Passions 8

St. Seraphim’s Fellowship
P.O. Box 351656
Jacksonville, Fl. 32235-1656

~ Introduction to the Passions ~

Part 9: “A Great Way To Fight Fears”

Dear Inmate:

Have you ever been afraid of two things at once and had to choose which of the two things you were less afraid of? For instance, have you ever been afraid to tell the truth about something you’ve said or done, but also afraid to tell a lie when someone asked you directly about what you said or what you have done? Have you ever been afraid to go to a party or some sort of gathering, but still more afraid of what people would think if you didn’t show up? Have you ever been afraid of getting hurt if you played in a rough game, but even more afraid not to join the crowd in whatever they were playing?

I think perhaps all creatures know what it’s like to have two fears at once, even animals. A mother cat can be very frightened of a large dog that’s after her kittens, but so much more frightened for the lives of her kittens that she can stand up to the large dog and scare it off. Small birds will face enemies they are terrified of, in order to protect their nests. Some years ago, I was out walking and fishing at the edge of a lake and my dog was with me. I walked up to a little bait shop where they rented small row boats. I thought I could do better fishing from the boat so rented one thinking my dog would just jump in the boat with me. It turned out that my dog was afraid of the boat and refused to jump in. I had already paid the rental fee and knew the dog would wait for me until I returned. So, I started to push off into the lake, and the dog was barking very anxiously. The next thing I knew he jumped into the boat, right onto my lap. It seems he was more afraid to be abandoned all alone than he was of the boat.

We are all afraid of many things, just by nature. Until we become saints, we are controlled more by our fears than by anything else. Fear is the biggest source of natural protection we have. The fear of death and destruction makes us protect our lives, keep ourselves in good health, avoid whatever we think will destroy us. When we are afraid of two things at once, the bigger fear controls us, and the smaller fear loses its power. Often people have to have surgery to saves their lives. They fear the surgery, but they fear death more. They greater fear of death controls them, and enables them to go ahead and have the surgery even though they are frightened of it. All of your natural fears are quite reliable. Mostly they protect your life and the lives of people you love.

There are, however, some terrible fears, unnatural fears that sweep in and attack us all. They come when vanity, that disease of man-pleasing, puts you under the power of other people. Vanity makes you feel that you must please them, win their approval, get them to admire and flatter you. So whatever they say, vanity makes you go along with it, as if they were the wardens in a prison and you were their prisoner. With vanity, the people you feel you have to please become your gods. The Bible calls them “idols,” and it says that living just to please people is idolatry. Idolatry is letting something or someone else take the place of God in your life. You have probably heard of the ordinary material idols that pagans used to worship.

Their idols are silver and gold. They have mouths, but they speak not; eyes have they, but they see not; they have ears, but they hear not, noses have they, but they smell not; they have hands, but they handle not, feet have they, but they walk not; neither speak they through their throats. And the people who make them are just like them; and so is everyone who trusts in them. (Ps. 115:4,8)

Scripture says people who have idols become spiritually dead, unable to do anything. They can’t speak to you about any thoughts of their own, because they think only what others tell them to think. They won’t see or hear any facts of life on their own, because they can only look at and listen to their idols. They cannot move freely and wouldn’t know where to go if they could; they are completely controlled by what their idols want them to do, just like the marionettes that can’t move unless someone pulls the strings for them. Instead of being motivated from the inside out, they are motivated from the outside in, like material objects. Such people often have ruthless political leaders as their idols and blindly do whatever they say. So-called “mob psychology” is the result of idolatry and could not exist if people had no vanity.

"When vain people come together, their individual folly is increased by numbers and becomes greater. And they are led like sheep, and follow in every direction the opinions of one another or of a violent leader full of savage tyranny". (Icon of John Chrysostom)

Do you remember the golden calf some of Moses’ people made and worshipped
while they were waiting for him to return from the mountain top with God’s commandments? Worshipping a golden calf would seem pretty far-fetched to us today, but what the fathers say about it is quite interesting. They say the golden calf stands for our human brain and reasoning power. They say that it is the greatest and most dangerous idol people can have. That’s why the ones who worshipped it in the Old Testament were so severely punished, with death, to show that whenever we make a god out of our own brain and human reasoning power, everything we do will eventually fail and we will die like Moses’ people in the wilderness. Trusting entirely in our own reason, being guided by it instead of by God, is idolatry. For many people, money is an idol; they worship it and do everything they can to get more than they need of it. They can’t live without owning all kinds of unnecessary things/ They serve the idol of money even if they have to be dishonest, even if they have to kill other people or fight other nations for it, even if they lose all their friends and their own health and their own lives in the pursuit of it. Television is an idol for lots of people too, although they don’t always realize it. It tells them how they should act, how they should think, how they should look, and even what they should smell like.

We all have, especially when we are young, other people as our idols. And I don’t mean as our models. A model is someone you imitate because of affection and admiration, not someone you obey because of fear and intimidation. Parents are models of adulthood for us when we are children. Unless we were quick to move to God, when we were adolescents, they likely become idols to us. Then, whether for good or for bad, their opinions of us and desires for us will control us, or haunt us. Usually their desires for us were good, but the trouble is, they couldn’t possibly have known us in a deep way, the way that God does. They simply didn’t have the ability to desire what was spiritually and psychologically best for us, no matter how much they loved us. Parents just don’t have the least idea what God is preparing us for, or what he is going to call on us to do in life. So, most of the time, we can appreciate their good desires for us, but we have to be careful that as adults, they are not idols to us. We cannot let their desires for us as children control us when we are adults.

Your real self is always terrified of human idols, because in your real self is buried an awareness that it needs God. It knows idols cut it off from God’s protection, that they will crush it and paralyze it and take the life out of it. So idolatry causes terrific fear in your real self. When we have an idol, our real self plants its finger on the panic button and send out fright in every direction all through our system. The fears that come out on the surface can be really crazy ones, but the alarm itself is very reasonable. It means that your ship is in danger of sinking, just as the apostles’ boat seemed ready to capsize during a storm until Jesus woke up and calmed the waves. So if you have fear that doesn’t make sense, or feel fears running every which way inside of you, it means you need Jesus to come and calm things down, When we ask him for deliverance from idolatry, he calms our fears by delivering us from the power of our idols as he delivered his friends from the power of great storm-tossed waves.

Our fear of idolatry is sensible and helps to preserve us. But the various fears we get from having idols are not sensible. They work against our happiness and destroy our confidence. They make us cowardly and nervous about certain things. If your afraid to work at what you really like because someone else (an idol) doesn’t think it’s worthwhile, that’s an unreasonable fear. If you are or ever have been afraid someone will find out about an awfully embarrassing relative you’ve got in the family, that’s an unreasonable fear. If you are afraid of rough sports because people will think you are a sissy or an oddball, that’s an unreasonable fear. If you are afraid people will ridicule or reject you, that’s an unreasonable fear. There are also unreasonable fears of things like harmless spiders, snakes, mice, and dogs. And there are unreasonable fears about being in certain situations, like a fear of high places or a fear of the dark. All unreasonable fears, whatever ones you may have, come from idolatry, from letting something or someone with no power to protect you become your god, and from not being close to and protected by the real God. Unreasonable fears make us nervous, agitated, worried, and sometimes even hysterical. Scripture says…

They that run after another god shall have great trouble. (PS 16:4)

A big part of that trouble is unreasonable fear, cowardice. When we pray to be delivered from idolatry, and from the vanity that causes it, God drives our unreasonable fears out of us and restores us to healthy, natural fears. Our natural fears are calm and well regulated, like traffic lights. They show us when to go ahead and when to be cautious and when to stop. No doubt you’ve heard people say, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” It means that when we are living with the natural fears God has given us, they force us to make wise choices in life. They make us choose paths that will bring us to God, because they make us afraid to go in directions that will take us away from God and away from his protection. These natural fears that God gives us are so strong that they trample down every unreasonable fear we ever had.

"Fear is not to be uprooted, but directed into the right way; and apprehensions, mistaken fears, are to be taken away, so that only the fear of God is left. For since this is the only lawful and true one, it alone affects that all other things may not be feared". (Icon of Lactantius)

The fear of God that Scripture talks about is the fear of being separated from him, losing his love and protection, the joy of his friendship for us, and the beautiful rich life we can have in him but can’t find anywhere else. If you were on the ocean twenty miles from land, with sharks here and there, wouldn’t you be afraid to leave the boat and start swimming for shore? That’s just a little of what the fear of God is like for people who are wise and experienced enough to know how seriously we need his protection. God gives us that fear of himself, so we’ll stay with him and not try to swim through the dangerous waters of life alone.

And I will give them one heart, and one way, that they may fear me all their days; and that it may be well with them and with their children after them. I will give them fear in their hearts, so they will not depart from me. (Jer.32:39,40)

There is another way in which we have fear of God. When God looks into your heart and sees that you want him, that you have freely chosen him and desire him, then of course he cooperates with you. He does everything to get to you and help you get to him. It’s like what would happen if you put yourself in the hands of a doctor and committed yourself to a hospital when you were seriously ill. From then on, everybody would be out to heal you, because they’d know that’s what you really want, even if you didn’t like the taste of the medicine or the discomfort of the treatments you had to have. Or it’s like committing yourself to lessons from a music teacher. Once you’re officially his pupil, he’s got a right to give you a hard time when you don’t listen carefully to what he says or don’t practice enough. In the same way, when we commit ourselves to God in our hearts, God takes over our lives and holds us to our commitment if it’s really an earnest one.

Our second kind of fear, then, comes when we have invited God to take over our lives and have realized that, in his loving way, he will be “out to get us” from then on. So we realize we’ll make things a lot easier for ourselves by cooperating with him. This fear makes us like Jonah. God knew perfectly well that Jonah loved him and wanted to be with him forever. But Jonah, you see was scared to death to go and preach in a wicked city when God told him to. He was so scared he ran away and hid himself in a ship. God knew that Jonah really didn’t mean to disobey, but was only frightened. So he cured Jonah by giving him an even bigger thing to be afraid of, nearly drowning in the sea and being swallowed by a monster. Then Jonah became more afraid to disobey God than he was to face the wicked city. And he saw that God was more powerful than those wicked people could ever be, powerful enough to protect him from anything. So he was not the least bit afraid to go and do what God had commanded, and he walked into that wicked city as calmly as if it were a holy church; rejoicing every minute that he had been reconciled with the Lord.

"He who is permeated by fear of God is not afraid to be among evil men. Having the fear of God in him, and wearing the unconquerable armour of faith, he is strong in everything and can do things which seem hard and impossible to others". (Icon of Simeon the new Theologian)

You see what the fear of God does? It absolutely wipes out the unreasonable fears we have, without our having to fight against them or reason them out in any way. If you are afraid you have to go along with something that doesn’t look good to you just because somebody is putting on pressure, but are more afraid you will lose God and your real self by going along, then it will be easy for you to say no. If you are afraid of being rejected by people for what you do, but realize it would be worse to reject God and then be stranded without him, your fear of being rejected by people will just vanish. Also, when you decide to stick with God because you are afraid of losing him, God immediately takes definite steps to give you extra protection against anyone who might threaten your development. At the same time, he gives you extra power to move ahead and do what is best for yourself, which is his will. This special help of his is something extremely solid, something you can really feel and see when it comes to you. Then you begin to understand that you’re safe in a way you’ve never been safe before. You can look at the dangers of life, things you used to be afraid of, the way you’d look at dangerous wild animals at the zoo, with a big moat or steel fence between you and them.

The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom then shall I fear? The Lord is the strength of my life, of whom shall I be afraid? (Ps 27:1)

The fathers say to pray earnestly for the fear of God until we get it in ourselves, it dries up every unreasonable fear we have, like the hot sun drying up dewdrops in the morning. It gives you tremendous confidence and peace. When you’ve been delivered from enough vanity so that you have quit wanting to please people and have really decided to please God instead, that’s when you get this healthy fear of God and the courage that comes from it. And that’s when God starts showing you personally what he has for you to do, because he knows now that you will have both the courage and the desire to do it. At that point, God moves much more closely into your life.

St. Paul says people with a lot of vanity are “without natural affections.” That’s because of unreasonable fear. They’re frightened of others most of the time, frightened about not impressing people, frightened about being criticized or rejected, frightened by any number of things. So a person who doesn’t get rid of vanity and idolatry is too scared to love anybody. He thinks anybody who gets the chance will hurt or humiliate him. When people’s opinions no longer threaten you, when you can be your real self among people and feel comfortable about it because you’ve gotten rid of some vanity, the first thing that happens is that you are free to like them more. You can feel more affection for them, and have more fun with them. Without getting rid of vanity, and getting the strength of character that comes from a healthy fear of God, no one can really love others, because to some extent they will be idols to him, able to push him around against his will. He will often be afraid of them and resent them. When you get the fear of God in yourself, it’s the end of that idolatry and fear of other people, and the very beginning of love.

"The fear of God trains and restores you to love". (Icon of Clement of Alexandria)

The blessed Saint John, when he wrote to some Christians, explained exactly how we go from the fear of God to the kind of love real saints have, the kind you can have down in your own heart some day. You see the fear of losing God makes us repent, and repentance is what brings God’s love into us. So Saint John got the people to think about what it’s like to have God and what it’s like not to have God, and he got them to worry about the passions and sins that were separating them from God. In this way he put the fear of God on them, like putting a halter on a straying colt. With that halter, he’d lead them into repentance, the way you’d lead a colt into a safe shelter with plenty of food and water in it.

1 John 1:8-9 If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

The fear of losing God always makes us repent, always makes us want to drop our sins and return to him to be restored and protected. As we repent, we receive God’s mercy; we receive God himself in our hearts. That means love is coming into us, because “God is love; whoever is living in love is living in God, and God is living in him” (1 John 4:16) When people eventually become filled with this great love of God, actually with God himself, then all fear is gone, even the fear of God. From then on, fear is not needed, because the love is so strong it entirely controls one’s life. So Saint John says that beautiful thing, “Perfect love casts out fear.” As long as our love is still not perfect, we need to depend upon the healthy fear of God for our safety. There is nothing that will so miraculously protect you as that fear. But we are not meant to hate even that intelligent fear forever. Only take hold of it now, by praying for deliverance from vanity and idolatry, and hang onto it for all you’re worth, until God brings you safely to dwell in himself and fills you with such love that you no longer need to be guided and protected by any fear.

"Repentance is the ship and fear is the helmsman; love is the divine harbor. Fear sets us aboard the ship of repentance, carries us across the dangerous sea of life, and brings us into the divine harbor, which is love. When we have attained love, we have reached God, and our journey is over, for we have come to the island of the other world, where dwell the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit". (Icon of Isaac of Syria)


In Christ’s Mercy,

Brother Seraphim