Wednesday, March 3, 2010

A Word on Fear from the Dark

Last night a power outtage in our district left me with no time to write and plenty of time to think. I thought mostly of my experience here and again of the chapter I posted last about fear. It struck me after a couple of hours and I was instantly wide awake-in the corner of the humid black room I lay in my mind lit like a small match and I smiled. I am slowly sewing this quilt together here in the dark...

The thing about that chapter that struck me as so powerful, so insightful, is that it is an accurate description of the environment here. Read through the history of this city and you will discover a long, sordid love affair with fear. The political unrest and corruption of this communist state in West Bengal is as corroded by fear as it is by acid rain and acts of terrorism. It is in the mortar of the buildings, the grease on the wheels of business and religion. People drown in it on the sidewalks. Imagine the description from "Life of Pi", only mulitply the instant described by a lifetime of moments and you will begin to see semblance of some of the people I have encountered and the world that they know so well.

Here is the unique twist. When Krista first proposed this trip she mentioned that she felt she was coming here to encounter suffering. Krista and I then stepped into this world briefly, as though onto an elevator platform, and for a brief period of time we have been painted into the landscape. We have been afraid, we have been sick and exhausted. We each entered into our own kind of suffering- our tiny personal prisons of discomfort and disappointment, made smaller by the vastly worse conditions surrounding us, from which we have largely been protected. We have been pricked with enough pain and at the right moment to make us aware of who we are and how we live....and how often we fail to consider both counts.

No coincidence that as each of us struggled in our own way through conditions we find nearly intolerable (though 17 million people survive them every day), I remembered in my bed last night the words of Matthew Henry in his commentary on Psalm 58:6. Where David writes "You have kept count of my tossings; put my tears in your bottle. Are they not recorded in your book?", Henry explains "What the psalmist is saying here is that we need no other weapon than prayers and tears." What words!

From one of the most brilliant military tacticians in history comes this simple and tested advice: to engage the enemy you must first feel fully your own defenselessness. Lay your intellect with its flat factual comprehension prostrate before something greater. We must engage fear with hands not armed, but folded. We look it in the eyes until we see through it. We cry out in pain and in prayer to the one who is ever-attentive to our needs.

And then, though blind as we may feel, this:

In foreign countries, in frightening places, out from dark corners and down treacherous roads answers this voice...

"I will lead the blind in a way they do not know, in paths they have not known I will guide them. I will turn the darkness before them into light, the rough places into level ground. These are the things I do and I do not forsake them." Isaiah 42:16



Promise kept.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

It seems so powerful the way you describe it. I have known that kind of fear--no longer an abstract noun, but a living breathing being. It's the fear implied in Gethsemane that could only be faced when looked through the lens of "perfect love". This love very simply and easily drives it out. It's this love that once you experience it, will drive you to the streets of Calcutta, and give you the courage to look your worst fears straight in the eyes.
Still praying for you!