Sunday Assembly 2 Sep 1960
FEAR
I read that part of MacMillan’s speech because it’s an example, an illustration, of the thing that stands most in our way of whether we are nations, a whole world facing its problems, or whether we are individuals. Fear stands in the way and fear that is partly real and partly unreal. No nation in the world wants to attack another nation because it knows that the result will be disastrous, and yet every nation is afraid of being attacked, but because we are paralysed by this fear we can do nothing. Now think of fear, not only in that enormous context, but in your own lives. Is fear necessary – wouldn’t human life be better without it? Well, fear is necessary - we couldn’t do without it. Like pain and suffering, life is quite unimaginable without it. When people complain about the hard things of life, like fear, pain and suffering, they ought to think for a moment whether life would be possible wihtout (sic) them. I think you would very quickly find that life would be impossible without them. If there were no such thing as pain, for instance, what would it matter if you just dropped out of a top storey window? It wouldn’t matter, because not only would you feel no pain, even if you broke yourself in several places, for instance, but also your friends and relations would feel no pain, would feel no sorrow at your departure, so hang it all, what would it matter? Practically everything in life is reduced to nonsense if we do without pain or if we try to think of it without pain and without suffering. And life would be unworkable, totally unworkable, if there were no such thing as fear. If you didn’t fear the effect of putting your finger in the fire, you would quite often put your finger in it. If you didn’t fear what might happen on A1 you would just, in a crazy manner cross it and be eliminated. So obviously fear is a very necessary protection. But fear can be either fear of real things or fear of unreal things. If I go out on A1 and I am afraid of a collision and I drive carefully as a result, I am afraid of something quite real, because very frequently there are collisions on the A1, one actually sees them, afterwards, if not at the time when they happen. That is a real thing – what about unreal things? Well all of us have unreal fears – irrational fears. You have to remember that feelings can be irrational, just as thoughts can be irrational. It’s irrational to say that 2 and 2 make 5, but it’s equally irrational to fear a burglar visiting your house. When I was a boy I used to soak myself in stories of the jungle, especially stories of the Brazilian jungle which seemed to be full of alligators and poisonous snakes and enormous pythons, that had men regularly for a titbit. The result of this was that whenever I went to bed I always looked under the bed before I switched the light out to make quite sure that there wasn’t a python or a rattle snake waiting under the bed. And quite often, having got into bed I would get out of bed and switch on the light and look under the bed again, to make quite sure there wasn’t a snake under the bed. Well that is an irrational fear, because it is a fear of something that can’t possibly be there. And a good many of our fears are like that and we often start off our life with a lot of irrational fears and we have to grow up slowly getting rid of them. Think of some of the fears that probably quite frequently come to you. One of the commonest fears of mankind is the fear of isolation, the fear of being left with no friends, nobody to care for you. Perhaps it’s the deepest fear of all mankind – the fear of being cut off, and the fear of the madness that would result being utterly alone. But in a minor fear minor form, that comes to people when they are afraid of not being liked, and that’s a fear that comes to practically everybody except the swelled-headed and conceited. And it’s worth-while thinking how much that is a real fear and how much it is an unreal fear. Perhaps there is a bit of reality in it because most of us make ourselves unlikeable sometimes. Having made ourselves unlikeable we wonder for a moment whether anybody can put up with us. But I think we should always remember that nobody is to blame completely unlikeable, and that nearly everybody, when one knows them well, is likeable. We neednt (sic), if we are open and honest with people, and we let people get to know us, we need have no fear of not being liked. As I have said, nearly everyone, once one reaches the inner parts of their personality, is likeable. Another fear that often besets people is the fear of the opinions of the crowd. Now that again is partly both unreal fear and partly a real fear. The crowd is mainly dangerous in that it makes us afraid to be honest, makes us afraid to speak the truth when we ought to, makes us afraid to take action when we ought to take action. But quite often the crowd is ready to be led by a courageous person who is honest when he ought to be honest and speaks up when he ought to speak up. And so we ought not to let ourselves be paralysed by fear of the crowd. This is perhaps the most important or one of the most important fears to be got rid of, fear of the voice, the looks, the cutting remarks of the crowd. Its (sic) important not to be afraid of the crowd when youre (sic) trying to cultivate just the matter of taste – how to dress with discrimination and care, not to allow yourself, especially if you are a girl, to be caught into a fashion just because it is a fashion, but in point of fact it might be a vulgar and an ugly one. The crowd can work its way in all sorts of subtle ways into your mind, producing fears that count for an awful lot but of which you are hardly aware. And the fear of the crowd sometimes makes you afraid of looking a fool. I remember that one of the things that worried me as a youngster, that I might do something that would foolish what would make me look just plain silly in the eyes of other people. I used to have difficulty in going into a shop, and if it was a shop that sold that didn’t sell the particular thing I wanted, I felt a bit of a fool as I came out for having asked for it in that shop. And I still do suffer from that kind of thing if I’m out with friends in the country and we want tea somewhere and there is no sign of a place where we can get te[a]s (sic). I’m not the sort of person who can go up to a cottage door and say “Could you possibly provide us with tea?” whereas some of my friends would walk very boldly up to such and (sic) cottage and charm the people into being absolutely delighted to provide us with tea. I wish I was that sort of person, but I’m just not and that is one of those irrational fears that I shall probably have to put with to the end of my days. Another fear that dogs us, when we are growing up specially, is the fear of failure. I mentioned that last time. That’s a fear you have got to come to terms with, because failure in some measure, is the lot of everyone, as I have said. Only a few people really achieve their greatest ambitions. I read the profiles of people in the New Scientist and in the Observer – the people who have got to the top and done just what they wanted to do, and I have to say to myself “I’m not that sort of person, but what does it hang matter it all, what does it matter?” It’s far more important to know how to digest your failures, to face them and put up with them, far more important than it is to get to the top of the tree, because a person who knows how to face and accept his failures, in the end, in a quiet way, counts for so much more. I have mentioned a few real fears like the fear of being knocked down on the road, which makes you careful on your bicycle or in walking or in a car, and there are other real fears that may take hold of us just too much. One of the real fears I have had to put up with, and I am gradually coming to terms with it, is the fear of a plane crash, which in my first long journeys passing over the Sahara or over the Mediterranean, had me almost paralysed. Now the folly of that kind of fear is that it prevents you from enjoying yourself. And after all, if you are going to be obliterated in an hour’s time, why not enjoy what you can see in the meantime? It’s just silly to be paralysed. I’ve practically got over that fear now, but remembering it I see how silly it was. It’s an example of the way in which fear can paralyse you and because it can paralyse you, it’s terribly important that you should learn how to conquer it. Now lots of people have been in frightening situations, and they have had to somehow or other find courage. How have they done so? Not, I think, by telling themselves that they ought to be courageous, there is a courage of desperation that comes to people sometimes, but it isn’t the most important kind of courage (sic) or the courage that sustains people for very long. You can’t just by telling yourself to be brave, be brave. I think that courage has to be given you by some Courage, I think, is given us by relationships, by friendship, by being in the community to which we belong. It’s most significant that people who come from a lively, vigorous, united family are the people who can face, most bravely, the difficulties that the world has to offer. The experience of the family gives them the courage to face the world. And I believe that the quality of the community life that we do, I believe, establish in this school, gives people who go out of this school, courage to face a world that’s very different from it. Now it’s here that I want to say something about the significance of religion and especially the significance of Jesus in the life of a very large number of people. Although there may be many of them who can’t yet accept the significance of Christ or the significance of the Christian religion, you have all of you, I believe, been moved when I read you the stories of the victims, for instance, of the Gestapo prisons and how in their last moments they were given a serenity and a courage and a peace by the thought of the faith they had derived from Christianity, and the thought of the way in which Jesus met his tragic end, despised and spat upon by the very people who had previously applauded him. Somehow or other that tremendous example has given courage to millions of people in moments of extremity and finally extermination, and we ought to think why. Go back again to the thought of a friendship, a good friendship – an intimate friendship, in which people can exchange their views and their intimate thoughts, does give each one of them the power to cope with life better, and it’s one of the things by which you can judge friendship. If there isn’t something coming out of the friendship that makes you a more courageous person, a person who is more able to face the difficulties, then that friendship is in some sense inadequate and needs to be deepened in some way or other, or it may be that it is a trivial one. You see, to many people, what remains to us of the account of the life of Jesus in the Gospels speaks in an astonishingly vivid way of a man and of the kind of friendships that he made so that the personality of Jesus comes right out of the pages and enters into the lives of the people who read them, and it’s by that kind of experience that the people have been given the courage that he himself had. Now what is the significance of the religious community? A religious community or group or church to which people belong somehow or other intensifies and holds together this feeling I’ve just described. I’ve just referred to the way in which my own religious community has occasionally given astonishing courage to people in a frightful situation. I’m thinking of two men I knew who were pacifists and conscientious objectors in the first world war. I’m not speaking of this in order to urge pacifism or conscientious objection, but just to show what membership of a religious community did for two men in an extreme situation. In the first world war there were tribunals set up which were much more harsh than any tribunal in the second world war, in which pacifists were bullyragged and humiliated and taunted by the local grocers and whoever it might be that was set up on a local tribunal, taunted and laughed at, and some of them were deliberately put into the army in order to make it rough for them. Two were, and they were forcibly dressed in khaki and forcibly taken abroad into the battle zone and told to obey orders. Both these men refused to obey orders. Now if you are in khaki, a member of the armed forces, and refuse to obey orders, the result is a court-martial, and death. They were threatened that if they refused to obey orders, they would be court-martialled and shot. They both refused to obey orders. They were court-martialled and they were sentenced to be shot. But from government information the government acted just in time to prevent them being shot. Now in the case of both these men, what is important in this supported them in this extremely lonely experience (it’s much harder to be courageous when you are alone than when you are in a crowd of other people all doing the same thing); what supported them in this lonely experience was the knowledge that they had behind them the love of and the faith of all the other people in the religious community of which they were members. So if we want to be courageous, it’s important that we should be members of some kind of community that helps us to maintain some sort of faith. You see a community or a provides us with love, and as that reading I gave you from the Epistle of St. John says, perfect love casts out fear. That’s the experience of people in marriage. Marriage is an experience that makes you more open to fear. If you are alone, are just a bachelor, you can go into any part of the world and say well, what’s it matter? I can try to cross the Atlantic in a 12 ft boat and I sink – well nobody’s going to be very much the worse for my death, so what the hell? – let’s try it. Or you can indulge in any other dangerous adventure knowing that nobody will suffer seriously as the result of your departure. But when you are married and you’ve got children, you become much more vulnerable and lots of things that wouldn’t otherwise frighten you begin to frighten you, because you know that you have serious responsibilities and other people will suffer intensely if they lose you. But at the same time marriage, ig (sic) it is the kind of marriage I’m speaking of, provides you with precisely the kind of love that casts out, or rather conquers, that fear, and enables the people concerned to remain together to face situations that would be otherwise too much for them, and some of the finest examples of courage shown in the world have been the kinds of courage shown by married people facing extreme difficulties. Often when I’ve heard that phrase quoted, when I was younger, that love casts out fear, I thought there must be a contradiction in the Bible, because it so often refers to the fear of the Lord, or the fear of God. There is the saying for instance, that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and the Old Testament is full of references that the fear of God is a good thing. And I wondered, as a youngster, how you could possibly fit these two things together, the idea of a loving God and the idea of a God that you had to fear. Until I began to realise the kind of man to whom they are referring when they think of a man who does not fear God. What kind of man is he? He is a man who is pigheaded, the man who is conceited, the man who thinks he can do anything. That is the man who doesn’t fear God. And so, this fear of God that they refer to is really something like humanity. The man who says I’m not a man who knows everything; I’m not, by myself, a man who can cope with anything. I’m a man who has fears and worries and anxieties, but because there is love in the world, because there is love in God, I can live in this world and overcome my fear, I can cope with my anxieties, I can deal with my difficulties. And that, I think, is what they were thinking of, when they were thinking of the man who fears God - a man who has humility, who knows his weaknesses and who knows that he needs help. And thus they came, in the New Testament, to a clearer expression of what was meant by all this. Because the man who is humble, both in relation to his fellows and his relation to God, is the person who becomes loved by his fellows and who knows the love of God.
Archive reference PP/KCB 3/7/3 document 36