The divine command, "Be not afraid," can not mean, "Stop feeling what you are feeling," because that's absurd and demonstrably harmful. Generations who have tried to stop feeling have proven this by projecting their fear and shame onto scapegoats.
And "Be not afraid," can not mean that "God is in control," in the classic theological sense, because this is demonstrably false, as well. (If this troubles you because of the way you've been taught to see God through a particular understanding of the bible, I can't help you. I could say, read history rather than the story of God imagined by ancient Hebrews, or simply look around, but I know that tribal truth is your buffer against the deception of subjectivity. There is no argument against such a strongly felt identity.)
What then might it mean to Be not afraid? I'd like to ask a Hebrew language scholar who doesn't come with Platonic assumptions about perfection and omnipotence. Maybe there's some poetry in the original that suggests understandings that are hard for moderns to imagine. I don't know.
All I can offer is my own experience. I take the common divine statement, "Be not afraid," as an appeal to listen to the authoritative voice that has communicated this invitation to mystics for millennia.
The authority of "IR" (Ineffable Reality) comes from seeing all even if IR clearly doesn't control all. (I know that attributing sight and voice to IR is anthropomorphizing, go with it, or don't. I'm assuming that there's something to the depths of the ancient wisdom that is worth contemplating, namely, a God I'm call IR, that consistently invites us to be unafraid.
Back to my experience:
I feel fear
I hear the voice say, "Be not afraid"
I stop in my tracks and say, "What?! Are you seeing what I'm seeing?"
I get a "Yes, but..."
Already something good has happened. I'm still wide awake about the troubling reality, whatever it is, but I'm open and attentive to new and previously unimaginable possibilities. It's no longer a thinly plotted story with a catastrophic ending that I've already written in my mind. The story of my fear is thickened. I experience the truth that I don't know what's going to happen and that there are infinite possible outcomes. I'm no less aware that these outcomes may be horrifying, but I'm not caught in the narrow echo chamber of my individual fear.
Often the "conversation" with IR stops here. I understand that there's no more to say, my life must be lived without foreknowledge. But sometimes fear and this thickening experience is the beginning of a longer conversion about what I might do or say in the limited sphere over which I exercise some small influence. Other times this experience leads to an extended creative silence where I'm opening my imagination to see the possibilities that are currently hidden.
"The bigness of the world is redemption. Despair compresses you into a small space, and a depression is literally a hollow in the ground. To dig deeper into the self, to go underground, is sometimes necessary, but so is the other route of getting out of yourself, into the larger world, into the openness in which you need not clutch your story and your troubles so tightly to your chest."
-- Rebecca Solnit
And "Be not afraid," can not mean that "God is in control," in the classic theological sense, because this is demonstrably false, as well. (If this troubles you because of the way you've been taught to see God through a particular understanding of the bible, I can't help you. I could say, read history rather than the story of God imagined by ancient Hebrews, or simply look around, but I know that tribal truth is your buffer against the deception of subjectivity. There is no argument against such a strongly felt identity.)
What then might it mean to Be not afraid? I'd like to ask a Hebrew language scholar who doesn't come with Platonic assumptions about perfection and omnipotence. Maybe there's some poetry in the original that suggests understandings that are hard for moderns to imagine. I don't know.
All I can offer is my own experience. I take the common divine statement, "Be not afraid," as an appeal to listen to the authoritative voice that has communicated this invitation to mystics for millennia.
The authority of "IR" (Ineffable Reality) comes from seeing all even if IR clearly doesn't control all. (I know that attributing sight and voice to IR is anthropomorphizing, go with it, or don't. I'm assuming that there's something to the depths of the ancient wisdom that is worth contemplating, namely, a God I'm call IR, that consistently invites us to be unafraid.
Back to my experience:
I feel fear
I hear the voice say, "Be not afraid"
I stop in my tracks and say, "What?! Are you seeing what I'm seeing?"
I get a "Yes, but..."
Already something good has happened. I'm still wide awake about the troubling reality, whatever it is, but I'm open and attentive to new and previously unimaginable possibilities. It's no longer a thinly plotted story with a catastrophic ending that I've already written in my mind. The story of my fear is thickened. I experience the truth that I don't know what's going to happen and that there are infinite possible outcomes. I'm no less aware that these outcomes may be horrifying, but I'm not caught in the narrow echo chamber of my individual fear.
Often the "conversation" with IR stops here. I understand that there's no more to say, my life must be lived without foreknowledge. But sometimes fear and this thickening experience is the beginning of a longer conversion about what I might do or say in the limited sphere over which I exercise some small influence. Other times this experience leads to an extended creative silence where I'm opening my imagination to see the possibilities that are currently hidden.
"The bigness of the world is redemption. Despair compresses you into a small space, and a depression is literally a hollow in the ground. To dig deeper into the self, to go underground, is sometimes necessary, but so is the other route of getting out of yourself, into the larger world, into the openness in which you need not clutch your story and your troubles so tightly to your chest."
-- Rebecca Solnit
