America’s Wildfire of Fear

Scared people scare people.

This year’s season of Halloween is special, and I say season because it is no longer regarded as the singular night in our American calendar when as a child I would don some homemade outfit such as an old bedsheet (always white in those days) to go in search of the neighbors’ sweetest of treats.  It affords us, children of every age that we truly are, a great learning opportunity.   We are all afraid.   Our nation and our world seem in many ways more out of control than perhaps ever before.     Death is in the news, with last week bearing witness to racially and politically inspired murders and potential murders.

Scary times we live in.  This season of Halloween that won’t end.

Until.

We learn about how fear feeds upon itself, and how we can personally go about starving it instead.   This is a learnable lesson.   Now is a teachable moment.   It’s Halloween.  So let’s take another look at fear in our world, our nation, and ourselves.  

Writing from my own perspective as a geezer who has first studied and then served his time as therapist and even pastor for hundreds of folks over the years, permit me to offer this perspective.   Fear feeds first upon ignorance, or let's at least say misunderstanding.   To begin with, we are often ignorant of fear’s presence, our minds distracted instead by the hatred our fear produces.  It’s as if we are blinded by hate from being able to sometimes even see our own fear.  

I liken fear to fire.   Hatred is the smoke fear produces.  And sometimes all that we see these days in America is that smoke.   And so we go about fighting smoke itself, for that is what blinds us to see the actual fire beneath.  Putting out the smoke is of little use unless we also learn how to fight the underlying fire.   Ours is not a smoke problem.  It is a fire problem.  It is not a hate problem.  It is a fear problem.   And the fear is so large and its smoke of hatred so dark that we had better use this season of Halloween to help get it out.  Pronto.

Yes, we need safe outlets for our hatred.  People are dying from inhaling the smoke of hatred resulting from our fire.    By some lever we must certainly open the hot damper door above our fireplace, to use that analogy.   There has to be a safe outlet for our hatred or it will truly blind us from ever finding the fear itself.  And suffocate us in the process.

Staying with the fire metaphor, fear is like a pilot light in our brain remaining lit at all times.  Fuels from outside our body can then feed that flame, but so can memories from within our brains.   This is where past traumatic stress comes in.   Past hurts.  Tragedies of disappointment, perhaps loss or even grief act as fuel for the fire within.   So just as underneath our angry hatred lies fearful anxiety, so underneath our fears lie all of our unhealed hurts from stressors past.   Yesterday’s traumas fuel today’s anxieties and potentially tomorrow’s explosions.   

Picture, if you will, an out of control wildfire whether in fields of grass or forests of trees.   Each blade of grass or each tree limb becomes a carrier.  Fires are like viral germ epidemics.  Get too close to the next burning object and the fire spreads to the next object, and so on. 

Scared people scare people.  Fear spreads.  Hatred then follows like billows of smoke.  And as we feel increasingly out of control, we resort to calling out to others for help as well we should.    We should indeed, in this season of Halloween, do as Fred Rogers was advised by his saintly mother and look for the helpers.   There will always be helpers.  But there’s even more to be done after looking outward for such help.   We need to then look within to locate our own souls.  There we will find a kind of immediate fire extinguisher we can begin using ourselves.  

Halloween for me as an aging child, who still feels my own fears within being fueled by the world around and my past inner memories of stressful and hurtful incidents, is a time for both looking outward in search of helpers and within my own soul to begin helping myself.   And I find this.

I have a Heavenly Father filled with love for me that is expressed in two ways.   One, this Father sends Jesus to be my outside helper.   For me, looking for the helpers means looking first for Jesus, the King of all helpers.   Secondly, this Father sends the Holy Spirit to be my inside helper within my soul.  My own fire extinguisher to use immediately in helping myself.  

             

The good news is we are all Halloween children of this same Heavenly Father, whether we know or understand it or not.   This same Father or Higher Power or God of our own understanding loves us all.   Sends helpers, like Jesus.  And sends soul mates, like the Holy Spirit within us.   And it is this love that then goes to work putting out the fires of our fears.   Just as November 1^st is what we wake up to after October 31^st comes to an end, and just as our season of Thanksgiving follows our season of Halloween, so does love awaken us to fear’s extinction.   It’s what comes next.   And it happens when the church of Jesus Christ in communion with the Holy Spirit seeks out her own primary mission.   An epidemic of love, spreading its relief throughout our world.

It's altogether possible.

Because loved people love people.   

Deciding to make the switch

It happens every year around this time.

Where we live in Ohio, the month of October predictably brings up a decision my wife and I must make here at home.   When to finally make the switch of our gas furnace thermostat from OFF to ON.  

Thankfully, we both have an internal thermostat within our own bodies that can cue the mind quite well when that time comes.   Yet, our minds are stubborn creatures in and of themselves, often choosing to postpone that switch of our furnace to ON just as long as possible each Fall season.   By habit, we drag out our sweaters from summer storage, pile another blanket on the bed, pull those warm slippers down in place of our summer flip flops, and about anything else we can think of to delay this simple switch of that furnace thermostat from OFF to ON.  But, every year, on some morning before October comes to an end, we agree to give in and make the switch.  

The switch from OFF to ON turns our cold house into a warm home seemingly in minutes, always to compensate for those mornings of cold discomfort we were determined to prolong each and every October.   Yet it also turns our summer memories into a kind of winter dread that is a bit harder to explain.  

In our case, we have the blessed assurance that the little pilot light on our furnace will stay lit and can be entirely forgotten for months on end.  No heat but no cost to amount to anything.  Just a tiny flame awaiting that moment each year when we make that eventual decision.  To make the switch from OFF to ON.  And to then listen for the big flame that bursts up within the furnace for exchange through our fan and filter into every room, every duct, throughout our newly warmed home in preparation for winter.   All this after going many days of resisting that switch and many months of taking that tiny pilot light for granted in the first place.       

Which reminds me of something else in life we might postpone, and also take for granted.

I believe there is a soul within each one of us that acts much like a source of warmth in our lives, and within that soul lies a tiny flame I call God’s Holy Spirit.  It’s our energy supply that, well, goes unnoticed for a period of time.   Why we may choose to prolong that period of time and leave that soul’s own thermostat switched to OFF is a question for the ages.   But, true confession, I’ve also been known to stubbornly refuse making that switch from OFF to ON before in my life.  Maybe I’m not the only one.  Maybe we’re in this one together.

Why is that, do you suppose?

Why is it we not only take for granted that the Holy Spirit’s tiny pilot light within our souls is even there, but why do we also resist that switch from OFF to ON even upon realizing our need for additional comfort in our lives?   Why do we resort to all other manner of comfort from head to toe and back again before realizing this Spiritual energy is clean, renewable, and downright free for the taking?  Here I’m talking about the equivalent of warm slippers, pullover sweaters, and heavy blankets.  Things like alcohol, comfort food, and shopping trips.  Anything we think might comfort us enough to avoid, for awhile longer, having to make the switch within our souls from OFF to ON.   And so we leave the Holy Spirit’s pilot light to just flicker away on its own, hesitating to actually fire it up again.   

Here’s my own thought as to why I, perhaps you as well, might resist.  You see, I prefer the times when the world around me is a warm and friendly place.  I’d like it to stay that way all year around.  And I rather hate the thought that it can turn into a cold and cruel place.  Yet, as the seasons of our calendars change and signal more warmth or more cold ahead, so our environment changes in ways that predict more cold cruelty from life’s storms and other terrors in this world, and, well, I resist that awareness.  I resent that prediction.   I angrily drag my feet at the thought that the warm and friendly world that I have known can seemingly turn on a dime into some place cold and cruel.   Then I reach for all manner of other comforts before considering my own soul’s energy source that lies ready to supply my body with its every need if only……………I will decide to make the switch.  Decide to pray.  Decide to switch God’s clean, renewable, free energy from heaven from OFF to ON.  To fire up within me through that tiny pilot light I call the Holy Spirit.   

And to strangely warm my heart even through the times when this cold, cruel world can no longer be denied or postponed.   

"I will talk to the Father, and he’ll provide you another Friend [comforter]so that you will always have someone with you. This Friend is the Spirit of Truth. The godless world can’t take him in because it doesn’t have eyes to see him, doesn’t know what to look for. But you know him already because he has been staying with you, and will even be in you!"   --  John 14:16-17 (The Message)