Most of the time I believe that dread is wise, anxiety righteous, fear a holy thing. It sounds ridiculous, but bear with me.
There are days when fear seems to be not only a rational response to my circumstances, but a moral duty. After all, being a grown-up means responsibility. It means everyone, God included, backs off and watches what you’ll do. Grace was the get-out-of-jail-free card, but now I’m out, and I have to start earning my keep in this world. If that thought makes me sick to my stomach, it’s just evidence I’m still thinking like a child. I’ve never had much business savvy, so I’m sure to run into some situation I didn’t expect and don’t understand and can’t handle—which means lots of panicked phone calls and a constant stress headache. If I do manage to save myself from disaster by the skin of my teeth, the relief will be mixed with a large measure of regret: if only I’d been smarter, more enterprising, more virtuous. Thank you God for allowing me to save myself by the skin of my teeth.
It feels frankly immoral to pray—at least any prayer that’s not a battle-plan. These days—these dread-full days—are his tests. Tests of my courage, my work ethic, how well I was planning ahead. If I don’t pass them—is that supposed to be his fault? His responsibility? Am I supposed to pray for a pass? That would be like asking God to help you cheat.
If life is indeed a series of rather terrifying tests, the responsible thing to do would be to study for them. How do you study for pending disaster? Something rational in my mind says to me, If you fear it—that nameless disaster waiting in the wings of every day—if you fret and dread, it won’t happen. Or, if it does, it won’t take you by surprise. At least you won’t feel stupid too. God won’t be able to say to you, “Sorry hon, you should have seen that one coming.”
I know (since I’m Reformed) that he works all things for the good of those who love him. So I know that if (when) I fail, he’ll turn my failure into a sanctifying lesson for me. A sanctifying lesson in never doing that again.
I know that if (when) I sin, he will forgive me. But good parents don’t spare their children the consequences of their actions. So I struggle to understand how his forgiveness makes much difference anyway.
The rational voice says to me, Good. Now channel your fear. Channel it into resolve. It can do great things for you. Let it fuel your willpower. When your alarm goes off in the morning that sudden heady panic will propel you out of bed. That nauseous feeling in your belly—that’s the Holy Spirit. Do what it says.
But for some reason this anxiety does not shoot me out of bed in the morning, poised like a runner on the cusp of the day. It makes me burrow down, hit snooze five or six times, grasp at every possible distraction (Facebook refreshes them every ten minutes). It makes me hunger for dream-worlds where people live simpler, prettier lives—for that there’s Netflix. All the while righteous dread is bloating in the back of my mind.
And God—I keep away from him. He’s the one with the checklist and disappointed expression when I come downstairs an hour late every morning. He’s the one who haunts my house like a dead relative who loved me very much and wanted the best for me. He had a great work ethic himself: built the world in six days and spent every minute of his 33 years on earth very productively. What a legacy.
Do you see why there’s no escaping this fear? Because what my berating conscience says, citing Scripture for its purposes, is true. My procrastination is despicable, my willpower is a joke. I should make mighty resolutions, take my life in hand, start building habits of industry.
Something about Jesus, about Jesus helping (I’m Reformed, after all). But I can’t see what Jesus has to do with taxes, or car problems, or an impending final exam. To pray about those things would be to shirk responsibility, and he doesn’t like that.
More panicked phone calls. More Facebook. I’m sick at heart. It’s not even me anymore clicking links, snapping at my roommate, caressing easier, prettier lives with my eyes. It’s an automaton with fear for a brain. Sometimes I manage to heave the thing out of bed and out the door. But if I let go of it for a moment, it goes back home to sleep off the fear.
We go through this horrible mockery of a dance, my wretched automaton and me—the scramble for goodness, the weary capitulation—every day more slowly. I don’t know if the fear or the lust will win in the end. I don’t care. God’s face is more and more disappointed, more and more resigned. His finger is on the light switch.
How can so many truths amount to a lie? How can something so good produce death in me? His finger was on the light switch, but he pushed it up, not down. Funny how until now I thought the light was on.
Isak Dinesen’s short story “The Pearls” is about a young woman who thinks, like me, that fear is righteous thing. She has been raised to believe that hard work and anxiety are human responsibilities, the way man earns his keep in the world. But Jensine falls in love with a soldier who has no concept of fear. Alexander has spent his adult life fighting duels and gambling with his last coin; he approaches the future with the unconcern of a child. Jensine is morally repulsed by her husband’s carefreedom—to her mind he’s no better than a cheat and a thief. But she also pities him for his naiveté.
At their wedding Alexander gives Jensine a pearl necklace. There are fifty-two pearls on the string. On the last day of their honeymoon she breaks it, and they take the pearls to a nearby shop to get it re-strung. When Jensine gets the pearls back, she refuses to count them. But she suspects that one of them has been stolen.
The two return home and begin married life together. Soon Jensine’s soldier husband is going off to war and is, predictably, eager rather than frightened. Jensine is terrified. She hasn’t taken her necklace off since their honeymoon, but she is convinced by a change in the weight around her neck that one of the fifty-two pearls is missing. One day on an impulse she finally takes the pearls off and counts them.
There are fifty-three.
He’s bending over me on the floor, looking down at all the frantically whirring gears of me. This mouth that isn’t mine, it tries to start up once again the prayers that are really just being anxious in the presence of God. But he says to me, “You know all this broke a long time ago?”
I do know.
“You know you don’t need this to breathe?”
What if all this fear were unnecessary? Immediately the bars come down around my soul; it clenches up in self-defense. If I let myself believe that, discipline would go out the window. My life is already scotch-taped together; remove fear and the whole thing will crumble. If I’m wrong, if God is not in fact for me, won’t I look like a fool.
It’s funny how a corpse can still worry about looking like a fool. And it’s funny how a person who has the life of Jesus inside them can still contrive to be a corpse.
I have never grown accustomed to grace. I likely never will. It will always upend me. It will always make me feel a bit like a cheat. I will keep undertaking each day as if I have to earn the air I breathe, and I will keep floundering. And, like a drowning person, my only hope will be to do—once again—exactly what goes against all my instincts, what feels not only unwise, not only irresponsible, but frankly immoral: stop kicking, stop flailing, and lie back against the shoulder that I’m still not sure is there.
When we creep into Paradise, walking uneasily for fear of trapdoors, will we suffer a shock, amounting almost to horror, at the profound need there for carefreedom, a carefreedom we never thought to cultivate while alive? If there is any purging necessary, will it be the purging of that carefully-honed righteous anxiety that I come into the presence of God clutching to my chest? Will what I have to learn baby-step by baby-step in the kingdom of heaven be peace?
Let’s start now.
Leta Sundet is a PhD student in Literature at the University of Dallas.