Fear is a gift of God. Which is sometimes hard to remember when we are in the grip of it.

Who hasn’t known it? Fear. Cold, clammy, raw fear. In the pit of the stomach. In the sweat on the palms of the hands. Of all the emotions experienced by average human beings in situations of risk—near death, flying, heights, failure, darkness, pain and public speaking—few human responses have been studied more than fear.

Why? Because unbridled fear ensnares us in life. Worse, it makes us our own captors. It puts boundaries around our lives and limits us as surely as lock and chains ever can.

But fear has another side, as well.

The fact is that fear is useful when the object of our fear is actually dangerous or distressingly near. Then, it catapults us into action. It enables us to make changes in life without agonizing over them. It moves us out of harm’s way. And quickly. At very least, it can stop us from being foolhardy. Evolutionary biologists tell us that fear is the emotional residue left to us by ancestors who lived alert to natural dangers at all times. As surely as fear saved early humans from bad storms and wild beasts, it has the capacity to save us, too.

But most important of all, perhaps, is the fact that fear is learned. Which means that we’re not born afraid of things. Instead, we have an experience that stresses us or, if not ourselves, we see someone else go through it. For me, it was watching a doctor put a needle in my father’s arm. “See,” he said, “if you don’t eat your food someday doctors will do this to you, too.” The incident stayed with me forever. It was a long time before I presented my arm knowing that I would surely survive the experience. Whatever the situation, it is the fear of it—seldom the thing itself—that affects the way we go through life after that.

The good news is that what is learned can also be unlearned. As long as we face it. If we have close companions to support us through it. If we know, deep down, that all of life is gift from God and meant, as Scripture tells us, “for our well, and not our woe.” God did not put us here to suffer. God put us here to grow in personal strength, in eternal trust, to our full spiritual stature and in a deep-down awareness of God’s protective presence.

The Monastic Way by Joan ChittisterIt is our fears that teach that lesson, as—one by one—we survive them and become stronger because of it.

—from The Monastic Way, September 2015 by Joan Chittister