Love in the Right Hand, Fear in the Left

Beloved in Christ,

There is a deep cut on Bruce Springsteen’s 1987 album “Tunnel of Love” called “Cautious Man,” which tells the story of the speaker’s struggle to stick with the disciplines of marriage and domestic life. When he is introduced, we are told “On his right hand Billy tattooed the word love and on his left hand was the word fear/and in which hand he held his fate was never clear.” 

In my experience, the opposite of love is not hate, but fear. My feelings of anger or hatred toward something or someone else usually mask something I am afraid of losing or trying desperately to hold onto. Like the speaker in Springsteen’s song, all of us have the power to choose every day whether we will live from a place of love or from a place of fear. The life of discipleship, it seems to me, is making a choice in each day and each moment to live from love.

There is no doubt the world can be a fearful place, particularly in the days we are living through. But the good news of Jesus is that God’s love is more powerful than all that we fear, and more powerful than the demonic acts of hatred that fear so often drives us to commit. In these final weeks of Lent, we begin to slowly turn our attention once again to the story of our Lord’s Passion, and its reminder that while fear will always try to destroy perfect love, fear cannot and has not triumphed. Our witness to love’s liberating victory in the world starts with each of us grounding our own small lives in that liberation and victory. I hope you are finding some way, each day, to choose love over fear. I hope you are finding some way, each day, to know and feel God’s perfect love in the depth of your being, so that your life, and our life together, might shine more brilliantly with God’s light, to illuminate our fearful world. 

Keep the faith,

The Right Reverend Craig Loya
X Bishop
Episcopal Church in Minnesota