Fear and Hope Are Not Mutually Exclusive
Influence of Grandparents
When I was growing up, I spent a lot of time with my grandparent’s. In fact, I lived with them until I was 5 years old. Much of who I am today is because of who they were. My grandparents were both born in Texas and came to Baltimore on their honeymoon and then decided to stay. My grandfather took a job with Martin Marietta and my grandmother stayed home to raise their family. They had very little money, but my grandparents both continued with their education. My grandmother eventually became a nurse. I remember both of them taking college courses well into their sixties. Their tiny little house was always full of books. They loved learning and that was one of the gifts they gave me.
My grandmother also loved listening to the news. She either had the radio or the television on, and it was always a news station. When I think about spending the night at my grandmother’s, I remember struggling to fall asleep over the din of whatever talk radio show was coming from her bedroom. The bad part in all of this was that she was always relaying the most horrendous news stories to me and to my cousins. Abductions, murders, you name it. If something bad happened to a child, she told us about it.
I realize now that it was her way of trying to make us aware, her way of protecting us. Unfortunately, what she ended up doing was filling me with fear; a fear that has stayed with me into adulthood. Suffice it to say, I am very cautious when it comes to my personal safety.
After I was married and had kids of my own, I asked my mother why my grandmother would tell me all those horrible stories. Through my mother, I learned that when my grandmother was a little girl, her infant sister was kidnapped, stolen right off the front porch in broad daylight. She was found a week later, unharmed, in the middle of a field where a traveling circus had been. That event traumatized my grandmother and her family and she passed the fear of that trauma on to me.
Who knows, perhaps she saved my life by making me so cautious? I’ll never know. What I do know is that I have struggled with fear for my personal safety my entire life, but understanding where this fear came from has helped me deal with it. It will always be a part of me, but it no longer impacts me the way that it used to.
Most of us have irrational fears of some sort; the number of phobias that exist is endless. And that’s okay. For the most part, we manage to live our lives to the fullest in spite of them.
Fear is not a bad thing. It’s instinctual and necessary, and meant to protect us. But there is a very real difference between these types of irrational fears and the very real fears now consuming our country. Most of us have never known a time when I entire country has faced such difficulties. Each of us knows someone who has lost his job. My own husband has been out of work for over a year. Each of us knows someone who is struggling to pay their bills or to keep their home, or to keep their business afloat. And yet, comparatively speaking, we are still far better off than most of world. Regardless, this is our reality and it is scary.
So what can we do? What can we do, from a spiritual perspective, to help quell our fears?
Balancing Fear and Hope
The Tao de Ching says, “When you stand with your two feet on the ground, you will always keep your balance.”
So if fear is the left foot, what is the right foot? How do we balance out fear that has permeated our spirits and is throwing us off kilter? I believe the opposing force to fear is “HOPE”. Finding our sense of hope in the midst of fear is one sure way to restore our footing.
When James Poniewozik wrote that we are experiencing both “dread and excitement”. The excitement that he was referring to is a direct result of our recent presidential election. Certainly, our hopes as a nation were lifted by the swearing in of President Barack Obama our first African American president. Most of us are hopeful that the changes his administration will make will, among other things, alleviate the financial burdens we are facing. Yet we all know it is going to take a long time, and one man is not the answer to all of our problems.
So, yes, we’ve had some recent hopeful moments, but how do we keep this hope alive in our hearts and minds and souls? How do we not let our fears get the better of us? I won’t pretend that I have the one answer. I don’t. But I will tell you what works for me personally.
Prayer and Meditation First, I meditate or pray, to me they are the same thing. When my husband first lost his job I prayed constantly. But as the months have passed, praying has become more difficult. There are times when, out of frustration, I find myself saying “what good will it do?” But, each time I’ve had that thought, I force myself to do it anyway, and I am always changed as a result. Praying and meditation comfort me, I feel more centered and calm and this helps balance out the fear.
Take Action Something else I have done to restore my hope tank, is take action. Not the action of mindless distraction, though I’m sure I do that too, but productive action. Right now, Jen Grow and I are in the process of starting our own business. And while this might not be the best time to start a small business, it is something that we’ve been thinking about for over a year and we are both very passionate about our vision and excited about the possibilities of what we could create. This gives me hope.
Conversation Another thing I do, and this is important, is to share my fears with family and friends. It seems simple, but it is so important not to remain in isolation with our fears. There is great comfort in knowing you are not alone.
Margaret Wheatley, author of “Turning to One Another: Simple Conversations To Restore Hope To The Future” says this:
“To advocate human conversation as the means to restore hope to the future is as simple as I can get. But I’ve seen that there is no more powerful way to initiate significant change than to convene a conversation.”
Later in her book she tells a story about a Canadian woman who is returning to Vietnam to pick up her second child, being adopted from the same orphanage as her first child. She writes:
“She had seen conditions there on her first visit two years earlier, and had vowed this time to take medical supplies. She was expressing this to a friend one day, and the friend suggested that the most useful medical thing she might take would be an incubator. She was surprised by the suggestion, but she started making phone calls. Many calls and weeks later, she had been offered enough pediatric medical supplies to fill four forty-foot shipping containers which included twelve incubators! From a casual conversation between two friends, she and many others self-organized into a medical relief program that made a significant difference in the lives of Vietnamese children. And it all began when some friends started talking.”
When I read this story I can’t help but think about how our own community, Journeys, came together to raise money to purchase stuffed lambs for Howard County Hospital’s pediatric NICU. These lambs played sounds of the womb and were given to the newborns who were struggling to survive in the NICU. All of that happened because of a conversation I had with Kathy Braithewaite in which she shared her heartache over the loss of her newborn grandson.
I see this happening all the time in my life, in little ways and sometimes in big ways. When I told you about my husband losing his job, many of you offered suggestions as to who he could contact for employment. Some of these leads have turned into very real possibilities for him and could be the difference in us being able to stay in Maryland rather than having to move out of state for work. Seemingly innocent conversations do make a difference. And seeing people come together making a difference in each others lives really does give me hope.
Scared and Sacred Back in 2006, I also spoke about fear during a service. And one of the things I discovered when preparing for that service has always stayed with me. I’ve never forgotten that the anagram for scared is scared. (An anagram is when you take a word, or name or phrase and scramble the letters to form a new word or phrase.) Ever since I realized this, it has been something that pops into my mind when I’m frightened and it forces me to try and find something positive in whatever it is I’m experiencing.
So when I am feeling anxious about all the jobs that are being lost and my husbands search for work, I remind myself how wonderful this last year with him home has been. He cooks breakfast every morning and helps me get the kids ready for school. He does homework with the kids, we eat all of our meals together, and the house is always clean! What do I have to complain about? To be honest, I don’t know how I’m going to go back to doing it all myself when he does finally get a job.
More importantly, watching how diligent he has been in his job search, and the fact that he doesn’t complain he just continues working toward getting a job has been so impressive and inspiring. And I know that he is not going to give up. And this gives me hope.
Moment of Grace During our last service on Everyday Grace, Tim Braithewaite gave us another example of scary moments being sacred. He commented that he thought what our country is going through right now is a moment of grace. He mentioned how happy he was to see the younger generation so involved in the political process. And he’s right. This is a moment of grace. We just need to open our eyes to see it.
Most recently, one image that was so inspiring and so moving I can’t help but feel hopeful, when I think of it, is the image of the over 2 million people standing on the mall in Washington D.C. watching the Inaugural ceremonies. I consider myself to be a caring citizen, deeply concerned about our country. I was completely engrossed in the presidential campaigns. You could say I’ve become a political junkie. Quite like my grandmother, I find myself listening to at least 2 hours of political news a day, between my car and home. I had my bumper sticker on my car. But you would have had to pay me quite of sum of money to go stand out there in the freezing temperatures in that sea of people. And yet, there they were, two million Americans. Is it possible that 2 million people care more about this moment in history than I do? Apparently so, and that gives me hope.
Anagrams The interesting thing about anagrams, and I’m going to go off on a little tangent here, is that the new word or phrase often means the same thing as the original word or phrase. For example, the word Evil can become Vile, and the word Silent becomes Listen. George Bush becomes He Bugs Gore.
The reason for this, linguists believe, is because we form words based on the emotional response we have to the sounds of individual letters and regardless of how you order those letters the emotional response is the same.
Take words containing the letter M for example. The mm sound evokes feelings of maternal warmth as in mother’s milk, mollify, and summer. Evidence that our response to the M sound is innate and cross-cultural comes from the fact that the word mother is dominated by the letter M in virtually every language on earth.
The last time I talked to you about anagrams, I created anagrams using the names of our Journeys members and they were really quite profound. You might remember for Rev. Harry Brunett, the founder of Journeys, his anagram was Hurt Tern Bravery, which, for anyone who knows his life story, is quite prophetic. Today I want to leave you with the anagram I found for someone else.
But before I show it to you, I want to give a little explanation. One of the words in the phrase that this person’s name becomes, is the Sanskrit word rasa which has two meanings, one spiritual and one secular. The spiritual meaning of rasa is spiritual transformation of the heart. The secular meaning is inspiration. So the anagram for Barack Hussein Obama is this:
Barack Hussein Obama = Him Backbone USA, Rasa
Isn’t that interesting? I did the anagram purely out of curiosity but was so surprised by it that I just had to share it with you. It is hopeful. Isn’t it?
Higher Consciousness One last thing that is hopeful to me is that more and more businesses are becoming eco-friendly, and that non-profit organizations focused on peace and bridging cultural divides are growing faster than ever. Twenty years ago, documentaries like An Inconvenient Truth and Sicko would have had a one night showing at The Charles and then never heard of again. Today they are winning prestigious awards. All of this says something about how our culture is changing.
Just this past Saturday, I attended a meeting for the local chapter of Earthsave, a global organization dedicated to saving the earth by educating people about a planet-friendly diet. One of the things they do is to hold a monthly vegetarian potluck followed by guest speaker. Based on what I know about this particular group, I expected there to be about 20 people in attendance, but there were at least 70! The room was busting at the seams. And each month they have more and more people attending.
Albert Einstein said, “Our problems cannot be resolved in the same state of consciousness in which we’ve created them”.
I can’t help but feel that collectively our consciousness as a species is moving toward higher ground, and that gives me great hope not just for myself but for my children and all future generations.
So, this along with prayer, taking action, conversations, being in community, and recognizing sacred moments all help keep hope alive for me. It’s funny, when I started on this reflection I didn’t realize I had so many different pathways to hope, and these tools are available to all of you as well. However, none of this will help if we fail to remember that hope never leaves us, only we can abandon hope.
