“Escaping the Fowler’s Snare”

“Escaping the Fowler’s Snare”  December 16, 2018    Dr. Roger Ray, pastor

Psalm 124            click here to see the video

² if it had not been the Lord who was on our side,
   when our enemies attacked us, ³ then they would have swallowed us up alive,
   when their anger was kindled against us; ⁴ then the flood would have swept us away,
   the torrent would have gone over us; ⁵ then over us would have gone the raging waters. ⁶ Blessed be the Lord, who has not given us
   as prey to their teeth. ⁷ We have escaped like a bird
   from the snare of the fowlers; the snare is broken,
   and we have escaped. ⁸ Our help is in the name of the Lord, who made heaven and earth.

On November 30, 1954, Mrs. Ann Hodges was taking a nap on the sofa of the home she rented with her husband near Sylacauga, Alabama when she became the only person in recorded history to be struck by a meteor. It came crashing through the roof of the rural house, bounced off of a radio and struck her in the thigh, leaving a large bruise, a photograph of which was featured in Time Magazine. In some ways she was lucky, the meteor had broken into two pieces before this six-pound rock came through her roof. She was lucky that it hit the radio before it hit her, slowing it down enough not to have killed her like a giant bullet from heaven. 

The incident that made her famous probably also made her feel pretty unlucky. Billions of people, over thousands of years of history, and she is the only one who has ever actually been hit by a meteor even though several thousand rocks that weigh a pound or more hit the earth every day at a speed of about 200 miles an hour. Several cars have been hit over the years. When a large meteor breaks up in the atmosphere there can be a sonic boom that is like an explosion. The largest one we know of took place a hundred years ago over Siberia, flattening an estimated 500,000 acres of uninhabited forest. But no injuries. Just poor old Ann Hodges.

I don’t think that I have ever mentioned Ann Hodges in a sermon before, but I have told her story more than a hundred times. I use her story as a part of Rational Behavior Therapy when I am working with someone who has a severe anxiety disorder. Now, I don’t mention Ann when I am talking with someone who has a substantive reason to be anxious. I worked with a lot Vietnam vets who had PTSD when I was a chaplain in a VA hospital, my father had PTSD from his experiences in WWII. I have a good friend here in town who is currently being treated for PTSD after barely surviving a housefire that we have reason to believe was an attempted murder. 

There are a number of people among us who suffer from panic attacks and a generalize anxiety disorder that they come by based on very real experiences or fears. But many people suffer from anxiety disorders, panic attacks, or phobias that can have very serious effects on how they live their lives for no good reason at all.

Most of these are exaggerated anxieties. All of us worry when we send our kids off to college that they are not mature enough to make good decisions. 

We worry about drugs, sexual assault, or a growing tendency to cut class and keep us from finding out how bad their grades really are. But if you can’t sleep at night because your kid is away in college, then you may be allowing your fear to become exaggerated. 

I have a good friend who is so afraid of lightening that when a storm comes, she hides under the stairs until it is over. We have talked about this many times. I will tell her, don’t worry about the lightening, it isn’t going to get you inside the house. Worry about the meteors. Every hour there are more than 200 of those heavenly bullets raining down on the earth at 200 miles an hour and they can come through the roof, the ceiling, and the stairs and get you right where you are hiding. If I just say “Ann Hodges” to her, she looks at me like she is going to choke the life right out of me. 

But, seriously, irrational fears can paralyze a person. If you tell your physician about your anxiety, you will probably get a prescription for an anti-depressant, usually one of the serotonin drugs because they seem to work, at least for a while, and they have fewer side effects. However, they have a horrible rate of recurrence. That is, when you stop taking the medication, the fear comes back.

Many others will get a prescription for Xanax or some other benzodiazepine medication, which can be very helpful, but it is also highly addictive and tends to require a higher and higher dose to be effective, which almost guarantees addiction. 

Clinically speaking, the most effective treatment for anxiety disorders, panic attacks, and phobias, all of which are similar to one another, is talk therapy. Therapy that is aimed at reality orientation, perhaps desensitizing exposure to or talk about what a person is afraid of. Most therapists take a more sympathetic approach than telling people who are already terribly frightened that hundreds of meteors will strike the earth in the next hour at the lethal speed of 200 mph, but then, I am not paid by the hour and I prefer to cut to the chase. 

Most of what people have talked to me about over the years are social phobias . . . fear of public speaking, fear of the marketplace, Claustrophobic anxieties or fear of heights, of flying, or even of ladders. Children grow up with anxiety dreams about being chased, or of falling, or of monsters under the bed. Children are small and vulnerable, and their dreams betray those general fears. As they grow into their adult bodies, these unconscious fears usually just go away.

Teenagers and young adults often suffer from anxiety dreams that generally come in one of two flavors: the test anxiety dream or the dream about being naked or in your underwear in public. Both of these are fears that we will be discovered to be inadequate in some way. Again, these anxieties typically resolve themselves in your 20’s as you gain more self confidence.

Most of us grow out of those anxieties of youth but they can be replaced by fears of all sorts that we see reflected in popular movies.

Fear of ghosts 

Fear of spiders       

Some people would add the fear of snakes here, but I do not find that fear to be the least bit irrational. Rationally, I know that most snakes are not poisonious and that many are actually quite helpful in keeping down the rodent population. However, I find it best to assume that every snake is, in fact, a Black Mamba that can kill you with a single strike. 

There are irrational fears and then there are totally reasonable self-defense reflexes and that is all that I am going to say about snakes. 

A couple of months ago I got to spend four days making a silent retreat at the Gethsemane Abby in Kentucky. While there, I gathered with the brothers seven different times during the day to chant psalms in the church. The Trappists’ daily life is a constant flowing between work, prayer, study, and sleep. Spending a few hours a day chanting psalms with the community, the frequent refrain of fear verging on paranoia that is repeated in the psalms came to my attention. 

Who are the enemies who so frequently tried to ruin the life of the psalmist 2500 years ago? Some of the psalms are about foreign powers, some about abusive captors, but even granting that, a lot of them are just downright anxiety riddled about unnamed critics and enemies. 

It seems that they, like we, spent way too much of their time worrying about what people say about them or think about them.

My father was a stutterer. When he was upset or nervous, he virtually could not talk. He took public speaking classes and was prescribed what was, in those days, called “nerve pills,” usually Valium but he never got over it. I was interested then, when I encountered an article in grad school that noted that stuttering was virtually never seen among Native Americans. I later learned that it is equally rare among the Chinese.

Doctors and Psychologists sometimes battle for theories to account for this but what I knew about my father and about many others, is that he did not stutter when we sang. That seemingly subtle shift in where the language is coming from in your brain, completely eliminates the nervous disorder. But still, it seems to me that it just can’t be a physiological issue. It is an anxiety issue. It is speculated that Native Americans don’t stutter because their culture is less judgmental of public speaking. 

I don’t want to appear to be dismissive of what is a very serious problem for many people but stuttering and anxiety attacks and dreams, and many phobias and neurosis arise from caring too much about what other people think or what they might say about you. Again, this is not always true. 

I, myself, went through a period of years of disturbed sleep after having been held hostage at the end of a shot gun for five hours. I spent those hours anticipating my death every second until my form addiction counseling client got sober enough and tired enough to lay the gun down, allowing me to escape. For months, I could not close my eyes without seeing the open end of a double-barreled shot gun and the man’s bloodshot eyes at the other end of the gun. 

I know all too well how a trauma such as warfare, a car accident, a house fire, or an assault can leave you with scars that take years to recover from. But the extreme cases of battlefield PTSD and other violent events can hardly account the very high rate of anxiety and panic disorders in our culture. 

I fear that the majority come from the basic meanness of society and our innate desire to be liked. They come as ways of literally somatizing our fear of gossip, judgement, rejection. And to that, I have something I want to say to you as your pastor, as a person who cares about you and your happiness:

Don’t let your critics take either your joy or your self-confidence. When I began writing opinion columns for the News-Leader, and I wrote columns that I knew would be controversial because I wanted to stimulate thought in this very conservative city, but I was destroyed by the hate mail. I went into explosive fits of rage and horrible bouts of depression and I wanted to fight back. I said controversial things to make them think about things they didn’t want to think about, so they wrote nasty personal insults to me to hurt me. And for years, it worked pretty well. I made them think and they made me miserable. 

I finally had an editor who gave me good advice, and mind you, I have endured dozens of editors over the decades, almost none of whom had any good advice, but this one guy finally got it through my skull: Irrational criticism is the price you pay for having a public voice. 

You have to choose. Do you want to accomplish good and important things with your life, or do you want to avoid the discomfort of being criticized? Any time you light a candle in the dark place, you are not just dispelling the darkness, you are also attracting bugs. That’s just how it works.

It is not simple and it is not easy, but you don’t have to let toxic people rent space in your skull and drive you insane. You can choose to, day by day, raise the rent on those suckers until you get them out of your life.

Sure, you guys see me up here every week sharing an unvarnished 20 minute version of my views on everything but the reason that I don’t soft peddle things or stutter is because when I walk up here, I have decided to be this guy:

And you can be this guy too. 

A hundred potentially lethal meteors have struck the earth while I have been standing here talking to you. None of them hit you and probably none of the others that will fall in the next several decades will either. The things that people say about you, what they may think about you, also will not hurt you, unless you give that power to them.