Episode #254 - Between Faith and Fear

What does is mean to have faith?  What does is mean to fear?  Have you ever thought that fear might be reduced to the emotion we feel when we know our ability to choose is about to be restricted.  Faith and Fear is about agency.

Transcript

Welcome to this special episode today.  I am your host, Damon Socha.  Today we are going to talk about two of the most basic concepts of religion in the sense of mental health. But before we get too deep as to why they are important to us, let’s talk a little about this time of year and the darkness that ensues within us.  I was taking to a wonderful woman the other day about her experiences with mental health.  She has severe anxiety and it has been a problem for some time.  Now I also have some reasonably severe anxiety at times but mine is more walking anxiety, where you can get by with some very good masking and poor excuses.  This is the anxiety that leaves you incapacitated and unable to function within your own home.  This is mental health that needs some greater care than I typically espouse.  I don’t talk about this much, nor does anyone really.  There does exists another level of mental health care that requires inpatient and outpatient care with doctors and medicines.  I suppose that we don’t talk about it because it represents our greatest fear as human beings.  Our greatest fear isn’t pain, or suffering.  It isn’t even death in some senses.  Our greatest fear is losing control or having control arrested from our conscious abilities.  We fear exactly what Lucifer wanted to impose upon us.  We fear a loss of agency, a loss of choice.  There exists no doubt that agency is precious and a primary objective of our Father in Heaven.  Lossing our ability to control our lives is exactly the type of fear we never discuss.  Why don’t we?  What is it that we fear?  We fear a type of prison where we know we possess the agency and capacity but we are unable to act.  Or worse yet, to lose agency that we have once obtained, never to have it again.  We possess a deep fear of losing who we are.  Our agency provides us our identity.  Think about who you are for a minute.  Think about your identity.  How would you describe yourself and how would others describe you?  What provides for that identity?  Your ability to act according to it.  To demonstrate that identity through your choices.  We deeply fear losing our ability to choose our identity.  To be forced to be something we are not because we no longer have any choice.

This fear lies so deep within us that we don’t even recognized it until it is upon us.  How many times have you felt that ugly feeling wash over your when you were caught doing something you shouldn’t?  That feeling of fear is what we dread.  It is not because we were caught, it is because we know that a punishment is likely to ensue and that punishment will likely be a restriction of agency.  So fear in its most basic form is the idea of losing agency or control over our lives physically and spiritually.

Now as faith is to be the antithesis of fear, then faith becomes something a little different.  It is the confidence that he who gives agency will reward those who follow his commandments.  It is the maintenance of choice and agency through living a particular set of divine principles.  Faith is believing what our Father in heaven tells us about agency.  Our greatest level of agency and greatest capacity for growth is celestial agency.  This is the agency that allows for greatest freedom in our lives.

Before we go too far, there exists an important concept regarding agency that many individuals do not perceive because Lucifer is so good at teaching the lie.  Once we have knowledge and the power to act, we have agency.  Agency has a little bit of a language problem in the English language and I assume other languages.  We define agency as freedom to choose.  And we tend to leave it there.  Unfortunately two camps exist in this world who both define agency as the freedom to choose but in different ways.  The first social camp says that agency is the freedom to choose never mind the consequence.  The second camp says agency is more than just making a choice because every choice has a consequence.  You are not simply making a choice, you are choosing your consequence.  One side defines freedom as the ability to make a choice and the other the ability to choose the outcome.  I realize that this sounds a little nuanced.  So let’s take a real world example of this principle that will highlight what I am discussing.

Let’s take the law of chastity as knowledge and that it defines appropriate and inappropriate actions.  The law we will use is that of the Church of Jesus Christ.  Which states that intimate relationships are to exist only between a man and a woman who have been legally married.  That is a fairly clear rule at least for the discussion.  The first camp as we discussed it focuses on the freedom to have an intimate relationship and the second camp focuses on the consequences of taking the action.  If you really pin down the first camp, they will tell you that they understand the consequences principle but consequences are spelled out by God in this case, ignoring the real social case for chastity.  So it depends upon what you believe or if you believe what the consequences will be.  Doubting entirely any consequence is also within the realm of possibilities.  This is the atheist or agnostic. If you doubt the consequences or assume in some way that they will never be fully inflicted, then you will easily focus on the freedom of choice.  If you have a solid understanding and testimony of chastity as spelled out by the church, then your focus is likely to be far more focused on the consequences of disobedient and the blessing of obedience than the choice itself.

So putting this all together, hopefully in an intelligent way.  Fear is really in its essence, the emotion we feel when we begin to lose control of our agency or it is taken from us.  Fear is also ever wondering if those divine rules apply to us and if they do what does that mean for my agency.  Faith is the emotion we feel when we have confidence in the outcomes of living a particular set of divine rules.

Now those are spiritual definitions of faith and fear.  We also have similar emotions within the mortal body that can coincide with faith and fear spiritually, meaning feel similar but not identical.  For instance, if you are walking through a dark portion of a cemetery and a friend you didn’t know was present jumps out to scare you, you have a rush of fear.  Yes this fear feels very similar to the spiritual one but it has a unique purpose of protecting you physically.  It is a survival instinct meant to help us on earth and mortality to keep our bodies safe from injury and pain.  What I find so interesting is that both types of fear have very similar feelings in the brain and body, often so similar they cannot tell one apart from the other.  Breaking a commandment you have accepted as true your entire life can feel eerily similar to someone jumping out in front of you.  The fear of dread suddenly overwhelms you.  Although in the physical sense, the dread sensation normally lasts only a short timeframe.  Spiritually that feeling of dread comes with an additional feeling of guilt.  However, the two are so locked together than even when we do not commit sin we can feel this guilt as times.  So what we have is a system that warns us of physical or emotional danger and a system that warns us of spiritual danger and both feel very similar to one another.  So similar that when this warning system malfunctions we can feel spiritually and emotionally as though we are in the pit of hell for our transgressions

Here is where our story takes a turn.  What if the emotions you felt when that friend jumped out did not fade with time.  What if the adrenaline, the racing thoughts, the ever expanding concerns and questions linger and remain with us.  What if physical fear somehow got a little stuck and we couldn’t see out from it?  What if we experienced something so traumatic that it flipped a permanent switch in our heads and we could never feel life the same way again?  How would that affect us spiritually and physically?

Think for a moment if your guilt meter got stuck.  You did something wrong and you repented but just could never feel completely forgiven.  If you were to ask the Lord he would say yes you were forgiven but you continued to feel guilty, rationally knowing what the Lord had stated.  What if fear were stuck in an “On” position?  How would the gospel look to you?

Anyone who has experienced anxiety and some types of depression on any real level can tell you that the gospel can be extremely difficult to live when you experience anxiety.  You feel guilty all the time.  You feel worthless all the time.  You lack capacity to do things you once loved.  Your testimony wains because you struggle to feel peace and faith in the Lord.  Every time a faithful thought comes so does the anxiety.  You feel worthy and unworthy at the same time.  Nothing you really do makes you feel better or significantly greater faith.  Yes you can feel some increases in your faith but it always seems as though the anxiety matches it.  And then comes the moment of darkness, where anxiety overruns the system and you feel nothing, empty and hollow.  There is no greater level of pain and suffering than when you are empty.  The darkness overwhelms you and envelops you entirely.  I think that those of us who suffer might have a least a little understanding of outer darkness as I can’t imagine that it would be any different.

Now what of your testimony.  It gets caught in a web of truth and half truth emotions where fear and faith tumble like a sock in a dryer.  The whole thing becomes confusing.  Am I worthy?  Am I not worthy? How do I know if I am clean or not if I can’t feel it?  These moments in time can be very difficult to explain to someone who has not experienced them.  In fact, I would say that it is impossible.  So individuals who have anxiety tend to struggle deeply with their testimony from time to time according as the illness affects their emotions.  There is nothing wrong with this at all.  It can feel as a punishment send from God but it is not.  There is nothing wrong with your testimony.  You are worthy and you are clean.  And how do I know that.  Because you have likely repented far more times than needed and felt guilty far longer than necessary.  One thing I learned serving as a bishop is just how quickly the Lord forgives.  When he forgave the woman caught in adultery, she was forgiven right then.  There was no I will forgive you when you clean up your act.  We tend to struggle with this when we make mistakes.  We expect far more punishment than the Lord intends to give.  We feel we need that level of punishment  to be able to fully repent.  I need my forty lashings to move on.  The truth is that we don’t.  The Lord in almost every case forgives us far more quickly than we forgive ourselves.  So I know that you are clean and worthy.  

How do I know that nothing is wrong with your testimony.  Because if I removed the illness, that testimony would be right there waiting for you.  Your testimony is intact.  Everything you once knew to be true is still true.  The anxiety covering, the depression covering is just too strong at times for us to see the testimony.  The darkness can become a little much for the light of our testimony.  But the light is not out simply because the darkness gets thicker.  The light remains even when it is foggy.  So your testimony is still burning brightly.  It still exists.  What you knew to be true you know to be true.

So what does this all mean?  It means that sometimes you are going to feel fear when you have faith.  Sometimes your testimony may be a little dim to others as you work through emotional difficulties.  Some days are just going to be dark but the light always returns.  When you understand what is happening to the brain and that it uses the same emotional system for both physical and spiritual needs you can begin to separate what it from the Lord and what is from the illness.  Will you still get it wrong from time to time.  Absolutely yes.  I still do once in a while. But you will get it right sometimes.  And that is a blessing.

So it is important to remember that fear and faith have far more to do with our agency and ability to act and the punishment or blessing associated with the action.  When we feel a loss of faith in ourselves, we should rationally take a look at our current environment and our daily spiritual needs.  Are we meeting the needs with prayer, scriptures, meeting and temple attendance?  If we are doing what we should and our environment has not changed to the negative in a serious way, then the answer is that anxiety has a hold of our emotional state.  This can somewhat calm to soul, although it doesn’t necessarily remove the anxiety.  But once we know then many feelings and emotions can be simply discarded as false.  We can take a little better control of our lives as we seek the Savior.  This may or may not help your anxiety and depression or your PTSD.  But it will give you some ability to control what you feel and discard emotions that have no bearing on your life.  I plead with the Lord everyday for those who suffer with these illnesses.  I know the trial and the daily struggle for just a small portion of the spirit.  I know that struggle to find peace and happiness.  I pray that you will find the Lord waiting for you.  Until next week do your part so that the Lord can do his.