We’ve talked a good deal around town about fear, especially about fears of economic uncertainty.

The short historical walk into February and March, 1933, of Monday’s column IN COMMON sought out the genesis of Roosevelt’s iconic line about the only thing we have to. In so doing I slyly avoided answering the question with which it began: what’s the line really mean?

But that work was already done here, in this place. In a remarkable sermon delivered on November 30 at St. John’s Evangelical Lutheran Church, Pastor Cynthia Krommes got to the heart of it.

Now, to bring together the thirteenth chapter of the Gospel of Mark with the tag line from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy could have been counted feat enough. It may even have been enough to identify and name threads of hope buried within the stark images of destruction and desolation in the biblical text alone.

But those very feats were accomplished by an argument which was as much neurological as theological:

“’DON’T PANIC!’ Because when we panic we do not use our whole brain, but only the base of it. That part keeps us alive when we’re under attack for it controls the fight or flight mechanism. But it doesn’t give us options. When we use our whole brain…we [are enabled] to move beyond panic into other possibilities and in doing so to go from being reactive to proactive. Options open up and a new future is born.”

Those apocalyptic images in Mark’s gospel? They’re in place not to engender fear but to target frontal lobes badly in need of a good thaw and some good exercise. Signs of hope? Images of life in death, and of the stunningly, bafflingly unexpected emerging from the narrow confines of blinkered common prediction.

“So, DON’T PANIC, but instead hope. Then all sorts of possibilities open up.”

And to the point with which we began: “What might take place in our community when instead of succumbing to economic fear and paralysis, we make a commitment that we will get through this together?”

Posted by
G.E. “Skip” Lawrence