UPFRONT June 26, 2006 Issue

Afraid ... of fear???

STEVE GRAHAM, MANAGING EDITOR

Sometimes what terrifies you is right there in front of your eyes. In other cases, it's something you imagine—maybe not a reality of the moment but a possibility of the future. In either case, as Franklin Roosevelt proclaimed, a solution lies in getting control of "fear itself."

How true it seems that the more people focus on a particular threat—be it disaster, disease, security risk, or in Roosevelt's case the economic peril of the Great Depression—the more the fear of that threat takes on a life of its own, first individually and then collectively.

But just as mass fear begins with each individual consenting to fear, so does its destruction begin with individuals grasping a vastly larger and more powerful reality. God is Love, and Love is the opposite of fear, the very antidote to it. And through the invocation of divine power, which is a good description of prayer, we have the opportunity to disarm collective concern and panic, right within the precincts of our own consciousness.

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