But as a cleric committed to the Nazarene, what you want to happen is something pretty huge. Oh, sure, we help facilitate the orc-slaying and the goblin-bashing and the kobold-punting now and again, but that's not our primary purpose. We've got bigger fish to fry. We're looking to change lives so that compassion and mercy and grace and justice are made real. We're in the business of bending this whole blessed world in a new direction.
It's an immense task that has been placed before us.
Fear gets in the way of all of that. Fear turns human beings against one another. Fear turns us against ourselves, from moving towards being the person that God made us to be. Those anxieties and terrors and gnawings prevent those around us from making this branch of the material plane into what it should be.
So one of your key tasks, as a Christian Cleric, will be to master the ability to make those around you unafraid. That's where "Remove Fear" comes in.
Unlike Bless and Detect Evil, Remove Fear is a contact spell. It's a spell of presence. It's your hand on the shoulder of someone who's suffering. It's your voice, speaking words of wisdom. It's you, there, unafraid, with them.
That means that Remove Fear can only be cast if you remove fear from yourself. This is not the same thing as being blindly self-confident or willfully oblivious of the implications of what you're doing. There are plenty of clerics who confuse their egos with this first step of Remove Fear, but these are mostly the folks who rolled a flat nine for their wisdom score, and who probably would be better off as a fighter or a thief.
Fighting and stealing tends to be what overconfident egotists do when they lead churches anyway, but that pet peeve is another thing for another time.
The power for a Remove Fear spell comes from your own sense of God's presence and purpose in your life. As with other similar spells, this sense of God...the source of everything we do...is developed through careful spiritual discipline and practice. That means regular prayer, but it goes past that. Mystic disciplines are particularly good for this, because they ground you and center you in the Creator.
That grounding and centering creates two things. First, it replaces all of the small-ball weakness and paralyzing anxiety of our day to day existence with the Fear of God. Our God is an Awesome God, as that praise song goes. But when Jesus folk sing that and smile and hold their hands in the air and wave 'em like they just don't care, they really have no idea what they're talking about. When you, in prayer, get a sense of the divine presence, it's knee-buckling immensity. Scares the bejabbers out of you. Or overwhelms you so completely that you kinda sorta cease to be for a little bit.
This is not because God is a monster. It's because God is so much vaster than we can imagine, so much more all-pervading and radiantly, inescapably real. When we get a glimpse of that, even a tiny peek, it's a shattering thing. It changes us. And that's really terrifying, to the point where all the other things we encounter seem like mist and shadows. Oh, they'll make us quake a little bit. They can threaten us physically. But they are so much less than God that it becomes hard to let them rule us.
That fear...the deep, personal, and existential knowledge of God...changes how you act. It is, as the Manual says, the root of all wisdom.
Second, that grounding relieves that fear. God did not create us to be afraid, as level thirty seven High Priest Paul once said. Once you've got a deep sense of connection with the Divine, and that Spirit moves in you, fear evaporates. Why? Because you're so infused with your sense of God's gracious purpose that neither shattering chaos or crushing oppression seem worthy of your anxiety. They lose power over you. In their place, faith pours in hope. And hope, coupled with faith, overcomes all fear.
You even lose your fear of God. How can you fear that thing that is both your ground and your purpose?
So you've driven out fear in yourself, enough so that you are emboldened to resist broken and oppressive things.
The next step in the spell-casting is to project that confidence into the hearts of those around you. You do that by being there, and sharing it. Share it with your voice, speaking gently and boldly and simply. Remind people of their created purpose. Share it with your actions. Stand by them, working by their side and refusing to step away.
An example of this spell, cast over a sustained period, came as I entered my first congregation. It was a mess, a complete gnawing pit of lemures, wraiths, and the ghosts of what had been. Everything was whispering fear, fear of the denomination, fear of one another, fear of an unknown but seemingly hopeless future.
It was a dark chaos, but I made it clear: so long as you want me here, I will be with you. I poured out presence and the real possibility of change for the better. And in those first three years, it made a difference. The spirit changed. People had hope, and a sense of purpose, because I was there, continually and relentless casting Remove Fear. There were other spells, too, but we'll get to those later.
I will admit that it did not end as I had hoped, as the Enemy sent in reinforcements from one of the darker circles of Malboge. That ultimately forced my retreat and my evacuation of those who'd gathered around me to safer spiritual redoubts. But for a while, it was worthy. It worked.
A few caveats on this spell, ones that can cause you to fall from the path. First, don't be the only one who knows how to cast it. Teach everyone in your congregation how to cast it, just as they should know and be confident casting all first level spells. You do this because as a Jesus-cleric, you need to avoid becoming the only spell caster. Clerichood of all believers, as they say. Your friends have to be able to defend themselves, and embolden themselves. Don't fall into the trap of becoming the only one who knows how to use it.
Second, though this spell can be reversed, never ever ever do that. Cause Fear, like Curse, is a tool of the Enemy. It is a common implement in the hands of Churches that have fallen into the thrall of Evil. Those blighted communities use fear to maintain control of their members, terrifying them with threats of hell and social exclusion. They also create fear of others and fear of the world, forcing their terrified members to hide within the carefully constructed prison those fallen clerics create with every new cast of Cause Fear.
Causing Fear also has another effect. It makes people flee...not just from the churches tight in the clutches of Asmodeus and Beelzebub, but also from those that remain in God's hands. It is part of the Enemy's strategy. Teach them that faith is about fear and manipulation and pain, and they will learn to be cynical about faith.
Cunning and monstrous, but it's very hard to overcome.
But overcome it we shall, and Remove Fear is a potent tool in our spellbook.
