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 1st is what we
wake up to after October 31st 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.
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