Fear Is a Call for Love

“If only attack produces fear, and if you see attack as the call for help that it is, the unreality of fear must dawn on you.  For fear is a call for love, in unconscious recognition of what has been denied. (T217)”

Affirmation:  “Fear is a call for love.”

Reflections:

1 – Improving Our Relationships

This passage will go a long way toward smoothing our relationships with each other.  If another attacks us, it is best if we can see it solely as a call for help.  If the attack unnerves us or makes us angry, we are only being fearful.  And, the passage says, we are calling for love.

2 – Love in ACIM

A Course in Miracles sees everything in our world as either an expression of love or a call for love.  If we can believe this, we will be led to forgive our brother, regardless of the form of attack that he might use.  (Note:  This includes our “sister.”)

3 – Fear = Feeling Unloved?

When we feel fear, we have felt unloved.   But this passage speaks of the “unreality of fear,” and this is an important point.  The overarching thought is that the world itself and all that happens in it, outside of love, is an illusion.  This is part of the worldview of ACIM.  When we can truly believe, and let ourselves be comforted by the passages that we read, we will turn loose our hold upon fear.

4 – Choosing Fear

Many of us have chosen fear because we knew no better.  Something went awry in our world, and this threatens us, and before we know it, we are consumed by anxiety.  Jesus would not have it thus.  He asks us to pray for help in the conditions that have brought the fear about (a Text tenet).  He indicates that he cannot resolve the fear, because cause and effect are real, our minds are real, and we have brought fear upon ourselves by not watching our minds closely enough.   Jesus believes that he would be tampering with a most basic law of the universe if he came between our minds and the fear that our minds have made.  Fear is not real, but it seems real to us.  Sometimes fear has a sufficient hold upon the mind that we must turn to magical means for solace.  These magical means are our physical medications, which Jesus does not deny us.  We should not try to heal with the mind if the mind is particularly vulnerable to the results of attack.  A temporary expedient may be needed, if the hold of fear on the mind is particularly tenacious.  (These are all paraphrases from the Text.)

Prayer:

Dear Father/Mother,

I would choose to express love today, knowing that this is what You want.  You have no other advice, actually.  If we feel love and express that love, we will let fear fall away, and, with it, the ego.  The ego, a part of my belief about myself, has given me many anxious days and nights with troubled dreams.  I would leave aside all this nonsense immediately.  I give my all to You.

Be with me as I seek to follow Love’s pathway only.  When I slip back into old ego-oriented, anxious ways, help me to know that the best way, the only sane response, is to forego fear.  Why would I cling to something that has made me so unhappy?  It is only because I did not understand Your way well enough.  Help me to understand and to live Your way today.

Amen.