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For reasons which may become apparent as we go, I spent more time than I would like to admit deciding if I would call this morning's talk Fear and Grace, or Grace and Fear. Symbolically this distinction really makes a difference to me. Over the weekend, when I had taken a walk - one of my favorite things to do - and had spent easy enjoyable time in conversation with my friend visiting from Tahoe, and felt relaxed and so aware of the utter beauty of the landscape around me, it was definitely Grace and Fear, grace was a calm if at times transparent surety and fear a yapping lap dog not aware of its actual relation to the larger world. Mid-week, struggling with the stresses and concerns I worry away at in my head, that pile up in the mailbox and crowd out peaceful sleep, it was, of course Fear and Grace, grace the evanescent, naive and insubstantial hope, overpowered by the malevolent and powerful stare of a brute three-headed Cerberus, in control of who goes in and out of his dark kingdom.

We all know fear, we each and every one of us has her and his own particular nightmares and terrors, deep threats, most vulnerable areas, carefully built up over a life time - how else the creation of the horror genre, or a show like "Fear Factor" - which I've never seen, but maybe it is worse, or better, in the imagination. In fact, when I think about it, most literature and film rely on the ubiquitousness of human fear at some level. But grace, what of grace? When I told my mother, a Unitarian in Massachusetts, I was thinking about these notions, her first response was "wow, that's not a very Unitarian topic is it?" Now, she may have been talking about fear - as a whole Unitarians seem to focus, at least outwardly, more on action and ideas and not so much on emotion, but I think she was referring to grace. Grace is not typically bandied about by Unitarians, as it is a word that is usually followed by the phrase "of God", as in "and the grace of God came upon him", or "there but the grace of God go I". It was one of those odd synchronies, then, that when I was spoke with my grandmother, a lifelong Unitarian, about it, she just happened to be in the midst of listening to a book on Augustine - no Unitarian - who had quite a lot to say about grace, as many Christians do. And the crux of the problem for Unitarians and Christian grace, it seems, is that traditionally grace is connected to faith in the authority of God, and Unitarians, well, we are not. So were does that leave us? Certainly, some of us may be without a traditional God, but we are not without grace. This morning I'd like to consider grace, with its companion - lap-dog or Cerberus - fear, and translate it into a more recognizable and accessible version for us Unitarians.

So let's look at fear first. We probably know more about it, or at least are more aware of it anyway, most of us. Now, we are used to seeing the biological and emotional components of fear. Biologically, we are all aware of the famed fight or flight response. We also know that the original research which produced those options was conducted only on men, and when women were included in the equation other alternatives, like relating and processing, were recognized. But still, in terms of fear, the body's response to threat is activation, vigilance, arousal. I wouldn't call it fear so much as startle, responsiveness, taking action to protect. But the feeling component is something else: this I would call fear. The psychological - emotional - is more complex, growing out of our sensory experience but not in the present so much as in relation to our larger experience, so it includes dreading the future, worrying about decisions, ruminating on the past. It is the powerful and intricate mix of thoughts and memories and feelings connected with the experience of perceived threat, how we experienced it in the past, and how we anticipate it in the future. These are what we typically call fear. When I talk about fear today, I am considering it in terms of its spiritual implications as well, in terms of the meaning and effect of our fear on our life decisions, on our sense of place and freedom in the world and with others, on our stance in the world which grows out of whatever magnitude of physical arousal and intensity we have experienced, and is in relation to our felt experience and interpretations of what we call fear. This spiritual magnitude of fear directly affects our experience of our life, our choices, our perceived limitations, our degree of hope and possibility.

Fear is the ultimate spiritual question. Let's sit with this for a moment: Think for a moment about yourself and fear. Are you fearful? How does fear show up in your life? I'm a hugely cautious person - I keep a running balance in my check book, I make copies of everything official I send out, I buy replacements for household staples before they run out (some may call this obsessive compulsive). I plan and consider and keep track and anticipate& I worry, I try to create a safe life for myself& except when I don't, which is sometimes in some big ways, which is perhaps where grace may come in, a bit later. But for the most part I am cautious, even anxious, and yes, I would say, really, fearful. That it is up for me now in the way that it is, is something I associate with midlife. I wonder if 40 is a magical spiritual number: it rains for forty days and forty nights, Jesus spends forty days in the desert, how many days did Jonah spend in the belly of the whale? Jung wrote that only in mid-life did individuals individuate, really grappling with life's deeper and existential questions in the archetypal spiritual process of Self, capital "S", development. When I was a student of psychology, younger than my classmates, I was mildly offended by what felt like his bias toward an exclusive club. Now it seems more an observation than a bias - he felt the concerns of our twenties and thirties were necessary for that stage of life, significant but more subjectively focused and ego-related - and now that I have the arguable achievement of mid-life, in the midst of my 40 days in the desert, perhaps still knee-deep in sand, I feel the weighty pull of spiritual necessities, larger life questions, a depth of perspective I did not have ten years ago. Younger people, often, are more reckless, cannot or do not think so much about the future, they weigh options less, are afraid to sacrifice living for thinking, maybe because they feel more invincible. There is less depth and more breadth to their ranging lives. They tend to take more risks, not because they have more of a seasoned perspective that life is short and we are not alone, but because there are things they just want to do. They may be more responsive to - although not necessarily more aware of - their desires, interests, impulses, whims. Perhaps they let more life move through them, express through them. At mid-life we begin to be aware of a new perspective, or a need for a new perspective; maybe the roles we have created for ourselves, the different personas we wear, start to chafe, or we grow out of them, they do not feel so real, important or comfortable. Time is an issue, and decisions that have been put off, loom.

What am I so afraid of? For many years, waxing and waning, but like the moon usually at least a sliver in my consciousness, my habitual fear has been a vague but vivid sense of alienation, of feeling alone, and that it is my fault. I have much love and connection in my life. I know that. But we are talking about fear, not reason. I fear loss and failure. It is that bag lady fear that there is no other person, no cultural safety net, no external protection or comfort, and the internal resources are not sufficient to manage. This is fear of a spiritual dimension: intellectually I can recognize that an isolated person cannot really make it in the world alone. From a spiritual perspective, why would a person ever think it is possible? From the perspective of the interdependent web of the universe - beautiful but sometimes distant words - why could we think that a single baboon could thrive in the forest, or an ant in its own ant nest without all its toiling brethren, a single goose, silly goose, find its way south without the rest of the V to guide her, and why a woman, 30 or 40 or 15 or 90, could navigate the responsibilities and wonders of modern existence in Petaluma, CA, without the necessary association and support and comfort and expectations of those around her in her life. The subjective experience of this reality is, at times, terrifying. The cautious person is hoarding, fearful of subsistence, living in difficult times waiting for them to get worse, not able to let good times in, frightened by what could happen, perhaps wounded by what has happened, and lives in a smaller diminished world because of it. At times I am that person, and I weep for her.

Think of all the ways in which we live, afraid. Think of how we pass that fear on, to our family, to our loved ones, to the stranger we pass on the street. In our cautiousness we make others cautious, smaller. I can feel ways, see ways, in which it was passed on to me. As I become more and more aware of this tendency in myself, my fear, at this stage of life, is becoming more a fear of not living - though I am more am more aware of mortality, it is not really about death - but of not having important parts of life experience, and of not exploring or fulfilling parts of me that have not yet even been born and now may not ever be. This mid-life perspective makes me acutely aware of deep losses and disappointments, of failures. Partly this has to do with being far from my family and not having children, but it also is about not painting, not writing, not conversing frequently in depth, not knowing how to play the piano& living a life that is not as courageous and creative and alive as it can be. The notion of sin as a crime against oneself, of not having lived as one could or should, not having risked to live so, is strong. I can look back on all the careful constricting decisions and choices I have made, and say that fear limits my living - I am active, I risk in some ways others do not, succeed in some ways, but for myself, I know I keep much of me buried. Like the servant deemed unfaithful in the Parable of the Talents, when fearful I bury my self, my currency, for fear of losing it. When I do not risk, do not trust, and I fail myself.

Because I can't resist, I have to make a digression - or an expansion, which ever way you look at it - to the cultural arena for a second. We have to notice how our human tendency to be caught in fear is recognized, and sometimes manipulated, economically and politically. Who exactly is responsible for the thriving insurance industry? What about these terror alerts? Our vulnerability is constantly emphasized, usually to someone else's profit. How do you see the impact of this - what affect does it have? I see an increase in our sense of fear and alienation, of the use of projection, the proliferation of shame and judgment. Now, specifically, I won't even go into the curious timing of the urgent code orange, just following the Democratic National Convention, but its powerful effect is to sap energy and resources and focus, taking us away from something loving, communal, positive and hopeful. And it is telling of a prevailing tone in our culture today illustrated by a political cartoon my grandmother described to me: President Bush is sitting, serious, at his desk in the oval office, the seal above him with the eagle soaring, he is making an address; his spoken message is "All we have& is fear." I don't want to draw too painful a comparison to political differences, but this is a far cry from similar but vitally distinct words spoken in a different era. Remember "All we have to fear is fear itself"?

So what of Grace? Get a sense for a moment, what do you consider grace? Is it a real experience for you? What comes first to mind for me is an expansive peaceful feeling of connection with something larger, accompanied by conscious gratitude and appreciation. The feeling that something is right, and I am right there in this moment, experiencing it. David and I went camping in the Humbolt Redwoods this summer. One redwood standing as they stand, huge, tall, impossibly massive and impressive, is majestic, stupendous, awe-inspiring. But the forest of them, gathered, standing, seemingly eternal, is... well, an experience of grace. They each hold the impressive integrity of their size and age, and together they create an environment of community of this integrity and presence. The connection among them, their circles of growth, add that fourth dimension that grace seems to me to entail - yes they are tall, and wide and deep, but together the fourth dimension - that of meaning, significance, resonates in me, includes me in their grace. There is both intimacy and timelessness, inclusion and impersonality that is comforting. And then I put that experience in a context - I felt this when we were finally taking a break, I was relaxing after being extremely stressed, and it is clear that this was for me a moment free of fear.

Most descriptions of grace include what it is the grace is relieving. Hemingway said that "grace under pressure" defines "guts". Grace is connected with courage, and expressed within a context of pressure. O'Neill wrote that "Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue." Grace is, eternally, what allows us to mend. And Tillich wrote "Grace strikes us when we are in great pain and restlessness. It strikes us when we walk through the valley of a meaningless and empty life. ...a wave of light breaks into our darkness, and it is as though a voice were saying, 'you are accepted.' " In the context of living a human fallible life, fear and grace do seem like companions. We know that when we are in fear we are not in grace, and when we are in grace we are not in fear, and they are perhaps related by this inverse but necessary dynamic. West African Sobonfu Some, a transplanted spiritual teacher, addresses this connection, saying that fear is what happens when we fall out of grace:

In the Dagara tradition, Spirit brings the lessons of life through falls from grace. Crisis comes as the instigator of change; it takes you somewhere new, where you find a higher meaning and purpose. If you are going to learn and grow, you can't just be stuck in a particular place. Crisis breaks you out and creates the space for the Spirit to teach you. This breaking away from a place of stagnation, a place of comfort, and moving forward to a more perfect way is what we call a spiritual life... I tell you, it can be easy to take comfort in believing that one's misfortunes are caused by others... But that would mean not healing, being a prisoner in my own trap, fearful of change. Instead I have taken refuge in the words of one of my wisest teachers: my grandmother. "Failure is the best thing that can happen to you," she once said. The advice has stayed with me ever since, and has given me strength to find in my failure the paths to growth I would have otherwise overlooked. Again and again we fall from grace, and then we heal with the support of those around us. As we live our lives, this is what creates and defines our community.

Fear is a reality, but I do not think lingering ambient fear is something inherent to humans - it is grown through traumas and losses, nourished by temperament and emotional and cognitive patterns, learned from family history and style, reinforced by realities in our world, our culture. Yet while not inherent, it is certainly widespread, and one writer, Psychiatrist and spiritual teacher, Gerald May, has observed, through decades of his work with addictions and spirituality, that it is widespread because we misinterpret and avoid what is inherent. What is inherent in humans is a desire and longing for love, which only a few interpret as a desire for God, and many misinterpret as desire for the plentitude of all else - money, youth, alcohol, lying, work, success, beauty, order, drugs, food, power, all the things and ideas and patterns to which we cling, grasp, adapt, get attached, and, he thinks, get addicted. He writes that addiction is universal, and "exists wherever persons are internally compelled to give energy to things that are not their true desires". We get there through attachment, which "is the process that enslaves desire and creates the state of addiction". Our desire is not free. Grace, May believes, "is the only hope for dealing with addiction, the only power that can truly vanquish its destructiveness". We know about addictions, that they keep us focused on the concrete, on something outside ourselves, not aware of our deeper needs, realities. I will never forget a middle-of the-night post-modern airplane transfer experience I had in the United hub at the airport in Chicago, getting on a conveyer, and overhead a mechanical voice kept repeating, "please keep moving, do not get off the walkway, please keep moving, do not get off the walkway", with neon lights flashing on and off. With an over-stimulated external focus, always moving, never staying still, we never address our core issues. Perhaps fear is so widespread as the shadow of our culture of addiction, reflecting our lack of connection with deeply personal and interdependent spirituality.

In one of his many books, titled No Death, No Fear, Thich Nhat Hahn writes that we humans are most afraid of becoming nothing, of dying, and of the related smaller deaths of loss, separation, and failure. He writes, simply and kindly, that we are caught in ideas like birth and death, coming and going, thinking we are each separate little people, separate selves, who have our short little life span, and then there is emptiness, annihilation. This basic ignorance, this delusion, is the foundation of our suffering. If we could only open to the reality of no self, to impermanence, we would enter nirvana, the freedom from all ideas. I have often been drawn to Buddhism, but when I read it, it feels very intellectual, very conceptual to me, no matter how kindly it is written. But in this book there is a small section that gave me a moment of insight, so I will pass the meditation on to you: he talks about a wave:

When you look at the surface of the ocean, you can see waves coming up and going down. You can describe these waves in terms of high or low, big or small, more vigorous or less vigorous, more beautiful or less beautiful. You can describe a wave in terms of beginning or end, birth and death. That can be compared to the historical dimension. In the historical dimension, we are concerned with birth and death, more powerful, less powerful, more beautiful, less beautiful, beginning and end and so on.

Looking deeply, we can also see that the waves are at the same time water. A wave may like to seek its own true nature. The wave might suffer from fear, from complexes. A wave may say, 'I am not as big as the other waves', 'I am oppressed', 'I am not as beautiful as the other waves', 'I have been born and I have to die'. The wave may suffer from these things, these ideas. But if the wave bends down and touches her true nature she will realize that she is water. Then her fear and complexes will disappear.

Water is free from the birth and death of a wave. Water is free from high and low, more beautiful and less beautiful. You can talk in terms of more or less beautiful, high or low, only in terms of waves. As far as water is concerned, all these concepts are invalid.

Our true nature is the nature of no birth and no death. We do not have to go anywhere to touch our true nature. The wave does not have to look for water because she is water. We do not have to look for God, we do not have to look for our ultimate dimensions or nirvana, because we are nirvana, we are God.

You are what you are looking for. You are already what you want to become. Practice like a wave.

This is the process, symbolically, of the story of Psyche and Eros: the beautiful young girl is married to a monster, who she later discovers is the god of love, falls in love with him but is separated from him and has to work to reunite, proving herself to herself and to all the gods and goddesses; she has many trials and tasks, sorting the stuff and details of life, seeking gold from impossible places, needing much help from birds and beasts and bugs, gods and the very waters and winds, who all take pity on her in her human plight. When she and Eros are reunited they give birth to a lovely daughter and call her Pleasure. The uniting of psyche or soul, with spirit, the union of human and divine, creating pleasure, is this not a story of finding grace? Grace is truly experiencing the moment of pleasure and joy in life, an unmediated connection that is fleeting. I think about the Olympic athletes, these people, children many of them, who are the best at what they do in the world. Yet they have good days and bad, they spin out and fall over on their backs or to their knees or on their faces, and get up and do it again. They can get a 8.43 one day that makes their teammates veer away from them, and the next, get a 9.765 that gives them a gold medal by a margin of one hundredths of a point. Yet the grace in them, aside from the physical astonishment of what their bodies can do, the grace in them is not the moment they stand on the pedestal with all eyes on them and have the gold medal draped around their neck, no, from my perspective, the grace in them occurs in the private embodied moments of risk, in the experience of running the race that feels right, exerting completely in an all-out creation of personal physical expression, doing their ultimate best at the best of moments, that turns out to be, comparatively, a medal winner, or not. Some have their moments of grace and the judges miss it, or don't agree, and their grace is heard in their game and humble comment afterwards to the media, or in their doing it again the next day, or in four more years. Grace under pressure.

Perhaps we should try more to embody courage than control fear. In courage, we feel alive, we take risk. Often our desire is to have security, certainty. But creativity and growth are about change and newness, which usually bring fear. Ann Lamott relays a conversation she had with a man on a plane who turned out to work with the Dalai Lama. She said he told her, gently, that "when a lot of things start going wrong at once, it is to protect something big and lovely that is trying to get itself born - and that this something needs for you to be distracted so that is can be born as perfectly as possible." Lamott writes that she believes this to be true, especially when other people's things are breaking down - isn't this true? Its easier to see someone else's experience in the larger spiritual context than our own. She tells of a string of very difficult events, saying "when it's my stuff, I believe the direct cause (of all the problems) is my bad character... I (do) not find it very inspiring, I (do) not look around to see what lovely thing is trying to get itself born. I (am) just deeply disturbed." Sobonfu Some speaks about this time of testing:

It would be a limited perspective to imagine that because someone has wisdom, he will have some kind of serene life without any troubles. Jesus was worried about his Apostles betraying him. When he was crucified, he had pain. So there is humanity there. That's what makes it juicy. Without the humanity, it would be a deadened spirituality, because spirituality has, at its core, something that is living, something that is based on experience, something that is based on our relationships with other beings, with other people, with the land, with the trees and so forth. By virtue of those relationships, there's going to be friction, and we may not necessarily like it. We may not necessarily always be successful. So we take our frictions and failures, our falls from grace, and incorporate them into the fabric of our spiritual life.

So which is it to be, "Grace and Fear" or "Fear and Grace". The first seems more hopeful, the second more honest. I'm not a koan sort of person - my mind likes all the complexities and nuances, loves words and images and deepening meanings, but if I try to channel Thich Nhat Hahn the crux of today's topic is:
not Fear, not Grace
today I am human,
and I am not alone
This allows both grace and fear, it steps out of the attachment of platonic dualism, that fix that we - I - get in some times. It is this dynamic relationship that I will hold, and Anais Nin expresses it this way: "Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage." And I will hold as well, the time when I was 22 - younger but not a different person entirely - that I got in my new pick up truck in Cambridge, MA, with a backpack and drove to California with no plan. I moved to a place I had never been, where I knew no one, with no job, and no place to live. Not fear, not Grace.