Dear UBC,

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Fear is one of the three emotions – with sadness (covered last week) and anger (covered next week) – that regularly arises for communities living amid change and transition. Fear is an evolutionary gift to humanity. Without the capacity to experience and respond to fear, we would not have survived as a species. And fear can also be a hard emotion to hold in community with others.

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Fear and its varying degrees of worry and anxiety are our body’s response to a perceived threat or imminent harm. It's an emotion with a message: something you love and value is threatened in some specific (fear) or ambiguous (anxiety) way. For a church in a time of interim transition (and for a church living amid the upheavals roiling the country and the planet), fear can become a prevalent emotional response.

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We shouldn’t deny our fear, nor try to suppress it. Fear needs to be held in community, brought into conversation, and honored for the message it brings. The threat it points to won’t always be one we can alleviate. Change, for example, can prompt our individual fear response when the change is one that the community needs in order to move into its future.​

 

But when we can’t listen to one another’s fear with care, it can become a longer-term temperament or mood or outlook on life. When fear becomes a general orientation toward life, it erodes trust in other human beings and leads to a decreasing sense of security when we are with others. Fear as a long-lasting disposition can inculcate a sense of helplessness, a giving in to apathy, and immobilization in the face of very real dangers that we’ve become too fearful to address.

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To take fear seriously in caregiving, we must be respectful of the fear that others hold and be willing to explore their fears in conversation, even when we don’t share that same fear. Listen with compassion and be willing to be surprised by what you hear. Rather than trying to “fix” it, hear the fear into speech, explore it with compassion, and commit to being with one another amid the changes and transition of the congregation and our world. A community of compassion and support is one of the greatest sources of fear’s alleviation.

 

Finally, a reminder of these two upcoming dates to spend some time together in casual conversation:

 

THIS WEEK! Coffee Shop Office Hours: Wednesday, July 8, 9:00-10:30am, at Five Watt Coffee (861 E. Hennepin Ave, Minneapolis)

 

Pub Office Hours: Thursday, July 16, 6:00-7:30pm, at Urban Growler Brewing Company (2325 Endicott St, Saint Paul) [Urban Growler is the first woman-owned, and lesbian-owned, brewery in Minnesota and has a full dinner menu.]

 

See some of you there!

 

Peace,

Cody