Unitarian Universalist Meeting of
“Ghosts and Witches – Fear Not!”
Rev. Kathy Duhon
Happy Halloween, the holiday in
which we celebrate fear. Oh, it’s much
better to make some fun out of fear than to actually be afraid. So the Pagans in Old England began many of
the traditions we still follow today, in order to confront the big daddy of all
fears, fear of death and dying.
On the night that we now know as
Halloween, the veil between death and life was believed to be thin, and you
could potentially visit with the dead.
And so what did they do? Built bonfires
and put on disguises, which seems like they were avoiding communication, maybe
frightened a bit, or at least they seemed to want to avoid being recognized, and,
just in case, they were using fire to ward off any evil spirits.
We religious liberals are not afraid
of ghosts or witches or devils, the frights of this season. Ghosts may or may not exist to us – each of our
own belief systems varies – but they do not alarm us. And witches are those practitioners of
ancient, and renewed, Earth-centered traditions, for which we have a great deal
of respect. As for devils – well, we
began our history as a religion, on the Universalist side, by renouncing Hell –
our understanding of the divine was that God would not condemn any of this good
creation to eternal torture. And we
continue our development by understanding that the devil, or Satan, has always
been mostly an excuse to cast evil upon “the other”, making them out to be of
the darkness, demonizing the enemies.
The devil has been used by humans as a tool of fear and hatred. And we don’t put up with that kind of terrifying,
appalling nonsense, no matter what else we might believe about evil or demons.
But what about the
big granddaddy of fear, the fear of death and dying? These days, we don’t fear it much, at least
not consciously. It’s been removed,
after all, institutionalized, made irrelevant to our relatively secure and
independent daily lives. If we thought
about it, we might be afraid, and sometimes it steals into our thoughts, but
death is not generally part of our mindset.
After years of working in hospice
and being at the bedside of the dying, I’d have to say that even once you know
that you will die soon, you tend to have an up and down relationship with that
knowledge, and are sometimes in denial.
When you accept that you will die soon, the fear of dying is in your
face. Sometimes you are afraid of death,
and sometimes you accept it – the dying I have known tend
to go back and forth in the feelings of fear or acceptance.
Dying itself is actually nothing to
fear – it’s rather peaceful and calm, and it’s a gentle process, but how would most
of us know? We don’t witness death too often,
except for the make-believe gory and tragic stuff on the movies and T.V., that only tends to distance us more from death’s
reality. And we rarely talk to those few
who do experience death to find out what it’s all about – death has been both sanitized
and super-sized in our culture.
But this is not a sermon about
death, despite the nearness of El Dia de los Muertos,
the Day of the Dead, as Halloween is celebrated in some cultures. But before I leave death behind, I believe
that there is a worse fear than the fear of death and dying – it is the fear of
life and living. And that has a whole
spectrum of possibility. I would imagine
that all of us, at some time, fear life, just as all of us, at some time, fear
death.
The worst is the fear that life is
not worth living, the fear that love is not real, and that as bad as things
are, they will only become worse. This
fear is so strong and so deep in some of our precious fellow life travelers
that their fear of life becomes stronger than their fear of death, and they end
up taking their own life. This October,
two men that I knew both hung themselves. What a horrifying sadness.
Bob Dylan wrote a searing line in one
of his early songs, called “Masters of War”.
It goes like this: “You’ve thrown the worst fear that can ever be
hurled, fear to bring children into the world.”
This is another fear of life, fear that life is
becoming so awful, so alienating, so precarious, that we would not even want to
afflict others with this living. The
gift of life is withheld because it is too hard of a present. That is an awful and sometimes acted-upon
fear in this hurting and broken world of ours.
Most of us adults, at least
sometimes, fear for those we know who are younger than us, when we consider the
future. This came up recently in a
public event. A new President of my alma
mater, Harvard University, Drew Gilpin Faust, was installed. She was both the first woman and the first
Southerner to hold that office, and I’m delighted with both firsts. She read from a letter that one of her
predecessors had written, President James B. Conant,
in 1951. That was just after World War
II and in the beginning thrust of the nuclear rivalry between our country and
the former Soviet Union. He left this
letter for the president of Harvard in the 21st century, and not
anyone before. It was lost until a week
before the installation, but Drew Faust opened it with trepidation and read,
“My dear Sir”. President Conant feared an impending World War III and felt that there
was an imminent danger of the destruction of cities including Cambridge. He didn’t know if there would be a Harvard or
a President to open the letter, but he hoped that there would be.
President Conant
was a smart fellow and yet he feared strongly for the next fifty years, which
we’ve already made it through, but sometimes just barely avoiding utter catastrophe,
as with the Cuban missile crisis, which took place 45 years ago this
month. My elementary school teacher told
us that those Russian missiles were undoubtedly pointed right at us in
Southwestern Louisiana, ready to destroy the oil industry. Everyone feared that they were targeted or
that World War III was about to being, the world would end. Fear gripped us for good reason in that time
of the policy of Mutually Assured Destruction.
M.A.D. – mad, really, what were we
thinking? And what precipice
are we perched upon these days, with current policies?
Fear is universal, but most of our
fear is not acknowledged, is hidden away so that we hardly know how it drives
our lives and our world. Not unless we
start to dig a little, as those of us who are reading the book, “The Great
Turning” together are doing. We are made afraid of just how bad a
situation this world has gotten into by learning about what is really happening. History and science come together to scare
the stuffing out of us with inconvenient truths, horrifying tales of empire and
its destructive power, and the specter of planet-wide destruction through
weapons of mass destruction or environmental catastrophe. How could we not be afraid of what is
happening on a global scale? And if we
also confront the real truth in any part of our lives, we will undoubtedly come
in contact with personal fear and apprehension.
Fear is scary in many ways. It can be the Petri dish for intolerance and
cruelty. Superstition and bigotry have
their beginnings in fear. Fearful,
scared folks often seek safety and certainty, never
mind what or who gets in the way. When
we see what fear has wrought, we are afraid – it’s a vicious cycle. I just heard a Christine Lavin
song called, “Tom Cruise Scares Me”, and she also names a lot of other people
and institutions that scare her as well.
It’s a funny song, but not really.
Gandhi said, “The enemy is
fear. We think it is hate, but it is
fear.” But Gandhi would never let fear
triumph, though, because all of his enemies were opponents to be addressed,
including fear.
Walking through the fear is one way
of uprooting the bad stuff that it has brought to us. Fear will teach us, will bring us wisdom –
that’s Buddhist teaching. If we allow
fear to show us how to act with good sense, without letting fear paralyze us
and constrict our hearts, then fear can be our helper.
Dawna Markova told a story about fear in one of her books, from
when she was hospitalized for cancer.
She was in pain and she was also very afraid. A Jamaican cleaning woman came into her room at
night to clean, and sometimes would sit with her. Dawna called her a
Jamaican angel. The woman said to Dawna, “You’re not the fear in that body. You’re more than that fear. Float on it. Float above it. You’re more than that pain!” And Dawna felt
herself floating in a comfort that was wider and deeper than her pain or her
fear.
Martin Luther King, Jr. knew
fear. He said, “We must constantly build
dykes of courage to hold back the flood of fear.” Like Gandhi, King was a really scared guy
because he knew the truth of some pretty fearful stuff. But neither of them were stopped by fear –
they built huge walls of courage. Some
of the way we confront fear or minimize it is to turn to what is strong in our
lives, including love and hope and faith and courage. Where they live and thrive, fear is not very
welcome.
I will finish with an old story,
which speaks of a seeker and a wise one.
The seeker asks, “What is
love?”
The wise one answers, “The total
absence of fear.”
Then the seeker asks, “What is it we
fear?”
“Love,” answers the wise one.
“Be not afraid.” That’s a phrase that comes up often in the
Bible, both in the Hebrew and the Christian Scriptures. Be not afraid. Love casts out fear. So may we be loving and free. Amen.