Walking the Talk

Fear and Dancing

I’m going back over older writings with an eye for the shape of leadership and vocation. Here’s one piece, written in February 2004, on fear as friend.

I was asked recently what my favorite movie is. That’s a difficult question for me, movie-lover that I am. But the film I have to pick, because of its humor and grace and inspiration for vocation, is Baz Luhrmann’s “Strictly Ballroom,” a “mockumentary” about competitive Australian ballroom dancing and a couple who find the courage to break the rules and dance their own steps.

Throughout the film the protagonist’s father tries to tell his dancing son something important about his own failed attempt years earlier to dance new steps. But the son doesn’t have time to listen, and others, who are bent on the son’s success so long as it sustains the ballroom tradition, are always shushing the dad. Finally, the father delivers a powerful line just as his son is about to abandon his unique moves to dance the expected way.

“We lived our lives in fear!” he shouts across the dance floor. It is a moment of truth, and it leads to transformation.

Fear is certainly the greatest obstacle to vocation. For individuals and organizations, fear throws up many walls to block the journey of call. But the notion that vocation means fearlessness, like the idea that pursuing our passion is about “following our bliss,” must be broken down. We are not well served by the image of the “fearless leader” or “fearless organization.”

Vocation does not mean the absence of fear. Veteran actors and singers still get butterflies before they perform. Nerves cause my hands to shake when I pray or preach. An organization that takes risks to be faithful to its call naturally, and wisely, feels fear. Fear is a sign that we are alive. Healthy fear helps us differentiate between risk and recklessness.

Anxiety, however, is another matter. Anxiety is fear without basis in reality. That makes anxiety especially powerful, and debilitating. Anxiety is predicated on an unknown future — the what-ifs that paralyze. Anxiety is a cloudy lens thickened by our own projections. It makes us dizzy and doubtful. It leads to lives lived in fear.

I find it interesting that biblical texts tell us not to worry, yet at the same time advise us to “fear the Lord.” How do we make sense of this apparent contradiction?

Anxiety is not grounded in reality. Fear of the Lord, however, is a giving over to the Great Reality. Herein lies a wonderful paradox. Fear of the Lord — the awe and wonder that “draws us near” to God, as Abraham Joshua Heschel says — draws us away from worries that often rule our lives and institutions. Fear of the Lord frees us, drawing us out of anxieties about whether our path will be regarded as foolish, whether our gifts will be appreciated, whether we will be successful or valued or understood.

Fear of the Lord, appropriated as awe, is an entrance to the mystery that “something is asked of us,” Heschel says. That kind of fear is a recognition that the Creator calls the creation, that our lives and our institutions have purpose, that we are asked, as the rabbi puts it, “to be a partner of God in the redemption of the world.”

“The root of religion,” he says, “is the question what to do with … fear.” In other words, how will we respond to God’s awesome invitation?

Naturally, that’s a question which may leave us shaking in fear. But shaking is OK. Shaking can lead to dancing.

Daniel Pryfogle