Transcending fear

When evil walks among us, how can faith protect?

The original Fright Night was one of my favorite movies when I was a teenager. That story very much reflects the times that we are living in now.

A sleepy little town full of normal people who are going about their lives, completely unaware of a predator in their midst; this describes the whole world.

A suavely beautiful millionnaire with a silver tongue who hypnotizes people and convinces them that the evidence of what is going on in front of their own eyes is not really happening; media, political figures, entertainers.

A perceived hero coming in to save the day, who is actually a fraud; insert whichever messianic figure one is counting on to come through.

Myth (conspiracy theory) and reality (real and imminent danger) are converging into a moment like the collapse of a house of cards. It is the Red Pill moment that each of us must experience if we are to continue to remain alive here on the Earth. The realization that danger is all around us, and we must take action to save ourselves. And sometimes, figuring out what that action is can be daunting.

How many of us identify with the character of Peter Vincent, the pretend vampyre hunter, girded with a physical arsenal of crosses and spikes, which work just fine in a stage show but have no effect when the rubber hits the road? The character that Roddy McDowell played so well was horrified when he attempted to hold off a real vampyre by brandishing a cross, only for the monster to mockingly jeer “you have to have Faith for that to work on me!” Faith was the one thing that he did not have; not in Divine….not in himself.

The transformation that happens in this movie, Fright Night, is Peter Vincent’s realization that he can continue accepting that old identity by running away in fear, abandoning his friends to a fate worse than death and failing utterly as a human being…..or he can feel the fear and do it anyway, and in the process step into the shoes of an actual hero.

He chooses to push through the fear….and in the process, he discovers the Faith that he was not able to connect with in the past, when the stakes were low.

Many years ago, when I was young and utterly fascinated by the paranormal, I attended a dinner event in Connecticut showcasing Lorraine Warren and the haunted doll, Annabel. At the time, I was deep into “New Age” programming; atheist and insistent that all the evil is actually a shadow that comes from the ugly darkness that humans are capable of. I was angry at Jesus for being just a story that hypocrites who wanted to abdicate all responsibility to the harms that their own actions brought to others and to the world clung to, and I couldn’t feel any connection to Divine.

• The haunted doll was in a tall glass case, hidden behind a blanket, on the far side of the dining room. It remained there, off in the shadows, throughout the several-course dinner that we were served while we listened to Lorraine Warren’s family members describing the history that she had lived during the many years that she and her late husband Ed had been ghost hunters. Lorraine, at this time, was quite elderly and she was going to be making an appearance after dinner and before the unveiling of the doll.

The evening wore on, leading up to the big event, which would be the eventual revealing of the doll to everyone in the room. Lorraine Warren was a lifelong Catholic, as had been her husband Ed; their devout Faith and desire to free humanity from demonic possession had been the fuel that had driven them relentlessly forward in their work. As I sat there looking at the people around me in that big room; at least twenty tables with six place settings each, I found myself idly thinking about the power of religious belief. In the nodding heads and the assenting voices of my fellow attendees, I was seeing that they mostly shared the same convictions as Ed and Lorraine. This was shared even by the members of my own family who were with me at the time; my spouse and my daughter (who, I might add, definitely did NOT learn it from me!).

As I listened to the recounting of numerous personal encounters with embodied evil; evidence of the existence of the demonic realm that I hadn’t really considered before, I was suddenly hit with a shocking revelation. Lorraine Warren, her family….my family….and all these strangers surrounding me were protected from harm by the evil that was there in that room with us. God protected them; all of them. Everyone….but me. I had no protection. I had no Faith. And in that moment, I felt vulnerable and afraid for the very first time.

I rushed past Lorraine as she was coming in, said a brief hello, and hurried outside. I spent the next hour or so sitting next to the ornamental grass and lovely flowers on the far side of the parking lot beside my car, waiting for my family. That moment of revelation and fear had stolen away not only all curiosity and desire to see haunted Annabel with my own eyes, but also my remaining appetite.

It was the turning point of a new process of internal transformation, which forced me to really go within, question…and dismantle many of the beliefs that I had built my reality around. It also caused me to explore what the meaning of Faith really is.

When you pull yourself from the lower states of consciousness; fear, apathy, despair….through a conscious act of Free Will and allow the spark of courage to fire within you, you step out of force and into power. As David R Hawkins observed (Power versus Force), courage has a frequency of 200 on the Scale of Consciousness, and it is the point of transcendence.

Back to Fright Night; fake vampyre hunter Peter Vincent, by allowing himself to feel into the desire to protect those he loved (an embodied Divine Masculine principle), faced down the vampyre once again and this time he activated his courage. This allowed him to transcend his earlier failures, and reconnected him to Divine Source, allowing faith to empower that cross in his hands and this time vanquish the Evil.

This internal connection IS the “Kingdom of Heaven” that is present within all of us; whenever you become aware of the Divine connection inside, you activate a forcefield around you. The more that you allow yourself to feel into that connection…feeling into gratitude, and acceptance; all the principles of Christ Consciousness, the more you expand that forcefield. Sometimes, it requires raising your level of consciousness by taking physical action. Physiology controls psychology, and Evil cannot stand against it.

May you find and keep Faith within; As Within, As Without.