Faith And Fear

There is a legend from the Orient about a traveler making his way to a large city. One night he meets two other travelers along the road: Fear and Plague. Plague explains to the traveler that, once they arrived, they are expected to kill 10,000 people in the city. The traveler asks Plague if Plague would do all the killing. “Oh, no. I shall kill only a few hundred. My friend Fear will kill the others.”

After 9/11, the world changed. After that, politicians and pundits told us, we were in a new era. And for once they were telling the truth. Our treasured security disappeared. Many Americans were afraid to fly for months, even years after that. Some moved out of large cities, others bought gas masks and laid in emergency stocks of everything from antibiotics to bottled water. After a few years, though, when no serious attacks occurred, things got back to normal. Sort of. We were in the “War on Terror” but for most people it was far away.

Then we got hit by Covid. The government told us to stay home and wear masks and get vaccinated and boosted. Schools closed. Offices emptied out as employees started working from home. Highways emptied out as fewer people came to work. Nursing homes restricted family visits. Automobile sales plummeted. Restaurants closed. Churches Zoomed instead of meeting in person. Two years later we are still suffering the echoes of those policies, and many people are still afraid of crowds, still wear masks, still work from home. Are we safe or should we be afraid?

The answer to both questions is “No.” No, we are not safe, and no, we should not be afraid. I am not about to quote FDR at you, saying there’s “nothing to fear but fear itself.” There’s plenty of bad stuff out there that we could be afraid of. But living in fear is neither useful nor appropriate. A lot of people asked me, before I went on my cruise to Greece, if I was afraid. I wasn’t. Not because I assumed I was safe, but because I was no less safe than I had been at home. The fact is, life is not safe. But once we got over 9/11 we went right back to assuming that it was. And our society still doesn’t know how to handle it. And so the people who make their living off of travel and tourism have seen their incomes take a nosedive, and empty office spaces are expected to cause a real estate crash any day now.

Fear shows up and is acted out in a lot of different ways. After 9/11 some people took their fear out on Arab Americans - or people who looked like Arab Americans like Sikhs and Hindus. Some people blamed America - the left wing blamed what they called our Fascist foreign policy, the right wing called it God’s judgment on a godless nation. We had been able to look at places like Ethiopia or Columbia and say to ourselves, “not us.” I don’t know if any of us ever said out loud, “It’s because we’re better than they are,” but I suspect that we patted ourselves on the back for our democracy, our freedom, our economic prosperity, and all the other things which we took for granted. We’re Americans! We’re entitled! McDonald’s and rock and roll have taken over the world, and free-market democracy follows in its wake. Everybody wants to be like us... don’t they? But our world got turned upside down. There are people out there who actually hate us. The world is not safe.

When Covid hit, we couldn’t direct our fear to a visible enemy; it was all around us, in the air we breathed. There was no one to blame. We didn’t even hear preachers thundering that it was God’s judgment on a sinful nation. So we couldn’t repent and change; we were helpless because it was meaningless. And so we clothed ourselves in fear as if it were armor, as if we could become safe by walling ourselves off from one another. The people who refused to be afraid became enemies as well. People who didn’t wear masks were berated and in some places arrested; if you didn’t get vaccinated you might lose your job. There were places you weren’t allowed to go and things you weren’t allowed to do. The churches that closed forgot that Christians are commanded to gather together, for worship and support and living out our identity as the body of Christ. That said to the world that we, too, are governed by our fear, rather than by our faith. And it’s all because we are unwilling to accept that life itself is dangerous, and that to live fully requires accepting those dangers. The world is not safe.