You are currently browsing the category archive for the ‘Fear’ category.
I have found … by Your great mercy, that the love of a man’s heart that is abandoned and broken and poor … attracts the gaze of Your pity … That you have perhaps no greater “consolation” … than to console Your afflicted children …
Thomas Merton, in Thoughts in Solitude
+ + +
It is not our choice to live free of conflict, disappointment, ill fortune, betrayal, failure, hurt, mistake, injustice, hostility, error, illness, disability and death … These coexist with love we do not warrant, welcome we never need to earn, friendship far exceeding our merits … gratuitous kindness and forgiveness …
Yes, life presents the teaching moments of difficulties and hardships as ways of humbling us and bringing us wisdom and the priceless ability to acquire the pains and experiences of others and to witness trust in God, and grow closer to Our Creator.
In Thomas Merton’s words is a gem: God always consoles His injured children. Yes, we need not fear injury no more than we can avoid it in the rough and tumble course of human existence.
God’s presence and consolation is a certainty. That being so – why fear? Is fear not an absence of belief? Are believers not the greatest leaders? Do they not display the greatest calm in the face of the greatest struggles and most difficult calamities?
That said – sadly I do not see much in most who claim to lead. I do not see belief in those who would lead. I see godless ideologies and schemes that flow from them. In them, I know with absolute certainty that what they propose and advocate is destined for failure and disappointment. There is no leadership without belief – for without belief there is neither sight nor courage.
Are we not far better off knowing our limits and God’s unlimited expanse?
Believe. Fear not. In God one moves with confidence.
Shalom.
You wake up in this here world, my sweet li’l mister, you got to wake up tough. You go out that front door tough for a morning’ and you stay tough ’til lights out.
Daniell Woodrell, in The Death of Sweet Mister
+ + +
You wanna’ know how Trump worked the North Korea deal? Toughness. Toughness in language. Toughness in the New York City real estate business. Toughness in his Queens childhood. Toughness in the streets.
You don’t get toughness in the privileged class. They value the soft life where nobody starves and nobody gets killed.
Expecting the privileged to wrestle a guy loose from his missles is expectation misplaced. Yale and Harvard Law ain’t the the bloody streets. Ain’t fist fights and flying F-U’s. They don’t teach toughness there. Those guys ain’t missing any teeth.
Think about it – that last crew in the WH had to pay Iran billions and never derailed ’em from their nuclear dreams. The privileged think one pays for peace … Ya right! Those are the kids that pay the school yard bully not to hit them. Pathetic. Paying a bully says: “fear,” “weakness,” “push-over” – breeds their disrespect of you – – – makes it all the more dangerous a place to be alive.
Lesson No. 1 – don’t expect the privileged to fight for you. ‘Taint never happening. Never. Too soft, too much to lose. The status quo keeps them on top as the danger grows. Now you know why globalism is globalism.
The last WH crew didn’t never have a fight. Didn’t never face down the Murphy Twins who loved to go at you two on one for no particular reason. The last crew didn’t live a street war between the McLaughlins and the guys in your neighborhood. The last crew didn’t live in “public housing” with its asphalt and treelessness.
When you think about toughness – you realize too many here are too soft. You realize that there is a basic fault line between the guy in the street, people living in small towns where the factory closed and the money left – and the folks in Washington – those in authority and in the permanent bureaucracy … that difference: tough versus soft.
In the world as it is and always has been – you’d better be tough or you get your lunch eaten and your money taken.
Shalom.
Welcome Back after Thanksgiving. I hope you had a delightful respite.
# # #
Out of suffering has emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars. (Emphasis added.)
Kahlil Gibran
+ + +
Suffering is and has been a part of human existence since the very beginning of human existence. Yes, we are vulnerable. Long ago we might have learned that people actually betray one another.
Indeed, you may assume that those who hunker down in an effort to avoid suffering will impose suffering on others.
Forget climate change. Far more daily destruction comes at the hands of those who foolishly will to avoid suffering.
They are the ones who cannot absorb the experiences of life and the experience of other people or come to know themselves as they are and can be. They are the family despots, the ones who exclude – keep secrets and demand total loyalty from others while giving little of themselves (having so little to give to begin).
The fear and avoidance of suffering has a faithlessness to it.
Strange isn’t it to fear suffering. In this, one denies reality, life and the wisdom of Gibran words.
If you wish to listen to others who have something to say listen to the one who has suffered and grown because of it. He or she gains wisdom, character and courage for they have accepted the divine gift of life as it is and have, consequently, gained peace and relationship with God.
Shalom.
There is for all of mankind but one felicity – a gracious God.
Flavius Josephus, in Antiquities of the Jews
+ + +
Well, there you go. Written in 75 A.D. If only we had the wisdom of Flavius Josephus! But alas it is absent.
Nowhere in public discourse is there much thought of God, of life in the Spirit, of our historical record or wisdom of the many centuries.
No, in its place – talking heads, the chattering class of ill bred, poorly schooled, ideologues incapable of holding two contradicting ideas in their head at the same time. And yet the most astonishing thing is this: their words pass as worthy of our attention. Who is the greater fool there?
RETREAT while you can. Take safety in wisdom and reality.
Imagine a God of felicity – a gracious and loving God. Such a novel thought today in this deflated culture flooded with harmful utterances and ideas.
In contrast, I can offer this. I have never doubted that there is a God and that this God had an interest in me and all others. That is not to say that I acted without sin, nor that I did not attempt a life of self-reliance, a life in which I acted as if it all depended on me, my efforts. Yes, we are foolish for a time until we prove ourselves less than we think we are.
There is nothing, by the way, like tragedy and injustice, chaos whose actions abound to your loss and pain to bring you to God … and, in due time, to Flavius Josephus and his insight.
In retrospect, I can now express daily sincere gratitude for the grace to have always known there is a loving and merciful God – and that God, not man, reigns over mortal and eternal life.
After years of life, I know the valuable gift of humility, in knowing that I am His subject … and you are too. Likewise, I know in that reality, that relationship – the priceless value of intimacy … God’s love of me, of us and our divine opportunity to love others as God loves each of us.
Imagine if we knew what Flavius Josephus knew, we would not live in fear and think in that fear of the world as governed by race, or gender, or class, or force, or power, or money, or intellect, or sex, or status, or nonsensical ideologies.
No, on the contrary – tension and anxiety would dissipate; we would know certainty, live in confidence and gratitude, know peace and fellowship.
Best of all – if we were as Flavius Josephus – there would be no place for those who spread words of hate, who divide and speak so carelessly, so ignorantly.
That, Dear Friends, is a step toward Eden and you have been given the opportunity to step toward that Paradise. Alas, seize it … or suffer more, and continue to hurt yourself and others until you die and face this question: Why did you not take the path I gave you?
God help us all.
Shalom.
God, let the words of Flavius Josephus rest in our heart and animate our every thought and action in the confidence of your gracious and loving dominion.
Power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts … perhaps the fear of a loss of power.
Seneca
+ + +
Seneca has something here. We have seen people who manage power very nicely with calm and grace – but they are a distinct minority in time. God’s deeds, of course, are masterfully offered and employed. His power is perfectly expressed. Not so in man’s conduct.
If you want to understand Washington today, think of Seneca.
Corruption here today in Washington is rooted in the fear of the loss of power. Yes, this is the entrenched Washington elite – both parties, the bureaucracy and mass media, in the entertainment community, et al; they display a fear a loss of power, status, etc. They liked “being liked.”
Those who have power and influence simply refuse to release their comfortable grip on status, influence – power. They profit from the status quo and those who would disturb it are not welcome.
Let’s face it. People are self-interested. The greater the grip – the more prominent the fear.
One of the the hardest things to do is to acquire the experience of others. We live in our own experience; our fears and insecurities frequently govern – and more so among the godless.
Truth: the acquisition of another’s experience necessitates a growth in the Spirit, a faith which denominates one’s humility and God’s supremacy – reduces mortal existence to a passing moment and eternity to its rightful place. In this God-centered view, fear is vanquished and power need not corrupt. We are made, you see, for humility, not fear, for eternity not mortality.
If you want to understand corruption. Know this: it is present today. It is present among the powerful and privileged and when you see it you are seeing (as Seneca notes) fear. Yes, fear begets corruption. And, yes, those who are in relationship with God do not fear … and those who are not so inclined show fear. The latter is inevitable.
Think about how the powerful see and name “the basket of deplorables” and how they react when they are not favored, and how they react when a person is elected who challenges them: yes, the person and his or her supporters are attacked, and attacked, and attacked.
The fear of the loss of power is a mighty destructive force. Yet, our strength and identity has nothing to do with status, or power, wealth or privilege.
Seneca – very cool.
Shalom.
… sanity is spiritual. It simply is.
Gerald May, M.D., in Simply Sane
+ + +
Liberals are fearful, frightened. Having neither faith nor having sufficiently deeply examined themselves and the demonstrative nature of being human, they are in great need of reassurance. Hence, they are “snowflakes” demanding special zones of “protection” and they relish being victims and asserting all sorts of privileges they associate with victimhood. Yes, in such “status” they are reassured … at the expense of others – no matter the cost to other, self or society.
Fearful as they are, they seek control. They do so by making errant ideas their idols and forcing others to conform to their fear-driven orientation.
They root in politics – local, state and national. In this regard they create and encode fanciful notions: homophobia emerges, fascism assigned to others, genders “multiply” from two to many, “transgenderism” becomes a “human right,” marriage “re-defined” and child sacrifice legalized.
In the extreme, immaturity emerges. One thinks of the liberal state legislators who fled the state of Wisconsin to avoid conceding power to their fairly elected opposition, or of U.S. Senator Charles Schumer’s obstructionist tactics intended to thwart America’s legislative business and peaceful governance, or of the bureaucracies use of “leaks” to scuttle an American Presidency.
Liberals were once better than this. Alas, they are no more what they once were.
In life we must choose – self alone, or self in the Spirit. That is: life with or life without God. The liberals mistake – life without God, life without Spirit. In this, as May notes, sanity is lost.
It profits one not at all to maintain discourse with those who forfeit sanity. The mere semblance of dialogue with them destroys one’s own sanity – individual or nation.
We live in strange times.
Shalom.
The problem of living … begins in the relation to our own selves, in handling our physiological and emotional functions.
Abraham Joshua Heschel, in Man is Not Alone
+ + +
Rabbi Heschel makes a very important point: to live well – to live in a healthy and stable and contented manner – we must confront ourselves. The task of living is personal. Yes, even sacred – especially sacred.
Called into being, it is best to know why you are here and how you are called to be – not in a vocational sense, but rather in the fullest manner of human existence, which is in essence spiritual existence.
When you think about the absolute importance of this task of intimate knowing of self (and in the doing – knowing of God our Creator and Initiator) you might look around and ask: if we are to know our self, how is it that so many focus on knowing themselves by being part of a group? A political group? A herd of one sort or another?
Are we just feminists? Homosexuals? Democrats? Socialists?
Are these identities not just superficial? Are they not reductionist?
Do they not say so much less about us than what we might actually and accurately say about our self by simply saying: I am a human being, a spiritual being?
American author Midge Decter commenting on feminism offered that freedom created the contemporary “women’s movement” insofar as the broad range of freedom and opportunity in American society “frightens … [today’s woman] and disorients her and burdens her terribly … (and that) the movement offers her the … escape contained in the idea that she is not free at all.” [Emphasis added.] (See: “You’re On Your Own, Baby,” The Women’s Quarterly, Winter 1996, p. 4.)
If you think Ms. Decker is wrong, ask yourself this simple question: Is it not the case that the disordered people you know frequently have ignored knowing fully who they are in favor of some concocted notion of a life image that they alone design – a false and unexamined identity, frequently a “herd” identity?
Is not our age one in which people avoid the hard work of critical and honest self-examination in favor of group identity? Do we not from this see the reduction and destruction in “identity politics” and all the idiotic and childish folly and division that such hollow, plastic, much-to-do-about nothing “identity” discourse brings us?
Neglecting the task of knowing self has its great costs – and they are personal, interpersonal, familial, and societal. We seem to live in age of foolish and sick distraction.
Think about it.
Shalom.
Without God people only succeed in bringing out the worse in one another.
Fulton J. Sheen
+ + +
Yes, without God we are a wreck, create chaos, division and hostility. Without God, things are destroyed. Marriage. Community. Peace. A person. Even a Nation.
Wonder where we are? Why we are unhappy? Fearful? Antagonistic? Petty? Foolish? Irritating? Confused? Divided? No God. That’s why.
Listen to the discussion about the election and the state of life in the U.S. Does anyone – commentators or candidates – mention God? The place of belief in community? In a people who claim a nationhood? You know the answer; and, it is, “No.”
And the scribes and intellectuals – what wisdom do they offer on the importance of God to the human person, to community, to a nation, to America, Western Civilization? The answer, of course, is “None.”
We are lost. Without meaning and purpose. Without direction.
Have you heard one insightful word from the nominal figure in the White House in eight years? Again, “No.” Rather we hear only ideological gibberish from the Left and those transfixed on doctrines of race, gender, class, etc. With each word they destroy and subtract from the sum of human knowledge. What a mess.
It is the language and experience of God, not government, that we need. Yes, shrink government and grow God is the prescription for the sickness that is killing us.
We are in need of fixing and the fixing is as to the Spirit, as to each of us and who we really are in being human, capable of love of others rather than, and self-sacrifice, honor and virtue. But, no one speaks of this so we might know and heal. In the absence – disorder and inevitable collapse.
Father, bring us back to You …
Shalom.
Postscript – Dear Mr. Putin – Can you please put me on the list of those receiving top secret emails disclosing our national security secrets? I understand that Chelsea Clinton, Anthony Weiner and others have these emails on their computers. I don’t want to be the only one “out of the loop.”
Spirlaw 