How Not to be Afraid: On Fear and Loving Our Neighbors and the World

When I opened How Not to be Afraid: Seven Ways to Live When Everything Seems Terrifying, by Gareth Higgins, founder and editor of The Porch (“a slow conversation about beautiful and difficult things”) I expected to discover ways to not be afraid of tornadoes or flagged biopsy findings or pink slips or out-of-control worldwide pandemics. I thought the book would deliver ways to circumvent the pounding heart or racing mind on sleepless nights. But that wasn’t exactly the book Higgins wrote.

Higgins didn’t write to describe ways to combat fear but rather to describe living in a way that is bigger than fear, a way so full of love and care for this often oh-so-scary but rich and beautiful world, that fear is dwarfed. Here’s how to take your eyes off the fear that holds you and instead open them outward, Higgins is saying on these pages.

Early in the book I was attracted to what Higgins wrote about the stories we tell ourselves:

“Stories of connection, courage, creativity, and the common good are more true but less frequently told. Given that the brain more easily recalls shocks than wisdom and notices spectacular more easily than gradual change, these better stories need to be spoken more often with more imagination. That doesn’t always mean they need to be longer. Love your neighbor as yourself is a very short story indeed, but it may contain the secret of how all life can experience its own abundance.”

As I kept turning the pages, I realized more and more that Higgins is calling his readers to attend not only to the stories we tell ourselves but to the stories each of us are helping to write for our neighbors and the world.

~~~

Related posts:

• Practicing Walking With A Broken Arm

• On Hope and Fear in Birthing Hope

• What To Think About Today

Try This On: We Are Not the Cloud, We Are the Sky

In Finding Livelihood, I quoted a couple sentences from Willa Cather's Death of the Archbishop about the sky above Santa Fe: “Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky. The landscape one longed for when one was far away, the thing all about one, the world one actually lived in, was the sky, the sky!”

I thought of Cather's words recently and the glory and beauty that is the sky when reading a new book by Richard Carter, The City Is My Monastery: A Contemporary Rule of Life. In his book, using both poetry and short essay, Carter writes about ways of being with God and with others in community: with silence, with service, with scripture, with sacrament, with sharing, with Sabbath, and staying with.

A section that Carter wrote about the sky keeps resonating with me and—in a strange way, given that it's about the sky—is grounding. In his chapter on silence, here’s what he writes on page 22:

“Remember the image of clouds in the sky. The clouds come; the clouds pass; we are not the cloud; we are the sky. Sometimes the cloud feels so dark that it needs to shed its load. And so the cloud pours out its rain. This is like the grief within us that must be shed. The tears and sorrow dispersing the weight of the cloud. Remember we are not the cloud nor the rain. We hold this within; we let it go; the cloud dissolves; we are the sky.”

I love that. We are not the cloud; we are the sky.

~~~

[Photo: a late-afternoon late-winter sky]

Kathleen Norris on Acedia in the Time Of Covid

Kathleen Norris has a wonderful new essay in The Porch: "Acedia, Today." It's available to read at that link whether or not you are a subscriber. About ten or so years ago, Norris wrote a book on acedia, Acedia & Me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer's Life. She then offered multiple definitions for the ancient word: absence or lack of care, sloth; spiritual torpor and apathy; listlessness, carelessness, melancholia. A reporter called her months into the Covid pandemic and asked for her thoughts about acedia now, and she told him that "acedia is as opportunistic as a virus." She admitted to being in a daze at the beginning of the pandemic's lockdown, but then she found her way by remembering what she'd learned about combating acedia, mostly from the hard-earned wisdom of the desert mothers and fathers for whom acedia was the "worst and most devastating temptation."

"They learned how to combat it and fortunately they passed that wisdom on: cling to your trust in God that acedia is determined to erode; cling to prayer, even though it is warfare to the last breath; go to your cell and your cell will teach you everything; pray the psalms, pray the psalms, pray the psalms."

To this, Norris added reading scripture in a leisurely thoughtful way; taking walks; reading good books; streaming good films; writing; talking to her neighbors (from a distance) and thanking the postal carriers, garbage collectors, and bus drivers; signing up for online seminar and talks; attending church online; praying for people including the people on her church's prayer chain; joining with others to ask and answer the important question of who can we help and how. Norris attributes the stop of acedia's "deadly spiral of self-absorption and despair" during the time of Covid to all these things, particularly choosing to care and choosing to love.

She included in her essay this beautiful prayer from the 13th century by Gertrude the Great. It's an appropriate prayer not just in the time of Covid but now also at the start of the season of Lent.

Be my honor, Lord,
My joy,
My beauty,
My consolation in sorrows,
My counsel in uncertainty,
My defense in everything unfair,
My patience in problems,
My abundance in poverty,
My food in fasting,
My sleep in vigilance,
And my healing in weakness.

~~~

[This post first appeared in my monthly newsletter. Click here to subscribe.]

On taking a journey

I read River Jordan's The Ancient Way: Discoveries on the Path of Celtic Christianity before the holidays. It's made me think about what it is to boldly pursue a vision for a pilgrimage as well as to choose to trust people while on that journey. It's made me think about how the longing for the journey, the planning for it, the returning from it, and the weaving of the experience of it into your ongoing life are as much part of the journey as are the days between the packing and unpacking of your bags. For River Jordan, this journey was a pilgrimage to Iona, Scotland, the birthplace of Celtic Christianity, but Jordan's writing invites you to take what she learned and think about it in terms of ordinary life. To be touched by a vision of something that's yours to do and then to seek to do it, without knowing how it will play out in your life.

”I learned that following that sense of direction that came from a place deep in my soul was sometimes the surest way to find myself right where I belonged. As I traveled the path, God showed me that, like Columba and the monks of Iona, the point was for me to live the faith, to walk it out. To embrace the path and the doing of it and at all times to walk with the understanding that I was to be a blessing to those I met as I went. To be a living epistle.”

Throw kindness around like confetti

A group of friends—some old, some new—gathered on Zoom last week to discuss a book we'd all just read, Waging Peace: One Soldier’s Story of Putting Love First by Diana Oestreich. The book is a soldier's memoir about Oestreich's journey toward putting love first, in all circumstances. An Iraqi "enemy" modeled for her this way of being in the world and it changed everything for Oestreich. Many years later and no longer in army fatigues, she continues to live to love others, even to be the first to love, even when it costs. My friends and I were drawn to the challenge her life suggested to us.
 

"As a family, we decided to blackmail ourselves to love first. This meant that the usual strings we attached to who we showed up for—like agreement, sharing the same faith, politics, or being friends—would no longer apply. Choosing to love first meant everyone would be in our jurisdiction now. No one would be outside of our yes....

We decided that we would be the first to love, every single time, because love never fails. We were going to throw kindness around like confetti, to love like it was growing on trees, without need to determine if the person in front of us deserved it or not. This was our family's battle cry. Committing ahead of time to show up with people meant our decision was already made. We stopped talking about what peace might mean and started being peace. We did it because peace isn't the absence of conflict; it's showing up in the middle of it."

I particularly love this line: "We were going to throw kindness around like confetti." Without even needing to give any thought to a grand plan of loving every person, this sentence makes the barrier to entry to such a life of love toward others attainable.

Throw kindness around like confetti.

Blessed Are the Nones

“[A]s Sister Theresa said a few months ago at Saint John’s Abbey, God is walking with us regardless of what particulars we believe at any given moment, and life is long. Who knows where exactly we will end up!”

— Blessed Are the Nones, Stina Kielsmeier-Cook

A friend of mine, Stina Kielsmeier-Cook, has just had her first book published, Blessed Are the Nones (InterVarsity Press). I first met Stina online a couple years ago through the Collegeville Institute, and then just before Covid struck, I met her in person at a newly formed writing group here in Minneapolis. Blessed Are the Nones is a spiritual memoir that tells the story of her marriage as she came to terms with her husband leaving their shared Christian faith even as they stayed very much together.

Stina meets the monastic Salesian nuns who live in an ordinary house not far from hers while she and her husband were out trick-or-treating with their young children one Halloween. Befriended by these nuns, Stina wrote that discovering that they were in her neighborhood was as if God were winking at her. These nuns and their hospitality to Stina become a doorway through which she learns to live in the vital juncture of spiritual singleness and spiritual community.

Just as a good spiritual memoir should, the story Stina tells is not just her story, and the gains and losses she describes are not only hers. Blessed Are the Nones speaks to the faith journey of so many of us. For some, the way seems to get more and more sure; for others, the way veers in a different direction. For others, doubt visits, prompting a pause of short or long or unknown duration. Stina shares Bonhoeffer’s warning to love people more than our own visions of life.

Blessed Are the Nones shows that deep love can transcend dissimilar faith journeys and that God offers community to sustain us on the way. Echoing her words earlier in the book, and shown at the start of this post, near the book’s end Stina writes, “I rest in Sister Theresa’s wisdom that everyone is on a journey with God, whether they know it or not.”

The Slow Work of God

Last week I was on a vacation/writing retreat. Sitting on a bookshelf where I stayed was the book, To Bless Our Callings: Prayers, Poems, and Hymns to Celebrate Vocation by Laura Kelly Fanucci. This wonderful poem by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin jumped off a page for me, and I want to share it with you. It speaks to the challenge of finding our way in life, the challenge of being patient when things take ever so long, and the challenge of understanding the apparent slow timing of God.

Read it and see if it doesn’t resonate with something in your life, if it doesn’t give you some hope for being on the way.

“Patient Trust”

Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything
to reach the end without delay.
We would like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way
to something unknown, something new.

And yet, it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through
some stages of instability—
and that it may take a very long time.

And so I think it is with you;
your ideas mature gradually—let them grow,
let them shape themselves, without undue haste.
Don’t try to force them on,
as though you could be today what time
(that is to say, grace and circumstances
acting on your own good will)
will make of you tomorrow.

Only God could say what this new spirit
gradually forming in you will be.
Give our Lord the benefit of believing
that his hand is leading you,
and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself
in suspense and incomplete.

–Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

(In: To Bless Our Callings: Prayers, Poems, and Hymns to Celebrate Vocation, Laura Kelly Fanucci, Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2017. In: Hearts on Fire: Praying with Jesuits, edited by Michael Harter, 58. Chestnut Hill, MA: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1993.)

~

[Photo: taken of gray-headed coneflowers that I passed on a recent prairie walk]