Monsters under the bed. Scary movies. Things in our closets. Shadows. Fear is an essential part of who we are in our human experience. It is what we do with the unknown, particularly the unknown that we are not curious about. As a child, we wrapped ourselves in our shield of blankets, covering our heads, clinching our stuffed animals in our white knuckles, as if these measures of security would help us. We find ways to work out our fears, but often never confront them head on. As adults, we no longer rely on toy soldiers or safety blankets, but replace these things with new and improved methods of battling through our emotions. We replace a fear of failure by taking less risks. We replace our fear of intimacy by having superficial friends who do not truly know us. We replace a fear of commitments by always keeping one foot out of the door. We replace the fear of dying by seeking every way to medically prolong our life. Never do we conquer these fears, but instead find ways to avoid.
M. Night Shyamalan defines the captive nature of fear well in his film “The Village.” The Village starts off intriguingly enough, in late-nineteenth-century Covington Woods, a small settlement in the countryside of — we later learn — Pennsylvania. The villagers are isolated from “the towns” by the surrounding woods, in which some sort of deadly creatures live — we hear their howls and the crunch of their footsteps on the dry autumnal underbrush. Adventurous teenage boys play chicken with their fears, standing near the well-marked village perimeter with their backs to the woods to see how long they can endure the terror of wondering if they’re going to be eaten, but a longtime truce between the villagers and the creatures seems to holding, though they speak an awful lot about “Those We Don’t Speak Of.” If you haven’t seen the movie yet, I will ruin the ending for you now. The creatures that keep the Villagers from ever leaving are lies when one character leaves the village and finds modern day America beyond the walls. There’s not a crevice in our culture that does not seep with this sort of fear. Our advertising, our politics, our business, and our churches. I will get a little more into how fear and faith interact in another blog entry, but this is very serious in how we make decisions.
