turn the lights on
These days it seems that vitriol reigns as king. I am amazed at the anger, snarling, and arrogance that is pumping through the airwaves from men and women that we call “leaders.” Without the slightest blush politicians, pastors, media personalities, and reporters routinely name call, spread misinformation, and smear the reputation of anyone who dare disagree with them. Which leads me to believe that we are a nation built on fear.
My psychologist friend David Beighley once told me that anger is built on fear. He believed that if you find a person who is angry you have found a person gripped by fear. I tend to agree with him. Fear engenders all sorts of responses from people – anxiety, violence, blaming the other, increase in vocal volume (yelling), insults, etc. – all of these are angry responses.
If this is the case, then what is fear built on? Often times, it seems that fear is built on ignorance (willful or otherwise). Let’s be honest uncertainty scares the hell out of us. The legendary film director Alfred Hitchcock knew this. In many of his scariest movies, he simply never revealed the very thing that instilled such fear in his audiences.
In the film “Signs”, by M. Night Shyamalan, he imitated Hitchcock by not showing the aliens that were causing such a panic. At the end of the film he finally showed one of the aliens, and the overwhelming response of audiences nationwide was, “It ruined the movie when he showed the alien.” Why? Because once we saw it for what it was, fear began to fade.
Which brings us back to the vitriol, which reigns as king, coursing throughout this land of ours. Is it possible that many are so angry because they are simply afraid of something they know little about?
The Apostle John tells us, “There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear …” (1 John 4.18). And what is love? Love, at some level, is about knowing and being known. Love is about transparency and vulnerability. Love is about full disclosure without comparison and contrast or punitive judgment. Love says, “I know everything about you – even your deepest, darkest, dirtiest secrets – and I love you just the way you are, and way too much to let you stay that way.” When we encounter love, we encounter open embrace.
Last year some friends of ours had a Halloween Party for a bunch of kiddos. In their basement they set up a little “haunted house” which amounted to little more than a few black lights and a couple of curtains. Within five minutes of my daughter going downstairs I heard her begin to cry; she was scared. On the way down the stairs I flipped on the overhead lights. She stopped crying almost immediately when she saw the basement that she had played in so many times. Once she saw it for what it was, there was no more fear.
Love does this. She turns on the light inside each of us. Love liberates us from fear, and when we let that light shine, our presence liberates others from their fear (Willamson, Return to Love, page 191).
With love, there is nothing left that is unknown. Perhaps this is why men and women who understand themselves to be beloved sons and daughters of God can face hatred, bigotry, and even death threats without fear (For an example of this see Martin Luther King, Jr.).
For MLK he understood love so deeply, that when he faced hatred he understood it for what it was. His wife, Coretta Scott King, once said that they would speak about when he would be assassinated, not if he would be. Yet, even this looming threat did not cause him to fear. How do we know this? Because MLK was a man who was open to the omnipresent flow of God's love, and therefore was one from whom love flowed – even toward those who hated him the most.
As followers of Jesus, we need to wake up to who we are. Beloved sons. Beloved daughters. Children of a God who loves us, and everyone, desperately. We need not give ourselves over to more misinformation or ignorant polemics. Those just keep us in the dark. It’s time to turn the light on, and to allow love to reign as king.