Love’s Opposite

There is no fear in love.   – 1 John 4: 18

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We underestimate the importance of fear. 

In the positive sense, fear can protect us from harm and catastrophe.  Positive fear is what prevents us from driving drunk or shooting people we dislike.  It’s the type of fear that was missing the night my teenaged self jumped off an absent neighbor’s second floor roof into a pool surrounded by a cement apron two floors below.  Statistics indicate that humans are fairly well anesthetized to fear in the positive sense by the age of two. 

There is also fear in the negative sense, as a motivating force in human behavior.  Fear makes us act out in all kinds of strange ways, like staying in an abusive relationship, or denying refuge to traumatized people, or killing a bunch of strangers in a grocery store.  There is a lot of evidence for the prevalence of negative fear.

The two types of fear are connected.  Anesthetized fears, meaning fears that are ignored, cannot perform their protective function.  Freud called it repression and repression was rooted in our fear of being afraid.  As Freud also said, those repressed fears always find an escape hatch, sometimes far afield from where they began.  It’s not good to ignore our fears, such as selling machine guns to all willing buyers, because that’s when our fears come true.

You probably know this nightmare, or something like it.   (I don’t think it’s just me.)  You find yourself naked at school, exposed to the entire class, while trying unsuccessfully to hide under your desk.  As a fear dream, it raises the interesting question of why we’re trying to hide and what we’re afraid of exposing.  Essentially, that conundrum is what Freud tried to study, because it goes to the heart of why we do so many things.

Anger is an example.  Angry people are frightened people who have adopted an unpleasant strategy for avoiding their fear.  Unfortunately, others bear the brunt of their tactic, because angry people like to displace their fears onto you.  Controlling people operate in a similar manner.  They are scared of a world they cannot control, so they boil the world down to you.  They can’t control anything else, so you’re it.  Their avoidance causes harm.

Our ability to express genuine love, meaning love put into action, is another casualty.  Humans are capable of genuine love, but it frightens us, due to the vulnerability love entails.  We don’t want to offer refuge to migrants because of the harm they may cause us.  We don’t want to be fully honest with our partner because of the consequences that may ensue.  Offering refuge and being honest are both acts of genuine love.

Love and fear exist as the inverse of each other, not love and hatred.   You can see this in relationships.  If you are in a relationship where you can’t be honest, you also know that love is not the sole basis for the relationship.  Fear forms part of the relationship’s glue, along with the ensuing consequences, which frequently result in hatred.

The surprising thing is that the more we act in love toward others the less important our fears become.  A change of values comes with it, which reduces the sources of our fears.  Through an act of trust, love, we become more trusting.  Love is capable of repaying itself, if we make the investment. 

In the verse from 1 John, the author is providing us with his vision of heaven.  “There is no fear in love,” he writes, “and perfect love drives out all fear.”  Heaven, the elusive paradise, is a place where we no longer need to have fears.  Sign me up.  I can’t think of a better description.

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Photo of boy under pillows by Pixabay: https://www.pexels.com/photo/kid-hiding-on-pillows-262103/
Photo of frightened man by PublicDomainPictures from Pixabay
Photo of leaping people by Maksim Romashkin: https://www.pexels.com/photo/unrecognizable-happy-people-jumping-in-sunset-6152103/