Enclosed, please find a list of things I have been warned not to do, because someone was afraid of what would happen if I did:
- learn to swim (might drown -- even though my father was a proven long-distance swimmer)
-- learn to ride a bike (might fall off -- and after all, the boy next door did fall off and broke his collarbone, never mind that it healed and that nearly 50 years later he is still alive and well)
-- learn to skate (either roller or ice -- might fall)
-- buy a car (might make a mistake -- of course the first car I bought, the Blue Beauty, lasted so long that she became the subject of the most popular In Other Words to date)
-- rent your first apartment (someone might break in, which never happened there)
-- rent a house (might have too many things to worry about)
-- buy a house (ditto, and certainly way too costly -- until the benefits of home ownership kicked in)
-- live in Israel for a year (might get killed...nope)
People try to instill fear in all kinds of ways. I have been laughed at by other children who didn't want me at a junior high dance, and been beaten up by other children who didn't want me to be at a junior high basketball game; lied about by people who didn't want me to be the pastor of the first church I served; and verbally intimidated by people who disagree with my stands against domestic violence and for gay rights.
The result of all this?
Well, I swim a lot, although I really like that it's in a pool whose deep end is only five feet. I never did get comfortable around bicycles, although I forced myself to ride them once in the Province Lands and once on the Vineyard and garnered nice memories for my efforts. I never learned to skate; I tried once with a church youth group on the roller variety and fell so many times that I admitted defeat.
I've owned a lot of good cars that I bought; it's the one that was given to me that was the "car from hell." My first apartment never experienced an intrusion; subsequent residences have. I am sad about some of the things that have been stolen from me, but I do not regret for a minute having lived in any of the wonderful places I have called home.
I hate basketball. I love to dance, and got good enough at it that I have gotten paid to perform.
And I'm still a pastor -- one with 23 years of experience.
Fear challenges and tests our limits. It can also waste our precious time. We grow when we confront our own fears. We strangle when we impose our fears upon other people's lives, or upon our own.
I was glad when I learned to distinguish my own fears from fears that others have imposed upon me. I own my fears: I am afraid when I have to deal with someone who is angry, and I also hope that I never again have to be shoved into the tube of an MRI machine.
But if I hadn't gone to live in Israel because people thought I "should" be afraid to go, I'd have a poorer life experience and a thinner understanding of the Bible. I hear the route numbers of the buses that are blown up by the genocide bombers, and I've ridden many of those routes. I was even within the sound of a bomb once, and I wrote it off as a sonic boom. I have a friend who was injured in one of the first bombings. She has made it a point to stay in Jerusalem and to preach against fear. Who could have more authority to proclaim such a message than Petra?
A long time ago, a man tried to rape me.
He stepped out of a car on dark street, grabbed me, and began to hit me. I screamed and fought, and he chose to offer me this alternative: "Shut up, or I'll kill you."
That night, at that moment, I was truly not afraid. I did not shut up, and as a result, he did not kill me. I attracted attention and I got help. His "courage" evaporated with the turning on of lights and the opening of windows and the arrival of caring neighbors.
Fear of death is a bad policy, whether for persons or for nations, We are compromising far too much liberty and idealism as a nation lately for the fear of death that might happen at the hands of nameless "terrorists," and not opening enough to "make new friends and keep the old," in the words of a Girl Scout song.
The tsunami in the Indian Ocean reminds us how much of life is beyond prediction, beyond protection, beyond control. Every human life has to end in the death of the body although many religions, including the one to which I have pledged my life, offer more life beyond.
My healing from the fear from the attempted rape took some years. It came the night I had baked some bread. I wanted to share a loaf with some friends so much that I hugged it to my chest and ran through the night -- I had never again gone out alone at night since the attack -- and gave the still-warm loaf to them as they opened the door.
The writer is Minister of Spiritual Care at Federated Church of Hyannis.