This Sunday’s readings are all about fear, bravery and courage. The first interpretation of courage comes from our first reading. In the reading from Jeremiah, the idea of courage is a masculine, militaristic one, understandable from a highly patriarchal warrior culture. The second reading from the epistle to the Romans, Saint Paul tells us that death and, therefore, our fear of death (a pretty severe preoccupation of us humans) have been conquered by Christ’s salvation of us through his sacrifice on the cross.
Yeah, but I’m still nervous. In full disclosure, I have battled moderate anxiety since I was young, never looking forward to “the Sunday scaries” as I used to call them when I told my mother. Though just when I think I can’t relate, there is our Savior telling us, using one of his favorite examples from nature:
“Are not two sparrows sold for a small coin? Yet not one of them falls to the ground without your Father’s knowledge. Even all the hairs of your head are counted.” Beautiful. Whenever I hear this line I think of how Shakespeare ripped it off so brilliantly when he has his moody college student Hamlet, another person obsessed with death and struggling with the anxiety of existence, says: “There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ‘tis not to come. If it be not to come, it will be now. If it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all.” Perhaps the Bard is delving into a little biblical interpretation. Hamlet eases his concerns of death by learning the notion of acceptance and, therefore, perhaps trusts in something greater after death.
Countless words have been written on what Hamlet is feeling, but there is no denying, he’s feeling something that must be very close to peace so late in the play, certainly a type of resolve. Perhaps to ease our everyday worries into peace takes a type of acceptance. Or, as the philosopher Simon Critchley and the psychoanalyst Jamieson Webster contend, “a possible response to the question, ‘To be, or not to be?’ is ‘Let be.’”(The New York Times, July 9, 2011). That’s a powerful insight and as someone who struggles with anxiety, a comforting one.
In Christ’s challenge to “not be afraid” he is giving us not just courage or telling us to forget our worry. In the precarious place between fear and courage, Christ is telling us to accept. “Do not worry about your life,” he tells us, not because it is not worth worrying about, but because it is not your full responsibility. “I got this” Jesus seems to say. That’s helpful to me. The rest, as Hamlet would say, is silence.
I’ll be seeing you,
Elliot