Too Scared to Love: an Essay on Fear, Love & the Gaze

FEAR & GOSPEL

“Perfect Love Casts out all Fear,” so the writer of the Epistle of 1 John tells us.

In a world of so much fear, and so little love, one is left to wonder if there is indeed a perfect love that can handle the level of fear that seems to be inundating our worlds, our communities and our lives.

Fear of being nothing motivates us. Fear of losing everything makes us work harder. Fear of being ignorant makes us study. Fear of never being loved makes us pursue those filled with fear and unable to love in return with even more abandon.

Fear negotiates the world. It even negotiates our relationship to one whom we call The Christ. Were it not for fear, the fear of God, one wonders if fear could have become such a common currency.

It is used by so many, understood by so few. Fear is the Lord of the world.

Perfect love casts out fear? Really? Into what context does this even make sense…?

The Gospel’s knew something about fear.

They knew whoever controlled the mechanism of fear controlled the masses and their behavior. Yet, the Gospel attempts at multiple levels to dispel fear in some uniquely concrete ways that are lost on us when we read it as a story of details, rather than a narrative of provocation.

At multiples places in the Gospel the very thing that causes fear (principally the unknown) is resolved through a state of overcoming that which is feared.

In other words, fear is defeated by fear that is directed toward the redemption of fear.

The remainder of this redemption is no longer a love gone awry…a love that is misdirected because it is directed by fear, and therefore unloving, but a love that is so perfect that it can cast our fear.

Fear has been redeemed to become otherwise than itself through a dreadful event.

There is nothing more fearful than a dead person emerging from a borrowed tomb…yet there is nothing more redemptive than the ultimate fear of death lying lifelessly dead beside one whom the earth could not contain…The Christ simply giving it a passing glance as he slowly walks by.

This is paranormalChrist at his finest. An Example of the perfect love of God casting out the fear that threatens all of us constantly.

But the resurrection is not the only fearfully fearless redemptive act that redirects a love gone awry.

Others places in the Gospel remind us that Jesus came into the fearful situation of calming storms. These situations are unique because it speaks volumes about the Gospels mission to step directly into situations wherein fear is the arbiter of reality and denounce it as a misdirected affection. It is no coincidence that the stories do not primarily serve a purely Christological function, as much as they serve to renarrate the world we receive.

No doubt, the incarnation of God in one whom we call The Christ is a renarration par excellence, but such renarration does not occur because we have been able to precisely determine the ontological significance of the Historical Jesus. The stories don’t serve as perichoretic marking points.

The stories serve as confrontations with rulers, with archetypes, with paradigms of seeing the world that are now made new because the Christ has been his paranormal self and defied the natural order of things via God’s perfect love for the world…a love that castes out fear in every situation because what we fear most, our deaths, is now no longer something that should be feared.

Remember, Death is still lying outside the tomb lifelessly dead, its vibrancy and sting negated via the Christ and his stubborn refusal to remain subject to Hades.

This doesn’t only mean that now fear has been dealt a death blow via the death of death, though it certainly may mean at least as much. It also means that the supernatural perception of the Christ, the powers that allow him to calm fear, to suspend deaths final grasping, is not bound to his X-Men capabilities as much as it is bound to the simple things we miss about The Christ.

Fear cannot be defeated with greater fear.

Christ does not defeat fear in the world via the death of death with a greater coercive strength to make death die.

It is not with force that Christ resurrects himself nor is it with force and great chaos that Christ speaks stillness into the brooding clouds and churning seas of life that would love nothing more but to overtake our beings, who we are, and sink our dreams and potentials into the watery abyss below.

Fear is not defeated with a greater fear…that simply makes it stronger and more resistant.

What fear and death cannot resist, and what can thereby redeem love gone awry, is perfect love.

Perfect love that is characterized via The Christ as: perfect words, perfect presence, perfect patience, prefect space…a space that receives perfect love in simplicity and is filled with so much love that fear itself no longer has habitable room.

There is very literally no room at the inn where perfect love resides.

Moment of fear: The Crucifixion

Moment of love: Today you shall be with me in paradise…words spoken into immeasurable violence and death wishes thrown all around us.

Moment of fear: The perfect Storm

Moment of love: Peace be still…words of peace spoken into hearts filled with dread.

Moment of fear: My life is moving toward death

Moment of love: Death is not the final word…God actively raising Jesus and giving Jesus the gift of resurrection.

*And for a contemporary application…

Moment of fear: People all around us so filled with fear that their fear has produced a love gone awry

Moment of love: embracing the paranormalChrist and being a presence of spoken love that gives fear no safe harbor.

The Gospel is filled with saying no to fear, yet it is by fears we have been living and through fear our love has gone awry…and we have mistaken our fears for the things that we love even as the things that we love seek to be destroyed because fear does not allow us to fully love what we have been given to love.

We do not know how to love and surrender power through love.

We do not know how to receive love that is not seeking to gain something from us.

We do not know of a love that seeks the benefit and wholeness of the Other because we love through our fear of self satisfaction.

We do not know that love is not about control; it’s not about infinite demand.

We do not know that perfect love is self-kenotic…a self-kenosis that incarnates a love that is more than ourselves and creates a world so utterly foreign that it lends its audience to ask, “Can this be the Christ?”

Surely salvation/healing doesn’t look like this!

We are so fearful of losing everything or not being fulfilled or getting our way that our fears have characterized our affections and disguised themselves as pure motives when all they really do is keep us from loving and precipitate the destruction of our worlds…one nation, one community, one home, one person at a time.

Fear does not give life…it steals it…which is precisely why The Christ had to steal the greatest fear of them all.

Fear does not have the final word; It doesn’t get to write the end of the story.

Love and the Gaze

Our world is one with fear and trembling before the very numinous presence of a multitude selves unaware and it has become the catalyst for our narcissism and the infinite demands such places on those around us.

We know that fear is persistent and structurating because our world is in disrepair. A world guided by perfect love does not fall apart; its seams remain tight and colorful, keeping reality sewn neatly together…but fear unravels the seams and slowly pulls reality apart…because fear cannot understand what it cannot see…that it doesn’t really exist.

There is nothing to fear because fear is no-thing.

The nothing of fear has held love hostage…and love has gone awry…its very presence being questioned and its idea being lost.

And this takes multiple forms.

The chiefest form that is encountered by the many of us is the fear that holds us hostage to the gaze of the other…or perhaps we are the other that holds the world hostage in our own gaze.

The gaze is the view into reality wherein the subject, the person, is the all knowing, seeing, desiring eye, by which all of life is held to account.

There is nothing outside the gaze…no greater perspective than the gaze. It is penetratingly stubborn and inhospitable because it desires to see all things without adjusting its view…without discovering that it’s a gaze that is founded upon the fear of really not seeing what is there to be seen.

So long as the gaze can hold the world in its view, it sees what it wants as such desires are generated out of the fear to really see the world for more than it is. To see the world for more is to see its own self negation, to be on the road to seeing a world marked by beautiful subjectivity rather than fearful controlling of the subjects/objects that comprise the world.

So long as the all seeing eye of the gaze is lost in its specter of fear…love will remain distant because love is the impossibility of real relationality that the gaze has lost in its own sight.

The gaze becomes its own worst enemy because the very thing it is attempting to achieve, i.e., peace and happiness, is alluded its sight because it has failed to grasp that peace is not the product of seeing and demanding…holding the world in debt to its vision.

As Gerard Wajcman notes in describing a central thesis on the gaze:

“the central thesis that rules the hypermodern world- that all of the Real is visible- is itself animated by an implicit correlative thesis: If all of the real is visible, then all that is not visible is not Real.” (Lacanian Ink 38, “The Universal Eye and the Limitless World”).

It is little wonder that a world lost in the gaze of a love gone awry, one fueled by fear and disenchanted by what could be real by what is “real,” is incapable of seeing past its own fear and into a world of new creation that doesn’t just expand the gaze but negates it in its totality.

Real love, real relationality, is absent, not because fear has the final word, and thereby also death its closest partner, but because death and fear are what is visible and real…while the real moments of love that could be spoken into existence are seen as not real because they are not…they are not in the gaze.

And thus the vicious cycle recurs.

Those who want love the most…are also those whose love has gone awry because it is founded on fear and not in the simplicity of a spoken presence that reshapes the world one syllable, one touch, at a time.

Such perfect love simply does not exist in the gaze.

Peace is the result of loving past the fear, past the sense of happiness founded upon the fear of not controlling or having, past the sense that everyone around us is held hostage to the debt of the perception of the gaze.

“Perfect love Casts our fear…” the writer of the Johannine Epistle tells us.

As long as we continue to love from fear we are never really loving; we are only fearing to love.

…and as long as we fear to love because we have confused love with the needs of the gaze, we as a culture and society will continue to become dismembered, continue to spiral into despair and continue to be our own worst enemies in our quest for what all human beings want…

Love, peace and happiness as can only come from one who emerges from the tomb, stops, directs his gaze at us and confidently says, “Fear Not.”