"When Fear Turns to Hate"

I was young, but I was old enough to read when I first discovered the power of fear. Already familiar with the public library that I often visited after school, I was especially interested in classic children?s stories, mythology and religion. But I sometimes passed these up and looked at the snake books instead.

I was afraid of snakes, although I can?t remember a single sighting of one in the suburban New Jersey town where I grew up. I was always looking for new things to worry about, however. I had seen a print of the El Greco painting of the tormented figure from Greek mythology, Laocoon, wrestling with snakes, grimacing in despair and losing. The image fascinated, repulsed and worried me.

I wanted to learn more about snakes. I went to the library and turned to the nature books. I memorized the characteristics and menacing attributes of each strange creature: boa constrictor, cottonmouth, water moccasin, rattlesnake. I looked at the lizards too, but they didn?t give me the same strange pleasure as looking at snakes. For an extra thrill, I would dare myself to touch one of the pictures.

The fear was powerful and alluring enough to keep my imagination active for several years. Although it was later displaced by the bigger fear of nuclear war, snake fear remains a vivid memory from the annals of my childhood. It has not entirely dissipated.

Fear is powerful, formative and personal. We keep our fears inside ourselves, rarely exposing them to the light of day or the judgments of others. Think of Annie Dillard, who lay in her childhood bed night after night, riveted by the strange moving light against the darkened wall. "This was a private matter between me and it," she wrote. "If I spoke of it, it would kill me."

So early, persistent and irrational are our fears that we may assume that it is impossible to grow up without them. Even children who are fortunate enough to live without the very real threats some children endure, still fabricate fear in their private worlds. For the many children today who are exposed regularly to violence, abuse and war, fear has become a public way of life.

Perhaps it has for all of us. Over the past few years, I have watched our world get smaller and brought closer together not by friendship, but by contact with fear.

Nothing has made us as aware of the rest of the world as the reality that there is much to fear in it. Is the seemingly endless cycle of fear, violence, and more fear, part of the human condition? It seems to be so. Fear has the power to dominate and exert control over human lives. A child?s imagination may be drawn to fear, but later in life, fear is what holds us back. Internal fears, Cynthia Jarvis observed, can "define the person we are and deny the person we want to become."

External fears are even more damaging. Think of the tragedies of domestic violence and the hate crimes against Matthew Shepard and James Byrd. Think of the young California man, Eddie Araujo, whose brutal murder was reported this past week: killed because he wanted to look like a woman, and did.

"Fear begins to control lives," Cynthia Jarvis wrote, "when it insidiously possesses the life of the person who dominates with violence, or a community of those who exclude, abuse, exterminate, and hate." Unexamined fear mutates into self-righteousness, which allows us to blame others instead of looking at ourselves. It is only a small step from blame to hate. By the time a scapegoat has been found, we no longer see each other?s humanity. "Our world seems to be ordered by way of power and powerlessness," wrote Cynthia Jarvis, "by way of the bullies and the beaten." Perhaps this is the bleak natural order of things. Unwilling to face our fears, we convince ourselves they are caused by others; blaming them, we find reason to hate. It?s bully or be bullied.

If there is another way, we might be hard pressed to find it these days. But there are signs of hope that alternatives can be found. Some religious examples offer possibilities for living with fear, understanding it and using its power for something more worthy of our humanity than hate.

The Day of the Dead observance is a good place to begin. The people of Mexico, who have practiced this custom since prehispanic times, use it to commune with those who are gone. Few human experiences arouse more fear than that of death, loss and grief. Yet the Day of the Dead ritual is an opportunity to look directly at this experience, spend time with it and make it into something beautiful. The Day of the Dead is not a sad time. Decorations adorn the graves. Families have picnics in the graveyard, and offer the dead their favorite food and drink. Survivors construct, through art, ritual and music, a way of acknowledging not only grief and the reality of death, but also their ongoing relationship with those who have died.

The Day of the Dead observance suggests that the power of fear can be a creative, not a destructive part of life. But some fears should be dispelled, not celebrated. Our own liberal religious tradition offers help for that task. Rather than deny fear, seek to understand it. Use reason to approach what frightens us.

Annie Dillard tells of being terrified of the moving light on the bedroom wall. Eventually she realized that the light was caused by the reflection from a car passing her house."Figuring it out," she writes, "was as memorable as the...thing itself."

Sometimes there is an explanation for what frightens us. Not all fears are mysteries forever. With understanding comes great relief. If you are afraid, seek the truth.

Fear can be turned into ritual or dispelled with understanding, but it cannot be denied. The greatest harm seems to come to all of us when we do not acknowledge fear and disguise it instead as something else. This is the root of hate: the power to turn our fear into something that blames and hurts others.

The Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh teaches a spiritual discipline to intervene in this perverse quirk of human nature. The human tendency to fear, to worry, to ruminate about all the things that bother us, can be managed. The practice of mindfulness, of staying in the present moment, helps us to keep fear at a distance. "Peace is all around us," Thich Nhat Hanh writes, and "once we learn to touch this peace we will be healed and transformed." And he adds, "It is not a matter of faith; it is a matter of practice."

Thich Nhat Hanh is deeply aware of the realities of the world, and just exactly how much peace is not all around us. Rising to prominence as an advocate of nonviolence during the Vietnam war, he now lives in exile from his native land. He is familiar with fear and with hate. His words are simple, but his message is challenging.

It is difficult to manage one?s own fear in fearful times. How are we to feel about the people who apparently hate us and deny our humanity? We fear what they can do to us. And we have become familiar with our own capacity to hate.

This is what Thich Nhat Hanh calls "the beast in human beings." We all have it, we and our enemies alike. Human beings are capable of terrible violence, driven by hate and an inability to see the humanity in others.

We can learn to see differently. "Humanity is not our enemy," writes Thich Nhat Hanh. "The only thing worthy of you is compassion," he adds. "Hatred will never let you face the beast in human beings." Our humanity has the power to overcome even what is ugly in ourselves. With that message in mind, we can look upon our human struggles with understanding and hope. We can ask ourselves to do what is worthy of our humanity. We can acknowledge our fear, understand it and manage it, until it no longer has the power to control us or others. And then we can face the beast with compassion and the future without hate.

References used to prepare this sermon include "The Shadow Side," by Cynthia A. Jarvis, in Christian Century, July 17-30, 2002; selected writings of Thich Nhat Hanh gathered from various sources including Amnesty Now, Fall 2002.