity instantly turned to fear.

 

Confusing fear and reverence, some Christians think God wants us to feel afraid of him. They might assume that the angel’s call to Moses was designed to teach him the fear of the Lord. But I would suggest that it was designed to protect Moses from danger—the danger of a presumptuous approach to the divine that failed to recognize God’s holiness. God didn’t want Moses to stay away. Indeed he wanted Moses to approach him, because he wanted to share his heart with him. But he wanted Moses to approach him as the Holy Other.

 

What God next told Moses was that he was aware of the suffering of his people and longed to deliver them. He showed Moses his face, and it was a face of compassion. Quite unlike a god who wants people to fear him, Yahweh wanted Moses to know that he is a God of tenderness who suffers with those who suffer and longs for their release from all that binds them.

 

Discovering that God was a God of compassion, Moses began to feel less afraid. Fear instantly returned, however, when God told him his plans for the rescue. He was to go to Egypt and bring the captives back with him. Moses was overwhelmed with his inadequacy and the magnitude of the job. “Who, me? How could I ever do that?”

 

God’s answer was the point of the whole encounter, the reason he had called Moses aside and shared his heart with him: “I shall be with you” (Exodus 3:12).

 

God does not want us to stand back in fear. What he desires is reverential intimacy. He wants us close enough to him that we know his heart—close enough to hear his heartbeat. He wants to look into our eyes, and he wants us to look into his.

 

The story of Jesus walking on the water toward Peter and the other disciples in the boat illustrates this same point (Matthew 14:22-33). First, notice that Jesus invites Peter to come to him on the water. Jesus invites intimacy, invites surrender. In faith Peter stepped out of the boat, and to his amazement, he didn’t sink! But when he began to look at the waves rather than Jesus, instantly he began to be submerged. Fear suddenly replaced amazement, and he cried out with panic, “Lord, save me!” And “Jesus put out his hand at once and held him.”

 

Perfect Love overcomes fear.

 

Jesus is the antidote to fear. His love—not our believing certain things about him or trying to do as he commands—is what holds the promise of releasing us from the bondage of our inner conflicts, guilt and terror. Jesus comes to us to show us what God is like.  Knowing how we would react to a god who suddenly turned up on the human scene, God becomes human, to meet us where we are and minimize our fears. The incarnation is God reaching out across the chasm caused by our sin and starting the relationship all over again. The incarnation reveals true Love reaching out to dispel fear.

 

Fear would have kept Angie—the woman whose story I have been telling—from trusting God, had she not slowly become convinced of God’s deep love for her. First she had to learn that it was all right for her to bring her fears to God. That was the only way she could come. Her fears were with her continually until she came before the face of Perfect Love. As she soaked in God’s love—daring to believe that this was the fundamental truth of her identity—slowly she watched her fears drop away. And she was surprised to discover that she was beginning to feel love for God.  It was not something she tried to produce. It simply happened.  Her heart had been touched by God’s heart.

 

 

For Further Reflection

 

If this chapter drew your attention to some of your own fears, take some time to reflect on them. Don’t draw back from them. Face them in the full light of day, naming them for what they are. It is the things in ourselves that we refuse to face that have the greatest potential to tyrannize us. To deny the reality of fears is not to know ourselves, and then we risk becoming possessed by that which we refuse to face.

 

But if it were easy to face our fears, we would have already done so. So something must be different to allow you to really face things you previously avoided. That difference is love.  The courage to face unpleasant aspects of our inner self comes from feeling deeply loved. It also comes from the assurance that we are safe. Our gaze needs to go back and forth between divine love and our fears. We gain courage to face our fears as we soak in love.

 

Meditation on aspects of Jesus’ life and teaching can help you further ground yourself in perfect love. Let the following brief scenes lead you into meditative daydreaming. Picture yourself in each situation. Observe, listen and note all the sensory elements of each scene. Notice your feelings. And pay close attention to Jesus.  Allow the experience to begin to teach you about being deeply loved. And as you do so, begin to face the fears that have held you
back from surrender to this love.

 

 

Matthew 19:13-15. Join Jesus as people bring little children to him to be blessed. Hear the disciples as they scold the parents, telling them not to bother the Master. Then hear the words of Jesus: “Let the little children alone and do not stop them coming to me; for it is to such that the kingdom of heaven belongs.” Picture yourself coming to Jesus as one of those little children. Crawl up on his knee and feel his touch as he lays his hands on you and blesses you.

 

 

Matthew 22:1-14. Read these words about the invitation to a wedding feast as if they were an invitation to you to bring all the lame, broken and fearful parts of yourself into the banquet of love being prepared for you by the God of perfect love. Dare to bring these neglected parts with you.  There is a space reserved for each, and each is welcome in the circle of God’s love. Allow these neglected parts of yourself to enjoy the warmth of God’s love as they are honored with special treatment.

 

 

Mark 6:45-52. Join the disciples in the boat as they face a mounting storm. Notice Jesus walking on the water toward you. Hear his words of comfort: “Courage! It is I. Do not be afraid.” Then observe as he gets in the boat with you and the others, and as the wind—and your fears—suddenly decreases.

 

 

Luke 12:22-32. Listen to these words of Jesus as if they were spoken for the first time directly to you. Pay close attention to what Jesus says about how valuable you are to him. Hear his love for you, and notice how it feels to bask in this love.  Feel yourself rest in the love of a Lover God who promises to care for your every need and give you much more than you could ever dare to expect.

 

This article is from Surrender to Love by David Benner.  An IVP formatio book.  Please see book for references.

Tags:
The Individual in Formation