^{1Lord, thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations.}

   2Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, thou art God.

   3Thou turnest man to destruction; and sayest, Return, ye children of men.

   4For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night.

   5Thou carriest them away as with a flood; they are as a sleep: in the morning they are like grass which groweth up.

   6In the morning it flourisheth, and groweth up; in the evening it is cut down, and withereth.

   7For we are consumed by thine anger, and by thy wrath are we troubled.

   8Thou hast set our iniquities before thee, our secret sins in the light of thy countenance.

   9For all our days are passed away in thy wrath: we spend our years as a tale that is told.

   10The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.

   11Who knoweth the power of thine anger? even according to thy fear, so is thy wrath.

   12So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.

My father-in-law is my mentor in pool, billiards. He has taken me to professional pool tournaments to watch and local tournaments to play. Long ago he owned a pool hall, and routinely wins tournaments in Tampa, Florida, where he and my mother-in-law are spending their retirement years. He taught me the rules and strategies of nine-ball, how to estimate angles, gauge where the cue ball might end up, how to spin it and pull it back into place for the next shot. Pool is a game of skill and luck during an indeterminate duration and within a bounded place. It is ultimately about trying to control what cannot be completely controlled: how a ball rolls. He has given me a great gift for which I am grateful.

I play weekly with a local retired school principal living at Heather Hills in Cascade. He is 94 years old – which is one of the reasons I like pool, I can play it until I die – and we’re quite competitive with one other. For about a month now when he has won, he’s chuckled and observed, “That’s not bad for someone who may not reach his 95th birthday in December.” We both smile, but I know December weighs on his mind as it does mine. How can it not? Life is not a matter of realizing you’re going to die, or admitting to yourself you are mortal, but considering how close you might be to experiencing that reality. Human finitude is real. Mortality is the boundary of our days. It’s just considering how close to experiencing that reality you think you currently are! Through our humor I can see it and hear it: the fear that often underlies the sound of chuckling and broad smiles.

The secular part of our society recommends living out fear as the antidote to fear, as witnessed in the popular television show – it must be popular because it’s on all the time – Fear Factor. Individuals live out fears in order to get rid of them. In a recent national survey of fears, 20% of the population fear insects and bugs, which accounts for why on this television show they so frequently eat bowls full of them! Thirty percent of us fear heights, which might account for bungee jumping and the popularity of taller and taller, falling thrill rides. Forty percent of us fear speaking in front of groups, the most widespread of all fears, which may account for the popularity of Dale Carnegie public speaking courses, or the desire to go into ministry! As a remedy for fear, the secular part of our society recommends that in living the fear its imaginary quality will become apparent and it will disappear. It is a kind of hedonism. Intensify the experience to vanquish it. Eat bugs and have no fear! I don’t think human nature is wired that way, but, rather, than this leads to a denial.

Religion in our day largely recommends faith as the antidote to fear. Fear is a lack of faith. So to reduce or eliminate fear, instead of chomping down on a plateful of bugs, one need somehow to get more and more faith. The more faith is strengthened the less fear there is, until fear shrivels up and dies, a kind of willful, muscular religion. I don’t think human nature is wired this way, either. It has not been my experience that to deal with fear one simply builds up faith like building up the body to abolish weakness. It ignores the pervasive reality of fear by dismissing the feeling as something to overcome or triumph over or defeat. It’s like covering up an odor by smothering it with fragrance. They’ll inevitably be some corner of the room where the odor still lingers.

And it discounts the individual by insisting the individual possesses within the capacity to wipe away an experience. Fear that is felt and experienced has a reality that cannot be denied or taken back like a child whose mistake compels him to wipe away reality by proclaiming, “It’s a do over.” To suppose one can or should eliminate fear through gaining more and more faith is to suppose that the experience can be trumped by a more “real reality.” Fear becomes unreal by believing it is? What do you do with the reality of the experience for the time being? Say it isn’t so, when it feels awfully real? Live enduring as a slave to the unreal until released into a “real” next life? It’s no wonder that religion’s cultured despisers claim it promotes an escape from reality. The fear we know is real is dismissed as an unreality inferior to another reality rightly believed in! Thinking that one can or should replace fear with faith actually heightens fear and makes it ever more powerful. It sends it underground into an unconscious that many modern religionists deny even exists!

Our faith tradition has a millennia long history, and has been gathered into a distinctive faith tradition within the last 500 years. In other words, while those who openly called themselves Unitarians and Universalists compose a distinctive faith tradition from the Europe of the 1500’s to our present day, one can see millennia before spiritual characteristics in past individuals and communities that link them to us in conceiving of the spiritual life. The central characteristic of our distinctive form of the spiritual life is that it is rooted in human experience. Human experience is real and primary. “Teach us to number our days,” the psalmist puts it. “The Kingdom of God is at hand,” is how Jesus conveyed it. Human experience stands as real and primary to any formal declarations of belief, by an individual, a religious community, a church, a theological doctrine, or a profession of faith. This is critical to understand why it is that for many of us fear is not the absence of faith, nor its opposite. Fear is not eliminated by having more faith. Fear is actually multiplied when people declare it is destroyed by proper belief. Our faith tradition does not presume that there is something more basic and foundational than one’s experience. Our faith tradition does not presume that there is an answer that solves the quandaries of an experience even before one has it.

Our larger history and our faith tradition as Unitarian Universalists start us down a different path, with different presuppositions and a different view of human life and the meaning it might have. The direct experience an individual has of fear is real. It is not an imaginary product of the mind. It is not inferior to a greater reality rightly believed in. The direct experience of fear is real.

In other words, in the popular language of our day, we eliminate the “middle man.” I’ve heard that in so many commercials hawking so many products. Someone makes a product and someone buys the product, and the “middle man” is the one in the middle, taking the product from the producer and offering it to the purchaser, taking a fee for doing this of course. In terms of the spiritual life we eliminate this “middle man.” Each of you has a direct experience of whatever it is that created existence, however it came to be formed. Each of you, as Unitarian Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, “experiences divinity firsthand.” Historically it has been the role of religious orthodoxy, the Christian Church for example, to take divinity and creation, what exists before you have experienced it, interpret that, and then tender that interpretation to the individual as the correct answer to the perplexities arising from experiencing that divine creation. Historically and still today, religious orthodoxy takes on the role of mediation. It is the “middle man.” Divinity and creation are here. The human individual is over there. And in the middle, interpreting and reconciling one to the other, is the church and its doctrines, theologies, and professions of faith. The individual must conform his or her experience and its meanings, to the correct answers the “middle man” provides.

Have an experience of fear? Orthodoxy responds with, “Have more faith in the correct answers, conform to the right interpretations and meanings we provide, and fear will disappear.” Believe in the middle man over your own experience! But the form of the spiritual life from our faith tradition and history eliminates the “middle man.” It yields the prospect of experiencing divinity firsthand.

But watch out for what you wish for! It is both harder and more uncertain to take on this form of the spiritual life. It requires, it demands the individual risk diving into, risk feeling the depth of that immediate and direct experience. And this risk is never more evident and never more powerful than in the experience of human fear.

When I first went into the ministry an older colleague of mine told me that I needed to know some things about death and dying because I would experience it firsthand. He also told me that individuals have a certain moment – however long that moment might last – when the reality of their own death seizes them in the innermost part of their being. He was right on both counts. I saw it in a young mother as she lain on a hospital bed, nearly her whole body burned by a house fire, breathing her last breaths as I bent down to what was left of her ear and whispered to her a promise that the church would look after her daughter. I saw it in an older man late one night while talking at his home, as his failing heart caused him to fall to the floor motionless but conscious, as he soiled himself and apologized profusely. The individual is seized-up inside with a terror: “I am not in control.” It is a terror that may only be momentary, but it is the complete loss of the sense of self as existing. Theologian Paul Tillich called it feeling from the inside the “threat of non-being.” It is not a thought, but a feeling that grasps the body viscerally, at a kind of reptilian level experience where consciousness and thought merge with sense and feeling. The body often shakes in response. It is primal fear.

Men and women returning from combat know about this moment. So do those facing the last days of a terminal diagnosis. In a more diluted form it can come to one before an airplane flight in the form of a premonition that seizes one and causes the last minute purchase of flight insurance. In its strongest form it yields a debilitating paralysis. It doesn’t last long. But, I’ll never forget a friend describing his experience in the Navy, on a large ship in the middle of the ocean, no land in sight anywhere, while the power of a storm rocked his huge ship back and forth, threatening it with capsizing! “I was sick,” he said, “and throwing up over the side of the rail. But the seasickness was a relief to the deeper sickness I felt and have never felt quite as deeply since.” It was an immediate experience of the “threat of non-being.”

And many scholars who study the history of religions claim that at the dawn of human consciousness it was this experience that awakened or elicited the religious impulse. From eating bugs, to riding the roller coaster, to listening to a preacher standing over the casket of a young girl who tragically died in a car accident, pointing to its hard, silvery exterior with one hand and the ceiling with the other, shouting, “This deceased little girl, taken from us at such a tender age, would want you to follow her example and give your life over to Christ before you die.” Primal fear ignites the religious response within human nature.

This is real. The primal terror, the threat of non-being, is felt and therefore exists. But feeling the deep reality of fear is not all there is. In our faith tradition feeling precedes reflection on the meaning of the experience. We can conclude the experience of fear is imaginary, or will disappear amidst a greater reality like a right belief. But reasoned reflection tells us that an experience felt never disappears. It becomes part of the body and mind’s history, and thinking that it does disappear only pushes it down into the unconscious, where it will then erupt into our lives at odd times in odd ways. Religions driven by primal fear, and driven to declare that fear an “unreality” in comparison to the reality of right belief, appeal to our desire to ignore and deny the reality and truth of our own experience.

I remember one funeral I went to at another church. I never looked at funerals or primal fear the same again. It was an open casket affair, which I found out later from clergy friends in other traditions helps to insure a high conversion rate during the funeral altar call. As the preacher stood behind the casket, declaring the deceased father now resided in heaven, a “real” reality reserved only for those who replaced fear with faith, his oration was punctured by the cries of a courageous little boy, the son, who observed as though the main character in the children’s story, The Emperor’s New Clothes, “Daddy’s not in heaven. See he’s right there, laying down inside that box.”

There is no antidote to fear and nothing makes it unreal. But in any experience of fear that is not all to the experience. We may think it is because we cannot see in wider and broader ways. I can see this something more in the twinkle in the eyes of my pool partner when he sinks the 9-ball and wins. Delight takes over his body and his mind in the midst of waiting for December. When a man stands on the deck as a ship nearly capsizes in a torrential storm, there is an awesomeness and power and glory that grips him as well as primal fear. When that young woman heard my whispers, as her body shook, a smile was forged over her face and a peace, which passes all understanding, emanated from her body surrounding it like an aura. In the midst of fear there is love also. There abides a unity and freedom of the spirit even though one momentarily dwells inside the “threat of non-being.” Each moment, each experience, is pregnant with a grace, and a spirit is carried along moment to moment, a larger, transcendent “something more” carried inside even of an experience of fear. When we extend our hand to another it becomes evident. It is love. It is loving life, tethering one’s self to gratitude even or especially in the midst of fear.

To live without fear in the secular world requires courage before a denial.  To live without fear in the world of religious orthodoxy requires obedience before compulsory faith.  To live the spiritual life through fear in this faith tradition requires courage before faith, and faith expressed through acts of love.. And learning to act to bring about love does not refute, dismiss, or deny the fear. It redeems it. Because love is the harvest of gratitude. That in the midst of something like a fearful experience that would apparently deny life, there exists, waiting to be unfold, a love that affirms life and gives it a distinctive and abiding glory.

Life is a game of skill and luck during an indeterminate duration and within a bounded place. Like pool it is often lived as trying to control what cannot be completely controlled. And even when life cannot be completely controlled, instead of denying or dismissing the fear that it cannot, there is love, more powerful than this fear, more powerful than death, more powerful than anything that would threaten the meaning of our days. Faith, hope, and love, these three do abide. But fear cannot ever be fully eliminated regardless of how much faith one has. And fear is never smothered by hope. But fear can be redeemed through love.

AMEN.