Wiccan Weekly Writings are first, an opportunity for me to talk about ideas brought up by various quotations from a Wiccan point of view and secondly an opportunity for members of this community, whatever their spiritual path or lack thereof, to enter into dialogue about these ideas. Please feel free to ask any questions you have about my path, my personal interpretation of Wiccan theology, or the religion in general. We Wiccans don't proselytize, but we'll answer questions. Please let this be a place of civility and respect for the truths of other people's paths. And now, onto the thinky thoughts....
Also in blue
Fear, as opposed to anxiety, has a definite object (as most authors agree), which can be faced, analyzed, attacked, endured. One can act upon it, and in acting upon it participate in it—even if in the form of struggle. In this way one can take it into one’s self-affirmation. Courage can meet every object of fear, because it is an object and makes participation possible. Courage can take the fear produced by a definite object into itself, because this object, however frightful it may be, has a side with which it participates in us and we in it. One could say that as long as there is an object of fear, love in the sense of participation can conquer fear. But this is not so with anxiety, because anxiety has no object, or rather, in a paradoxical phrase, its object is the negation of every object. Therefore participation, struggle, and love with respect to it are impossible. He who is in anxiety is, insofar as it is mere anxiety, delivered to it without help.
(Paul Tillich (1886–1965), German-born U.S. theologian. "An Ontology of Anxiety," The Courage to Be, Yale University Press (1952).)
I've learned a lot about trust over the years, and about fear. It's natural when you first feel pain that you fear it. In the full flush of one's youth, it's natural to fear disability. I was 23 when I was told that I would never run again. I would not go hiking with my sons. I would be able to walk from bed to bathroom to chair, but no more. That someday I would very likely come to wheelchair use. I would never wear heels again. And I've been asked, if you could do things over again, what would you do?
People are sure I'd have stayed home that night, not tried to take my son out to visit my mother, thereby entirely avoiding the accident. I don't think I would have, now, though. I would have made different decisions about who I trusted to help me with my disability and who I leaned on for understanding. But I would not have avoided it. It has made me into the person I am, in so many ways, and taught me that sometimes the right response is not leaping in and doing something, but sitting back and waiting. It gave me the stillness to let the gods speak to me and change me.
I used to fear pain. I still don't like it. I prefer not to be in it. But I don't live my life fearing it. Similarly, I no longer fear disability. I prefer to keep myself as functional and active as I can....but I'm not afraid of what happens if I don't.
We speak often of "perfect love and perfect trust" in Wicca. I know our finances are perilous, I work to change that, but I am not afraid. Because I know things will turn out right, and I trust They who told me that. This trust lifts the anxiety of everyday life enough that I can write, and I am sure that it is in my writing that I'll find the income I need to cover the necessities of living. So it works together, and it's all right. Even if I still face another surgery on my foot.