One of the major steps on our journey is the discovery that the opposite of love is not hate, but fear. There is no fear in love, we read in the First Letter of John, but perfect love casts out fear. In a way, this is not what we expect. Love and hate seem to be opposites. But in fact, psychologically and one might think perversely, love and hate can be quite closely related.
It is the miracle of love, the sudden, surprising security of love, that gets rid of our fear of God. You can’t read great literature -- Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Dickens -- without becoming aware of the primal fear of God that much religion seems always to have engendered, fear of what God might do. It infects so much of the human story. Music such as sections of the Mozart Requiem depicts terror of a just and implacable God - Dies Irae, Day of Wrath... So many people assume that adversity must be some kind of punishment, deserved or undeserved. If it is undeserved, then God is a tyrant indeed to be feared. To counter such superstition St Augustine wrote: Fear is a suffering that oppresses us. But look at the immensity of love. We actually don’t have to be afraid.
All tyranny thrives on fear. Religious tyranny is no exception. Of course we do have a built-in fear mechanism, reflexes that are necessary to our survival -- I am not talking about that. It is our sometimes subconscious recognition of danger, leading to fear and flight. That much is simply the provision of a good Creator. The fear I am referring to, which is the opposite of love, is something altogether corroding and debilitating. It stops love, because love is always by its nature vulnerable. This fear causes you to be forever trying futilely to eliminate risk, to protect people from the perilous world and from nasty realities. In Coronation Street the children are immediately, by reflex, told lies and sent upstairs, by adults themselves afraid of the truth. Fear becomes the default position, and then love becomes impossible -- only relationships that masquerade as love are possible.
Silence and stillness are necessary while we discover how to be open to God who is unconditionally loving. Each time of prayer for a contemplative is an act of faith, because we are setting aside our normal defences and risk-limitation strategies, in order to sit still and receptive where God is, in our hearts. And as we keep on saying, if we need to assess or review our meditation -- what are we getting out of it? -- we need to ask ourselves, are we becoming more loving -- that is, less afraid?
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