don’t know
Fear is the opposite of love. That’s what this book I’m reading says. It’s not hate. Nope, it’s fear that closes one’s heart right down.
It’s green and blue outside. Green and blue and clouds pass by. Undeniably spring. It makes me think of Joseph Campbell’s instruction to participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world. Nature knows how.
But not me. I don’t know how to do that. Or if I did, I need to learn it again. Or maybe you spend your life learning it over and over again. I don’t know. I profoundly don’t know, which is scary because I thought I knew. At least, kind of.
Fear makes me think of Jesus. When I get wrapped up in fear, which is easy for me to do as it is my second nature, I wish I believed in Jesus enough to believe in being saved. I’m talking that old time give yourself over to the spirit being saved — knees buckling, tears flowing, speaking in tongues, falling over — that kind of being saved. It’d be a miracle, wouldn’t it, if accepting Jesus could really cast out one’s demons. That one could really be born again.
But Jesus rarely makes me think of love. Maybe, it was all those years spent looking at the life like crucifixion over the alter at All Saints. It was morbid. And the way we glorified his suffering and his death. The whole “he died for us”. In high school I used to think about it a lot about how people died for our sins all the time –torture, murder, neglect, genocide. And I’d ask myself what made Jesus different than a baby whose head got smashed in by some Nazi guard at a death camp. Son of God, I suppose, but then aren’t we all children of god.
Sometimes I think if the whole Jesus thing is really true, wouldn’t it piss him off that we don’t do more to celebrate his life. That we don’t do more to celebrate his instruction to love one another. Wouldn’t he go in a church and see that crucifix and think I meant for you to remember me in love, not death. His last meal was seder, it was Passover meal, which is the celebration of freedom.
I don’t even know why I’m talking about all this. Maybe I just want something to make sense.
fear vs. love – i look at my own life and find that’s strikingly true. one tends to diminish the other. and when i’m running scared in my head from fear, the air that love needs to breathe and simply be is gone, burning in the fire of my fear engine. fear often leads me to lose contact with my emotions.
last night i babysat a 1 year old – i had a bad headache and i was just wracked with fear – scary scenarios flashing through my head – how would i handle it if something awful happened? luckily he only woke up once. i gave him a pacifier, held him a little and then bam back to sleep.
not sure what that has to do with love, just that at the end of the evening, i had this warm glow (the aspirin had finally kicked in after a day of pain, too) – which, as i’m thinking about it now – is love, or at least the atmosphere in which i feel love most clearly.