Howie Cohen, an eccentric wanderer of the Far East in search of enlightenment and acquaintance of my girlfriend at the time, Cheryl, was having a presentation at his home--I believe it was on Tibetan Buddhism--not far away from where I lived in North Oakland. The sun was already down, the shadows darkening, and the colors in the sky fading from indigo to black, as I considered how to get to his house.

The neighborhood Cheryl and I lived in is what is commonly called a transitional neighborhood. Several streets to the west the houses were in declining repair and the yards were not being well maintained - a sure sign of poorer tenant occupants. Several streets north and east were very nice urban homes . We lived right across the street from a small low income apartment building with a car up on blocks in the midst of a never ending repair process and lots of children running about.

I could have driven over to Howie's house but the weather was very pleasant that evening so I thought I'd walk over. I love walking in the Oakland/Berkeley area because the streets are very attractive and many people have wonderful gardens. The year round temperate climate permits just about any kind of plant to be cultivated so flowers bloom all year round. Every morning, I was walking several blocks to the Rockridge BART station, riding the train to San Leandro just south of Oakland, taking my bike out of my rented BART bike locker, and riding to work at North Star Computers. Walking and biking were great pleasures for me so walking to Howie's house was quite ordinary.

I had walked about three blocks from my house on Colby Street when I saw two young fellows walk up from a side street about a block ahead of me on my side of the street. After walking together for a few seconds they stopped and one knelt down to tie a shoe. The other continued walking a few paces then stopped and turned around. Immediately, I felt a wave of fear.

The rush of fearful chemicals surging into the bloodstream isn't very pleasant. It sure doesn't feel like a gift to suddenly find oneself in a threatening situation. My heart started beating faster. My breathing rate increased. I felt tingling in my spine and the hairs on my neck rising up.

What flashed before my mind was that this was a trap. If I walked past the first fellow, the second might stop me and the one behind me could attack. The street was deserted except for the three of us. The streetlights were on yet the sidewalk wasn't well lit. I decided to step off the sidewalk out into the street and walk around them. As I passed them, I felt awkward so I said, "Hello." The one standing spoke in a sinister, leering voice, "Hello sport."

I had a lot of choices in that first moment of fear ... yet I was conflicted. Part of me didn't want to believe I was in danger. Part of my problem had to do with who these young fellows were. They were African American teenagers. I worried that my fear didn't come out of that moment but was racially motivated, a fear grown up watching the big, strong black boys who used to gather at a busy hallway intersection of my high school. Emotionally, was I being I thrown back to those high school days in Newark, Delaware creating my mistrust right now on the other side of the Continent? I could hear my mother's voice in the back of my head telling me not to be suspicious of these teenagers because of their skin color. She had worked at Lincoln University, a small Black college, and regularly brought home stories to counter our stereotypes. As I resisted my fear, it grew stronger.

I walked ahead of the young fellows back on the sidewalk what felt like a safe distance ahead trying to watch them out of the corner of my eye. The fear continued to build and I continued to rationalize it away until suddenly I felt myself flying forward toward the pavement. One of the fellows had silently run up behind me and hit me very hard on the back of the head with a heavy blunt object. "Ooowww" I moaned as I tried to sit up, my vision all blurred and distorted. "Give us your money!" came the command. I hadn't brought my wallet and told them I didn't have any. One started searching my pockets and found my key wallet. Just then a dog began barking furiously from inside the home right next to where we were and the light went on in the living room. That barking dog may have saved my life or perhaps my wounded body from a beating. The two teenagers ran off.

This incident, now over fifteen years old, was one of the formative experiences of my life and changed my relationship with fear. Before this, I was often very willing to reject the workings of my emotions and subject them to the scrutiny of my rational mind. My rational mind in this situation didn't want to believe the stereotype of black teenagers being dangerous. Well, from personal experience I can tell you that some of them are. And the same goes for white teenagers, Latino teenagers, Asian teenagers, and probably Mongolian teenagers.

The inspiration for this sermon was a book I ordered on a whim called The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us From Violence by Gavin DeBecker. My experience that evening is hardly unusual in the annals of crime. Most victims of crime experience some kind of uneasiness or apprehension that alert them to a dangerous situation. Many of them ignore or don't recognize these early intuitive warning signals intellectually until it is too late. Sometimes the signals are so subtle, their interpretation only becomes obvious when the victim retells their story in great detail to an investigator. Yet the emotion that something wasn't right came immediately. Our senses are very highly tuned for danger, the result of hundreds of millions of years of evolution. Survival is our first priority.

In a self defense class I took after being mugged, I learned that paying attention to my fear response was very important toward being prepared for trouble as early as possible. Being attacked is far from a certainty and in each moment we usually have many choices to avoid trouble as well as to invite it. My behavior on Colby Street marked me as a target. I could have crossed to the other side of the road and turned up another street. I could have rung someone's doorbell. I could have turned around and gone home. I could have run. I was so preoccupied trying not to appear racist that I severely limited my choices. In fact, I don't think I was even aware of any other choices that evening as I refused the gift of fear.

While fear can be a great early warning system for self defense, does it have value in other parts of our lives? In our spiritual life? In relationships?

One of the reasons I'm not married to Cheryl is a gift of fear also refused.

I remember Cheryl as a passionate woman full of strong emotions. This was one of the qualities that attracted me to her being a mild mannered electrical engineer just graduating from U.C. Berkeley. Her passion both attracted me and frightened me. I wanted to make her happy with me, to desire me and to eventually want to marry me. I decided early on that I would try to mold myself into the image of the man she wanted me to be. Once I had set up my side of the relationship this way, I was fearful of being anything but what she approved of. If she wanted me to be more emotional, expressive and empathetic, well then I'd just fix myself! Rather than face the fear of not being able to be who she wanted me to be, I chose, to change to meet her expectations.

Has anyone else been an actor this movie? I've played this part in several sequels too!

As part of her studies attending an alternative college in California, she spent time in Mexico living in a rural village. When she spoke of that experience and wanting to return someday, something inside me became afraid. When she sang along with Chris Williamson's beautifully passionate music again I became afraid. Inside, I suspected I couldn't be who I thought she wanted me to be. I couldn't meet her intensity. Still, I kept trying anyway.

After three broken engagements for marriage, we decided to part ways.

My fear was a signal that something between Cheryl and I wasn't right. My fear of losing her was so great, I couldn't face our differences. Fear can prevent good communication. I didn't want Cheryl to know the ways it was hard for me to be in relationship with her for fear she would leave me. The lack of this communication prevented us from trying to see if we could resolve our problems by confronting them and working them out.

I don't know if letting go of my fear would have cultivated our love and saved our relationship. We are both good people who continue to mature as we get older. Perhaps if we had faced our differences squarely early on we might have saved each other much later grief by separating much sooner.

Completely unlike my relationship with Cheryl, I rarely feel any fear in my relationship with Philomena. We have a strong affinity with and commitment to each other which inspires great trust. So when I do feel a little fear, now I recognize it as a signal, a gift of awareness, telling me there is an issue between us which must be addressed. Rather than ignoring the fear message, now my commitment is to seeking a resolution and restoring our love.

This doesn't make facing my fears any easier. I want our marriage to be pleasant, happy and trouble free. Similar as we are in so many ways, we are two unique individuals whose feelings, attitudes, values and beliefs sometimes clash. If we allow fear to limit our communication, we risk deepening the gap opening between us. I'm amazed each time I brave the pricks of fear and the contraction of my mind to speak honestly my thoughts and feelings and seek to understand hers. As we are able to begin talking, the fear begins to dissolve and our hearts begin to open. Usually we are able to quickly bridge the divide and end up feeling much closer to each other. Facing fear opens the way to deeper love.

The last sort of fear I'd like to consider might be termed an Ultimate fear - the fear of meaninglessness, the fear of God, the fear of death. This is a more expansive fear rooted in our desire for immortality confronting the certainty of bodily impermanence. Since this fear is universal, it is one all religions must wrestle with in some way. Universalism dealt with it by telling us we have nothing to fear in the hereafter as Jesus' atonement was for all humanity. Unitarianism saw such goodness in humanity that a person of good character should have nothing to fear from God's wrath. Unitarian Universalism, as a less than forty year old faith tradition, is still quite young and a consensus view is still emerging. Today we articulate the ground of our fearlessness in the face of death in the language of our inherent worth and dignity.

Because I faced life threatening childhood illness, fear of death has been quite present in my life since the beginning of my teenage years. A question which haunted me from my early teenage years was, "How should I live meaningfully, knowing my life might suddenly be cut short?". The college-marriage-career-children-retirement-grandchildren-peaceful-death-at-a-ripe-old-age life plan so many fall into without planning it didn't feel open for me. What I feared most was being homebound and sick, sitting by the window in pain and watching life passing me by. I knew this was a real possibility for me and it terrified me.

More than anything else, this Ultimate fear is what attracted me to Buddhist meditation. Buddhism starts where I did with the truth that life is difficult in ways we can't fix by the best social engineering. Worse yet, the problem isn't just out there, evil people, diseases, events & institutions which make our lives miserable, but rather the root of the problem is inside us, our reaction to the world as it is. The world is a mess and our reaction to it makes things worse. Yet that wasn't the end of the story. Sickness, old age and death are not all there is to look forward to. The experience of liberation from suffering was possible and there was a way to get there by observing very carefully moment to moment human experience.

If you want to really "get up close and personal" with fear, sit a week long mediation retreat. While many would run away screaming from this experience of sitting motionless and walking slowly like a zombie from before day break until late at night, I was drawn to it like a magnet to steel. I wanted to get to the very marrow of my fear, test its reality, and find freedom.

Meditation retreats provide almost constant opportunities to confront fear on every level imaginable--if you are willing. Sitting silently and motionless with aching muscles and knees, watching buried, tormented emotions burst through the mind's stillness, and facing the emptiness of sensory deprivation, stir up all our inner demons. While repetitively sitting and walking there isn't much input to distract the brain from itself. What is left is the processes of the mind and its storehouse of life experience.

Any machismo I have comes out when I meditate. For me meditation is like boot camp. I like to push my limits.

I remember my second meditation retreat sitting with a great deal of pain in my shoulder. I wanted so badly to be a great meditator who could sit through wilting pain and remain straight spined, mentally clear, aware and peaceful. The typical mental reaction to pain is to contract around it, trying to escape it, almost as if to hide it or hold it at a distance.

I was sitting all alone late at night mustering my strength and courage to face the demon in my shoulder. No matter what I did, the pain continued and my fear of that pain increased. Exhausted, I decided to turn, face my fear and be the first meditator who died of shoulder pain. In an ever so gentle way, I opened to the fear of pain and accepted it into that moment. As I was willing to be with my pain, to face it, to investigate it, to feel it, to be moved by it, even to love it, the muscle began to warm, throb and release. For an instant I accepted the gift of fear rather than turning away from it and rejecting it. And in the gift of fear was the release from fear.

My early fear of misery and suffering due to ill health has shaped the course of my life - for the better. In facing my fear of death and meaninglessness again and again, in seeing that fear as a gift rather than a burden, in exploring the nature and being of that fear, I have opened the door to experiences of living and meaning I didn't believe were possible for me. I'm no longer confused about what is meaningful and worthwhile. I'm no longer fearful of death and suffering for I know they await me. I'd still rather avoid them, yet I accept the reality that Nature is both fierce and gentle, harsh and kind, hard and soft, painful and pleasant and both a creator of life and a destroyer of life.

Whether within nature or beyond nature, I know the experience of living in the expansive spirit of love rather than the contraction of fear makes meaning and defies death.

Fear is not our enemy, it is our teacher. Fear is a teacher offering us the gift of awareness showing us where danger lurks and hidden opportunity await.

We reject this gift at our peril.

Closing Words

To see the gift of fear we must have the courage
to pull the ribbons off, and open the box.
To learn from our fears, we must engage them and seek their message.
If we turn from them and run, they will control and torment us.
May we all have the courage to face our fears and
by doing so, nourish our capacity for love.

Copyright (c) 1998 by Rev. Samuel A. Trumbore. All rights reserved.