On the Power of Fear...

These seem to be times given to fear. Fear simmers underneath our consciousness and it has become the great unseen hand behind the events of the day.

Fear has made us vulnerable because it tears us apart inside, sunders the bonds that hold person to person, and makes us vulnerable to manipulation by those who desire power and need our fear
so that we will give them what they desire. Fear calls us to exist at a mere emotional level, it takes away our capacity for rationality, and replaces thought with reaction. And as we give power to fear it grows as the solace we expected from it diminishes and we find ourselves, in the end, both captives and more fearul than ever.

Fear has much to do with where we place our hope. The Scriptures warn us not place our trust in princes and the sons of men (Psalm 146) because all of us are flawed and transitory and every thing we create is subject, despite our intentions, to the same mortality that touches all our life.

Hope, which is a cure for fear, needs something beyond itself to attach to or it is no better than sentiment. In this the human heart since time has been recorded has reached out the the Infinite, to that which we inherently understand as exisiting and yet beyond us, to God. Our instincts to limit our trust in ourselves, who we are, what we know, and what we can create, are accurate and have honed by millenia of painful experience. But we sometimes forget, and these days seem to be a time of particular amnesia.

Until this changes we will have only ourselves and our fears to make sense of it all.