Fear Not

אַל־תִּירָא

This phrase is made up of two Hebrew words, the first pronounced "al" and the second "tirah," and together they have usually been translated as "fear not." It's slightly different than what you would say if you wanted to say "do not be afraid," and it's not exactly a command (if it were, it would be "lo tirah"); it inspires comfort. These words are spoken to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, each of the prophets, and I'm told that the phrasing is even preserved in the Greek "fear not" spoken to Mary at the annunciation.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately as I deal with anxiety that causes me to start hyperventilating in department stores. I think about the fear of Abraham, leaving home, of Moses speaking to Pharaoh, of Joshua, who takes over the leadership of all Israel (and is told to "fear not" four times in his first encounter with God). These all seem like occasions in which fear is a very valid reaction. My fear seems petty and useless by comparison. But I take comfort by association, knowing that whenever God or any heavenly being is present, the first words to a human are "fear not." It reassures me to realize that God knows that fear is one of the most pervasive and universal feelings, and that we humans have a hard time dealing with it. When God has shown up, fear has been present, and conversely, when fear is present, God is also with us.

This morning, on my self-imposed Sabbath, I opened the book of psalms and flipped through it without looking until I felt like opening my eyes, and I stopped on Psalm 91. 

You who live in the shelter of the Most High, 
who abide in the shadow of the Almighty,
will say to the LORD, "My refuge and my fortress; my God, in whom I trust."
For he will deliver you from the snare of the fowler 
and from the deadly pestilence; 
he will cover you with his pinions, 
and under his wings you will find refuge; 
his faithfulness is a shield and buckler.
You will not fear the terror of the night, 
or the arrow that flies by day, 
or the pestilence that stalks in darkness, 
or the destruction that wastes at noonday.

Well, alright then! As I was reading this, I immediately felt safer, even though I'm having trouble with this concept of God's protection lately (a post for another day!). As I read, slowly, out loud, I calmed down. Something about mouthing each word made me slow my breath. Later in the day, I was reading Harold Kushner's book about conquering fear, and he referenced the same psalm and says something along the lines of "notice how all of these scary things still exist." We're not told that bad things won't happen, but it's the paralyzing and self-centered nature of fear that keep us from happiness and goodness, and when we have faith, that fear is mitigated, sometimes slightly and sometimes altogether.

Today, I was only able to calm down for about two hours before the next scary thing set me off, but it was enough. Remembering these words is enough for now.

Praying With and To

"A non-Jewish friend once asked me, 'Harold, what do Jews pray for?' I answered, 'Jewish prayer is less a matter of praying for, and more a matter of praying with and praying to.' As the theologian Martin Buber put it, when we pray, we don't ask God for anything. We ask God for God. We invite God into our lives, so that the actions we take will be guided by a sense of God's presence."

- from Conquering Fear: Living Boldly in an Uncertain World by Harold S. Kushner

Fall Apart, Fall Together

It seems like I'm now in some kind of holding pattern wherein I have small breakdowns every two or three months. My last one happened right before Christmas, just as my first semester was ending, so I'm about due for another one! 

My anxiety has been getting increasingly worse since I started school and my internship at SpringHouse, and every once in a while I feel like I just can't do anything. If you have anxiety or depression, you can probably relate; it messes with your sleep, your eating patterns, your physical health, your train of thought, your ability to concentrate, and above all it makes you feel crazy and isolated and selfish. For me, anxiety manifests itself in all these ways, and I can feel it in my shoulders and in my chest. I feel asthmatic, like I have a rhino sitting on my ribcage, and my heart beats in all kinds of weird rhythms.

Last night at about 3:30am I had enough of my nightly tossing and turning and instead got up and wrote in a notebook. It's been several years since I kept a journal, but then again it's been several years since I've been under this much stress. My problem with journal writing is that I find myself writing as though I expect someone else to read it at some point, and so I try to think up flowery metaphors and I never include anything too incriminating, just in case. But last night I just needed to get the thoughts out of me somehow, and so I closed my eyes and wrote one sentence at a time, thinking carefully about how I felt and why I felt that way, and mostly about what was worrying me. After two pages I finally got to it:

I feel like I'm not good enough.

This is a feeling that has come up for me at almost every stage of my life so far; I'm very familiar with it. I would bet that almost every person on earth knows how this feels at certain times. But I let this fear of not being good enough (and fear is the key word here) determine everything about how I live and how I interact with people. 

Right now I feel like I can't do anything right in my internship; like I'm always playing catch-up, and like nobody likes what I'm doing or how I'm doing it. I feel like I'm running myself head-over-heels into the ground trying to force myself to be what everybody (including me) thinks SpringHouse needs, and I'm not cutting it. There's a possibility that I could end my internship after this year in order to concentrate on my thesis next year, and I know that this would be a smart decision, but I don't want people to think I'm a quitter.

I'm worried about school, and how there's never enough time to get everything done. And I know that I say "there isn't enough time" right after I spend two hours watching Netflix. But I have to have some time to relax and take care of myself, and if I run out of time, guess which thing gets cut; the homework or the self-care? And if I don't do well on my work, what kind of student am I? School is the only thing I'm good at, and what if I can't even keep up in that arena?

I'm worried about work for my dad's company, especially when he goes out of town. I feel like the company "needs" things from me, and as much as I care about my family, and as much as I want to make them my first priority, I just can't seem to get everything done there either, and it feels like floundering.

I worry about my relationship with Ari. It's hard enough having a relationship which only allows for about four days of togetherness every two or three months, but we're also trying to figure out how to move ahead together in the future, and we have should-we-shouldn't-we conversations about so many possibilities, all of them terrifying for us in one way or another. I feel sometimes like things would be better for her if she weren't dating someone so far away and didn't have to worry about things like moving, and there's always the "I'm sorry you have to risk alienating your whole family just to date me" insanity that goes hand-in-hand with this kind of thing.

All this keeps me up at night, and it wraps itself around my heart, which already feels heavy with information and light on faith. Last weekend when Ari and I found ourselves in the Harvard bookstore I made my way to the religion section, and after browsing through a few shelves I thought "what am I looking for?" The answer came back, "something to make me believe again."

As we like to say in seminary, "it's not that I'm having a crisis of faith.........I'm just having a crisis of faith." Well, get used to it, kids. That's what we're here for. We fall apart, together. We're all throwing ourselves heart-first into things we don't understand, and trying to measure and calculate a feeling that has driven most of the world to prayer directed towards something we can't see. This was never going to be easy. But in the night, when you think to yourself, "I am not good enough for this. I don't know enough. I messed it all up, and I can't find a way back," you are already loved, and already forgiven. 

And I remember that, even though at the same time I am still scared to death about what my supervising pastor will say, or what my professors will say, or what my parents will say. God has promised to love me no matter what; people are much harder to read. 

I don't know what exactly I'm going to do with all of these worries yet, but one thing I realized yesterday; I don't think God wants me to literally make myself crazy trying to get ahead, and if God does love me like everything I read seems to say, then God wants me to be healthy. I heard it this morning during communion in the words "take, eat," and my body with its anxious stomach and bloodshot eyes said, "I don't think I can," but we got bread anyway. This morning I felt like the one lost sheep who gets separated from the ninety-nine; my health (my life, the Hebrew would say) is important too, even though I'm just one among many. Just being that one sheep is important, even if I'm not a particularly good sheep.

And I am thankful for a God that has chosen to ignore the numbers and come find me when I'm lost, because I feel lost right now. I'd like to start making my way home.