In C. S. Lewis’s Perelandra the greatest temptation presented to the unfallen lady of the planet is to forsake the floating islands for the Fixed Land. I get how this is a temptation. I would like things to be stable and safe.
The older I get the longer my list of possible disasters is. Old folks have spent a long time watching things go wrong and seeing Murphy’s Law enforced. Old people grow fearful because they have seen a lot to fear. I am not 60 yet, but I am already reading obituaries of people with whom I went to high school. In the last six months both my mother and my oldest brother have been in the hospital with heart problems. Mom got a pacemaker, my brother a heart valve.
Even the cures are scary. Drug ads rattle off all the possible side effects of each medicine they are trying to sell: thoughts of suicide, severe rashes, cancer, kidney failure, blindness, strokes, schizophrenia, and terminal zombie-itis. The morning shows on TV are always telling us of some new thing we should fear.
And of course we now have three 24/7 news stations that are reporting every terrible thing happening everywhere. Crime, abductions, tortures, and murders seem to be happening everywhere all the time. It is clearly time to load up and hunker down.
Even Hollywood has succumbed to the spirit of fear. We have had movies about every possible kind of apocalypse: nuclear exchanges, viruses, asteroids, volcanoes, climate change, sun flares, and zombies. I think Hollywood knows that eventually evil is going to get punished.
Sometimes the church isn’t much of a refuge from fear either. Too many Christians get caught up in speculation about conspiracies and the rise of the anti-Christ: Hitler? Stalin? Roosevelt? Bush? Carter? Nixon? Clinton? Obama? Elvis? Marilyn Manson? Paris Hilton? What about the Bohemian Woods, Trilateral Commission, European Union, Skull and Bones Club, the New Order, and the Illuminati?
All this fear kills the joy of the Christian life. The need to save for a rainy day kills radical generosity. Under the name of prudence our fear can make us forsake bold obedience of everything God says. Worst of all, fear kills love because loving others unconditionally is the riskiest thing we can do.
So for me this is a year of battling fear—mainly the vague fear of what might go wrong next. Teckla and I have been wrestling with whether to go camping next week. All the things that might go wrong have raced through our minds. What about Mom? My brother? Will the dog break the window again trying to get a cat? One tire on the car seems to have a slow leak and the radiator was gurgling again. What if the contractor wants to work on the garage next week? On and on.
We will keep a compressor in the car for a leak. We will watch the heat gauge on the car carefully. Stanley will check on Mom twice a day and we will call regularly. We will be wise but unafraid.
We are going camping. The life of faith, like Perelandra, is a sea of floating islands; there is no fixed land until heaven.
