Psyche Searching

I am a fan of an old, quirky movie directed and scripted by John Patrick Shanley and starring Tom Hanks (both of them on the front end of distinguished careers) called Joe Versus The Volcano. The film is a sometimes dark, sometimes silly existential comedy that takes a slanted (maybe even twisted) look at some pretty profound and deep issues – like life and death, for instance. In a scene from that film, a character played by Meg Ryan states, “My father says that almost the whole world is asleep – Everybody you know… Everybody you see… Everybody you talk to. He says that only a few people are awake, and they live in a state of constant, total amazement.” I like that declaration for a couple of reasons: First, because as a general observation on life I think it’s pretty true. Second, because I believe that a state of constant, total amazement is very close to the perspective that Christians should have in their world. In many ways, that description begins to get at what the Bible means by “fear of the Lord.” In some sense, fear of the Lord is living in a pervasive sense of awareness of the presence and greatness of God. It means being truly awake, sensitized to a deeper aspect of reality than most people ever perceive and thus, dazzled, astonished, and profoundly humbled by that reality.

If ever a person lived who must have understood this way of being, I’m guessing it had to be Moses. I almost get out of breath when I think about the life that he lived. More than any other biblical character I can think of, Moses again and again encountered God in God’s indescribable and spectacular awesomeness. It began with a burning bush in the wilderness. It continued with ten plagues and their associated wonderments. He walked on dry ground amidst a parted sea, followed pillars of fire and cloud, carried (and broke) tablets inscribed with God’s own handwriting, ate manna from heaven, saw water pour from a rock at his somewhat misdirected behest, felt the enveloping presence of God at the Tent of Meeting, and even got a glimpse of God’s back (whatever that means.)

Words cannot capture the essence of an appropriate response to such experiences. Awe, wonder, reverence, astonishment, amazement – you name it; all of those words literally fall short of the glory of God. The inadequacy of language leaves us dumbstruck. Perhaps that is as it should be. Eugene Peterson puts it this way: “The moment we find ourselves in the presence of the sacred, our first response is to stop in silence. We do nothing. We say nothing. We fear to trespass inadvertently; we are afraid of saying something inappropriate. Plunged into mystery we become still, we fall silent, all our senses alert. This is the fear-of-the-Lord.”

Those who live in the fear of the Lord carry with them this attitude of overwhelming recognition of the one God occupying every corner of life. They are walking on holy ground and they realize it. They have stumbled upon the burning bush in the wilderness, followed the pillar of fire, and been enveloped by the shekinah glory of the presence of God in the camp of their lives. They are truly awake and aware of the holy one surrounding them and are driven to their knees in heart and mind. However, fear of the Lord is more than just this heightened sense of awareness. It is not just God-consciousness. The Lord-fearers’ senses are indeed attuned to the reality of God’s omnipresent glory, but even beyond that, their lives are shaped and directed by that cognizance of the divine. The next post will begin to develop some of what that means.

So, how could the Messiah that was to come, as portrayed in Isaiah 11, “delight in the fear of the Lord?” What does it mean that the Branch of Jesse will possess “the spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the Lord?”

As I pondered those questions, I remembered something I heard in a Sunday School class several years ago. An older woman, whom I would estimate had been a Christian for well over 50 years, held forth on the sorry state of preaching in those days. (I was not preaching in that congregation at the time, so I took no personal offense.) She stated that what she would really like and felt she really needed was to hear some good sermons on “how terrible hell is.” I remember thinking, why would a person five decades into an intimate walk with the Lord need to hear sermons about the horrors of being eternally separated from God? How could that benefit her at that point in her walk with God?

I think this woman probably thought that God wanted us all to “fear him,” and by that, she meant that we should fear the punishment that would come to those who reject him. There’s a great deal wrong with that point of view for the Christian.  In 1 John 4, the beloved apostle conducts about as extensive a full frontal assault on that perspective as can be imagined. “There is no fear in love, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.” Loving God the way God wishes is incompatible with being driven by the fear of punishment. If you are fear-driven in your relationship with God, you essentially limit the extent to which you can love God. At the deepest emotional level of your relationship with God, the “fight or flight” thing is going to kick in (see previous posts,) and avoidance and resentment of God is going to find a way to manifest itself. That’s just the way the human psyche works.

Another man I knew and respected approached me once after a sermon on strengthening our relationship with God. He said to me, “I’ve been a Christian for over 40 years and I have to tell you, this idea of a personal relationship with God is a foreign concept to me.” He was a walking example of what I’m discussing. Motivated throughout his Christian life by fear, he could never have an intimate walk with God. The emotions and thoughts required for those two things are just incompatible.

Make the Messianic connection to these concepts in light of Isaiah 11. How can the Messiah be operating with God out of a fear of punishment? I am convinced that in human form, Jesus experienced all sorts of fears and fought through all sorts of conflicting motives. But, it’s tough for me to imagine that he was ever motivated to be about his Father’s business by a fear of hell. If you tell me that he experienced that fear vicariously and was motivated by his fear of what was going to happen to lost humankind if he did not obey God, then I’m going to respond that you’ve both ignored the things Jesus said about his relationship with God and also probably projected your own fears onto Jesus in order to explain his motives. I’d also say that even if we granted the possibility of that projected scenario, what we’d really be talking about is a deep motive of love for the people for whom he gave himself. That’s a very different kind of emotion than the fear we’ve been discussing.

So far, most of this has been about what the fear of the Lord is not. The next posts will focus on what it is and what it would mean for us if we truly lived in that state of mind.

What I’m about to type is going to make some people angry. So, let me begin with a couple of disclaimers that I hope the reader will keep in mind.

1. I am not sad that Osama Bin Laden is dead. I say that neither with pride and satisfaction (though many feel those things) nor with embarrassment. I’m just being honest. One thing I know for sure is that he won’t kill anyone else, or plan anyone else’s death. He also won’t commit atrocities in the name of God. Those are good things.
2. I am a strong supporter of the men and women who serve and who have served in the U.S. military. I have seen the unfathomable cost of their service up close. I have had the honor of spending thousands of professional hours helping many of these brave people find healing for minds and souls that have been horribly damaged by the terrible things they beheld or felt they had to do while serving their country. I believe that many of them (along with many people who serve in civilian law enforcement) do so with a genuine spirit of self-sacrifice. They are literally willing to lay down their lives for others. I can pay people no higher compliment than to observe that their service in that way truly demonstrates a Christ-like spirit. I have great respect and admiration for those who are motivated by that spirit.

With those things on the table, I have to also say that the death of Bin Laden has left me with some deep feelings of unease. One reason for this disquiet is very practical: I simply do not believe that my loved ones are now any less likely to be harmed by a terrorist than they were a couple of days ago. In fact, the immediate danger may be even greater, given the compulsion for retaliation and the fact that this mass murderer, apparently living in camouflaged and sequestered opulence while simultaneously condemning capitalism is now a martyr in the minds of many.

The other reasons for my discomfort over the recent historic events are more theological. Jesus did say, “love your enemies,” after all. I can’t help but think about that now. I think it’s in the top two or three hardest things he asked us to do, especially at a time like this. My question is, do you think he really meant it? What if he did? Some Christian people are troubled by that question now. More disturbingly, I think many others are not troubled by it at all. In fact, to many Christians, the words of Jesus are completely irrelevant to our reaction to the news of Bin Laden’s death. We long ago jettisoned that “love your enemies” thing, along with a bunch of the other really hard stuff that he talked about in the Sermon on the Mount. As a functional and practical matter, it seems to me that many Christians have absolutely no interest in applying this teaching to their lives. What Jesus said literally has nothing to do with how they think about such matters. That’s a pretty strange way to be Christian, isn’t it? I am no good at loving my enemies. I hope and pray that at least I will learn to want to get better at it, rather than take pleasure in the demise of my enemies because “they had it coming.” If I understand the Bible, we all have it coming. If Jesus’ words do not speak to the death of Bin Laden, then to what event could they possibly apply? I think followers of Jesus are obligated to think about that. Isn’t Jesus asking us to love Bin Laden? Does that mean we can be glad he’s dead? I don’t pretend to have glib answers to that question, but I do believe that Christians should be asking it of themselves.

Another thing that messes with my head about all of this is what it says about the nature of violence as an idol, as an instrument of power and, with apologies to Marx, a kind of opium of the people. The violent death of an enemy satisfies our longing for a reckoning. I’ve heard people say, “He’s been brought to justice.” What happened is that he got “double-tapped,” with two slugs in his brainpan and the remains got fed to the sharks. A statement was made: “If you murder a bunch of Americans, we will hunt you down and bring you to justice by killing you violently.” Our country, the justice for which it stands, and by extension, our religious freedom (for which I am incredibly thankful) is made secure at the point of a gun. It’ll be maintained as long as we can do violence better than our enemies can. In that context, can American military power become an idol – the powerful force in which we find security and protection? If our sense of security comes from our ability to enforce our will on others by violent force, do we compromise what it means to be a servant of the Prince of Peace? When Peter and John were arrested (as recorded in Acts 4,) their religious freedom was threatened. Interestingly, they did not take up arms to protect their right to speak the truth about God. They instead prayed that God would give them boldness to speak, even if it meant their lives.

None of the questions or ideas I’m posing are my original thoughts. They’ve been debated and fleshed out for generations. I don’t pretend that we can arrive at all of the answers now. I’m just saying that the events of the day provide an opportunity for Christians to demonstrate that God’s idea of justice is not the same as that of our worldly culture. God’s direction for how to treat and think about our enemies is also not the same as that of the world. Neither is God’s idea about what constitutes strength and power.

God will bring real justice at the new creation. When that great time comes, power will not rest in the human ability to enforce one’s will if you’re better at the use of force. Peace will not be what happens when we finally kill off all of our enemies. It will be what God brings when he heals the nations, destroys death (God’s enemy,) and sets the broken creation right.

Until then, we should try to love our enemies. We should grieve death and violence in all of their forms and pray against their dominance in our world. We should work to embody forgiveness, peace and grace; thereby living lives that preview the new earth that God will one day bring to completion. May he do it quickly.

“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom,” says the psalm.  The “fear-of-the-Lord” is the phrase frequently chosen by biblical writers to convey an appropriate way of living in and being conscious of the presence of God. It is a term that defies a precise definition. In his important discussion of spiritual theology, the much-loved Eugene Peterson explores this idea first from the standpoint of the structural and symbolic meaning of the phrase itself. It’s what the field of semiotics would call a syntagma and linguists would call a “bound phrase.” In other words, this fear-of-the-Lord phrase is a single unit. You can’t break it apart one piece a time and reconstruct the meaning of the entire phrase from the individual words. The whole of the phrase is not only greater than the sum of its parts; it’s qualitatively different as a whole than the individual components from which it’s constructed. If you try to understand it by parsing the words one at a time, you end up terribly misled. Fear = being scared, Lord = God, the Supreme Being. Thus, fear + Lord = being scared of the Supreme Being, right? Nope. That’s a wrong-headed way to read and understand it.

Fear-of-the-Lord in the biblical context is not the same thing as being scared of God. Now, sometimes God and the things of God are downright scary. Furthermore, sometimes God is deliberately scary. (Another blog post to come will discuss some examples.) But, that emotional response to what God does is still not what the psalmist is talking about.

What do you do with something you fear? The human body and mind is constructed to push us to avoid a feared thing.  People will live with some kinds of phobias (e.g., bridges, elevators, insects, spiders, and snakes) for years, because they deliberately avoid contact with the feared thing. (Incidentally, you can cure a phobia like that pretty easily using a behavioral treatment that involves controlled exposure to that feared thing.) Why would God build into us an emotional-physiological response that is tailor-made to equip us to run away from the stimulus that provokes it (you know, that “fight or flight” thing,) tell us he loves us, and then turn around and tell us that the way God wants us to react to him is by engaging that fight or flight mechanism? That’s just no way to build a relationship. In fact, we’d say a parent that communicated with his or her children that way is mixing up a powerful recipe to produce an adult that’s an emotional wreck, especially when it comes to interpersonal relationships.  “I love you, but you’d better run when you see me coming.”

Psalm 25 makes the point even more forcefully.  It’s a poetic expression of a trusting relationship with a God who provides shelter and protection. “The Lord confides in those who fear him.” The psalmist ties together the idea of fear-of-the-Lord with an intimate friendship. God is not a fearsome presence to be avoided, but is in fact a close confidant to those who walk before him with this attitude. The point is driven home in a different way in Isaiah 11. In this shimmering Messianic prophecy, Isaiah describes the Messiah who is to come as one who will possess “the Spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the Lord.“  Further, he will “delight in the fear of the Lord,” (vs. 2- 3.)  Delight in fear? How do we understand that? Well, we’re not talking about getting a thrill out of a scary horror movie or a rush from a roller coaster ride. This is about a deeper cognitive-emotional complex. The next post will look at that idea a little more closely.

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration…” I remember reading those words from Frank Herbert’s Dune for the first time as a teenager. In that classic science fiction masterpiece, this chant was a litany repeated by mystic priestesses and taught to the book’s protagonist in order to help him master the effects of fear on his mind and body while he traversed the perpetually perilous road his life became. I guess I’ll admit to enough geek-hood to confess here that I’ve actually repeated the chant to myself (often supplemented with some additional statements I’ve adopted) when I’ve gone through my own anxiety-provoking times.

Fear is a fundamental component of every human being’s life. It’s a primal, preverbal, instinctive emotion that we’re born with the capability to experience at a deep physiological level, long before we have the language or cognitive capabilities to process and describe it. We come into this world with nervous and endocrine systems pre-primed to react in alarm and fright to all kinds of stimuli. For our entire life, we continue to feel forms of this emotion, ranging from mild anxiety to abject terror. In my professional life, helping people manage their anxiety and fear has been one of my most frequent clinical tasks.

It’s interesting how closely the language of fear and trembling is tied to God in scripture. The “fear-of-the-Lord” was embedded in the spiritual sensibilities of God’s people from the earliest days. Old Testament wisdom literature is filled with the phrase. In the New Testament, Luke uses those same words to describe a way of life for the thriving church in its early days. “Then the church throughout Judea, Galilee, and Samaria enjoyed a time of peace. It was strengthened; and encouraged by the Holy Spirit, it grew in numbers, living in the fear of the Lord.” (Acts 9:31, NIV) But, is the fear-of-the-Lord that is enjoined upon God’s people throughout scripture the same sort of emotion that both Frank Herbert’s litany and my best clinical efforts are intended to remedy?

I’m confident that many people think so. I hear that sentiment expressed in the occasional calls for “hell fire and brimstone” preaching. It’s present in the nostalgic reminiscences about the “good old days” when we could come to church and get a good scare put into us to help motivate us to behave ourselves throughout the week. There’s no doubt that fear can be an effective motivator – if you’re only interested in motivating behavior, and don’t care about the unpleasant side effects – anger, resentment, a neurotically fragmented sense of self, guilt, insincerity, and deception of self and others, to name just a few. Fear will certainly make you do things, but it’ll never let you take any joy in them. John’s epistle expresses it succinctly: “Fear has to do with punishment.” It’s that sort of fear that the aged apostle said the love of God “casts out.” That kind of fear is most assuredly not the same thing as the fear-of-the-Lord in which scripture calls us to live. The next entry will flesh out some of the fundamental differences between those fears.

The late Studs Terkel was the king of the oral history. He could sit down with a tape recorder, listen and record the comments and reflections of interesting people and synthesize them into a coherent and often inspiring narrative that made sense out of events and times of immense complexity. Near the end of his life, he published Hope Dies Last, a wonderful description of American social action in the 20^th century. Thoughts about that book repeatedly pop into my mind during this time of year. Good Friday and Easter are very much about the intermingling of hope and death, as is the title of Terkel’s book. In what I suspect is an unintended fatalistic irony, even though that title suggests the toughness and resiliency of hope, it still implies that hope is not invulnerable. The one that dies last still eventually dies, right?

My home town is Flint, Michigan, a city of tough people and proud traditions, now seemingly beaten down and defeated by a combination of economic forces, corporate betrayals, government corruption and incompetence, racial tensions, a culture of violence, and moral failures. It is not only the city in which I was born and raised, it’s still where I try to minister to people and where many of my family, friends, and church community work and live. I’m proud to say that many of those loved ones stand with upraised fists against the encroaching despondency in the city by protecting its residents and their property, educating its children, feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless, and caring for the health of its citizenry. Despite their valiant efforts, Flint still often seems to be a city without hope. Every now and then, someone in a leadership role tries to offer an idea for positive change for this downtrodden municipality, only to be thwarted by the fog of cynicism that now envelopes even the most sincere efforts. Hope may not be dead in Flint, but it’s in a persistent vegetative state.

How can we fight against a culture and ethos of hopelessness? And should we bother? Does it even do any good to be hopeful? Maybe hope is just a distortion of reality that we use to help us defend against the overwhelming anxiety and despair that would swamp us if we allowed ourselves to see things as they really are. Now, I admit that I am a big fan of psychological defense mechanisms. Where would we all be without them? However, I believe that hope is far more (and far more important) than even the most sophisticated and adaptive psychological defense.

Jerome Groopman is an oncologist and professor in the Harvard University Medical School. In his book, The Anatomy of Hope, he talks about his sense of how hopeful expectation has helped his patients, and even helped him deal with his own chronic pain. He also examines how hope works at a biological level, altering our brain chemistry in ways that change our perceptions of pain. There’s a huge body of research literature on the placebo effect (about which I hope to blog some time) to which Groopman refers in fleshing out his thesis. Hope is physiologically and psychologically (and philosophically) complex. It can best be understood from those standpoints as a multifaceted system of entangled emotions and cognitions defying simple explanations. But, beyond the intricacy of this system, it seems that our bodies and minds are wired up to respond favorably to an attitude of hope in the face of trying circumstances. As a psychologist who is interested in the places where mind and body interrelate, Groopman’s work is fascinating stuff to me. However, I think the stakes are even higher than he imagines.

Easter is all about hope – hope for a city like Flint, hope for a cancer patient, hope for despair in all of its manifestations. I believe that on that Sunday long ago, Jesus’ glorified body came out of the grave. I believe it was a historical event. However, the importance of the event transcends its historicity. The fact that Jesus was raised redefines the parameters of my life and yours. It establishes a foundation upon which Christian hope is based. That hope is not just a sense that things are going to be OK in the great bye-and-bye. It is a foundation that serves as a launching pad for us to live in the present as hope-bringers, kingdom-of-heaven-proclaimers, and world-changers – people who will work tirelessly to fight injustice, lift up the weak and poor, and illustrate by our lives in this world that dejection and desolation are no longer tenable positions. The living Jesus has changed all of that.

Our world and culture try to define us by our past. The message is, you are an artifact of what has happened to you or how you came into the world all of those years ago. You are the product of your learning history, your misshapen and traumatic childhood, your unfortunate genetic composition, and other things that used to be. On the contrary, the resurrection-formed hope of the Christian says that our selves, our lives, our vocations, and our directions are not defined by the past, but rather by the future. God has inaugurated a new creation in Jesus’ defeat of death. In the resurrection, the future breaks into the present and defines us, directs us, and shapes our lives in the here and now as we live out a new reality that transcends time.

It’s a message long unheard or misunderstood in our cities, our homes, our churches, and our own minds. “He is risen.” That changes everything. It is a message about a hope that not only doesn’t die last, but in fact defeated death and will never die again.

Think of it… Imagine what it could mean if Jesus’ followers embodied it… “He is risen.” Happy Easter.

But, who will read it? I mean, really? In this age of information super-saturation, why do we really need yet one more blog to clog up the cybersclerotic mass of words that is already out there to be sorted through, skimmed, googled, processed, and usually ignored?

To be completely honest, I’m still not sure I have good answers to that series of questions. To be glib though, the answer to the first question (who will read it?) is you. Let me thank you for that. The fact that you’ve read this far gives me both an affirmation and a challenge. The affirmation is that you chose this set of words from the vast set of options available to you today. The challenge is to keep your attention, not only for the rest of this entry, but perhaps for future looks at what is posted at this site.

If I haven’t already failed to rise to that second challenge, let me present some sense of what you can expect to find here. My interests (and education) are rooted in psychology, biblical theology, philosophy, science, popular culture, and a few other things. I have spent my career-life as a college professor, a clinician, and a minister and I’ll attempt to bring all of those perspectives to bear on matters of the mind, the spirit, and life its ownself. My tastes are diverse, my concerns are broad, and my curiosity is expansive. From that admittedly loose framework, I’ll try to present ideas and perspectives on how we can think about and live with faith, intellectual honesty, integrity, and grace.

I think maybe everyone who writes a blog is a bit of a narcissist. Maybe everyone who reads them is a bit of a voyeur. We’re all walking wounded, struggling travelers who are hanging on and getting by as best we can. Whatever your proclivities or neuroses, I hope you’ll find here some things that will provoke you to think, that will give you encouragement along the way, and that will be worth your time. I invite you to drop by and give it a look… again.