I once preached on this text in a psychiatric hospital where I was a chaplain. I boldly announced, "I John 4:18 says 'There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out all fear."' Immediately a man in the middle of the crowd jumped up and yelled, "That's a bunch of baloney!"

Fearful people just don't get it. I have counseled fearful people. My heart goes out to them, because the more filled with fear one is, the more difficult it is to relax into God's loving arms.

Some years ago I attended a retreat where a Jesuit priest who is now in heaven, Fr. Tony de Mello, helped me see that there are ultimately only two things in the world: God, whose sweetest name is love; and fear, which has many dreadful names like Satan. One evil in the world: fear. One good in the world: love. Love is often called by other names—freedom, peace, bliss, God or Yahweh. But the label doesn't really matter.

Neither does the label matter in the case of fear. There's no evil in the world that you cannot trace to fear. Not one. Ignorance based on fear, caused by fear, that's where the evil comes from. Take violence, for example. The truly nonviolent person, the person incapable of violence, is free from fear. Fearless. I think of Mahatma Ghandi, Mother Teresa, Nelson Mandela. You can think of others, I'm sure.

Now, think of the last time you became angry. Go ahead. Think of the last time you felt intense anger. Now inspect the fear behind it. What were you afraid of losing? What were you afraid would be taken from you? Or think of some angry person you know, maybe somebody you are afraid of. Can you see how frightened she or he is?

Ultimately, only two things: love; fear.

With this backdrop, here are four practical steps toward finding the real you. And by the way, wisdom is not something you can buy. You'll find the real you when you drop barriers of misunderstanding.

The first step is to get in touch with any negative feeling you have. Lots of people have negative feelings they're not aware of. For instance, people are depressed and they're not aware they are depressed. Those of us who do clinical assessment have a checklist of symptoms depressed people commonly experience. If most of them describe you, you are probably depressed seriously enough to warrant treatment. But I am always surprised at those who thought these symptoms were normal, that that's the way most people feel! Only after they become symptom-free can they understand how depressed they were.

You cannot deal with a cancer you haven't detected. Or get rid of the termites in the walls of your house if you don't know they're there. Do you feel gloomy? Guilt-ridden? Self-hating? Anxious? Tense? Get in touch with any negative feeling you have. And if you have trouble naming these fearful emotions, yet you suspect that you have them, ask your minister, priest or rabbi to recommend a counselor to help you coax out and name your negative feelings.

The second step is to accept that the negative feeling is in you, not in reality. In here, not out there. That may seem self-evident, but many people don't see it. They have degrees and licenses and make plenty of money, but they don't understand this. One of my fearful clients was a prominent computer scientist who, until we met together several times, really thought people were out to get him! Later, he described himself as "a head with its chicken cut off." He had a lot to unlearn and relearn.

Negative feelings are in you, not in reality. So: stop trying to change reality! And what is reality? The other person. She. He. They. No one has the power to make you unhappy unless you give your power away to them. No event, no condition, no situation, no person has the power to disturb you. St. Paul got it right when he wrote:

I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God.

But think about it. Somebody told you the opposite from what Paul said, and you believed them.

If you bang your knee against a table, the table is fine. It's simply doing what it was designed to do, to be a table. The pain is in your knee, not in the table. For centuries the mystics have been trying to tell us that reality is okay. Reality is not problematic. Take away human beings from planet Earth and life would go on, in all its loveliness and, yes, natural violence. But where would be the problem? No problem. You create the problem. The feeling is in you, not in reality. Accept that.

The third step is to dis-identify your precious self from that negative feeling. You are infinitely worthful, no matter what you feel. To help people get this, a famous psychiatrist designed a series of affirmations. Right where you are, try repeating four sentences after me. Do it out loud if you can.

Here's the first one: I have a body, but I am not my body.

Now the second one: I think, but I am not my thoughts.

Next sentence: I act, but I am not my deeds.

And finally, the clincher: I feel, but I am not my emotions.

Did you hear about the lawyer whose sewer backed up on a Sunday? When presented with the bill, he said to the plumber, "Hey, you're charging an arm and a leg. I'm a lawyer and I don't make that kind of money." The plumber said, "Neither did I when I was a lawyer." I can change my profession tomorrow, like changing my clothes. I am untouched. Are you your clothes? Are you your name? Are you your profession? I hope not. These things come and go. Once you truly grasp this, no flattery can bamboozle you, and no criticism can subvert you.

So please, stop identifying with your feelings. You may feel gloom right now, or hurt, or the thrill of a new job or a new car, but let it be, it will pass. Everything passes. Everything. This has nothing to do with your preciousness, or God's love for you. You may want to be attractive, desired, applauded, or paid big money for your skills. But you do not need these things. What you need is to be free from fear and filled with love.

The fourth step is to get it straight that you can better your life only by healing you. Imagine a patient who goes to his physician and tells him what he is suffering from. The doctor says, "OK, I understand. Here's what I will do, I will prescribe a medicine for your neighbor." The patient replies, "Oh thank you, that makes me feel much better." Jesus said, "They who are sick (who acknowledge their illness) seek the physician, not those who are well (who deny their illness)."

Problem is, when it comes to attitude sickness, to healing one's understanding, the person who is asleep usually thinks he'll feel better if somebody else wakes up. "If only my wife, my husband, my son, my daughter, my boss, my neighbor would change, life would go much better for me." Such a one keeps insisting, "When I feel good it is because the world is right."

Wrong. It's the other way around: the world is right because I feel good! That's what all the mystics say. Meister Eckhardt said, "God is not attained by a process of addition to anything in the soul, but by a process of subtraction." You don't add or do anything to be free; you drop something. Then you're free.

The greatest mystic of all, Jesus, said: "Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns... Consider the lilies of the field...they neither toil nor spin... So why are you anxious? Can you, for all your anxieties, add a single hour to your life span? Why bother about tomorrow? Get into today!"

So said Jesus.

In his remarkable book, Tuesdays with Morrie, Mitch Albom asks his old professor Morrie Schwarz, who is terminally ill, which are the important questions? Morrie replies: "...they have to do with love, responsibility, spirituality, [and] awareness. If I were healthy today, those would be my issues. They should have been [my issues] all along."

A colleague of mine put the following message on his answering machine: "Hello. This is Pastor Jones. At the tone, please answer the following questions: Who are you? And what do you want? Lest you think me inappropriate or even rude, let me remind you that most people live their entire lifetime without answering either of these questions." Beeeep!

I leave you with these two questions—Who are you? and What do you want?—plus one more: What are you afraid of, that keeps you from letting God's love permeate and envelop you?

May God's fearless love be yours.

Lydia Talbot: John, you conclude your compelling message on the four steps toward finding our real selves with three questions. I am going to ask you to answer them yourself. Who are you? What do you want? And what are you afraid of?

John Landgraf: Oh, that's wonderful. I'm a human being first of all. A human being who is on a pilgrimage to try to make real his potential and what I want is to figure out what kind of legacy God wants me to leave on this earth. Now that I'm sixty I'm thinking about that a good bit more than I did when I was thirty and I'm getting less and less afraid. I'm still a little bit afraid of people who misunderstand me or criticize me without knowing me.

Talbot: So how do you, John, apply the process that you've described to us from getting in touch with our real negative feelings toward the healing process. How do you apply that in your own life?

Landgraf: You know, the real key for me, Lydia, is again and again reminding myself of what the scriptures seem very clear about and that is that the Lord of all creation loves me dearly and knows my name and cares very deeply about me.

Talbot: So receptivity to that reality on the part of the individual is key?

Landgraf: Right.

Talbot: You are a psychotherapist, a clergyman, a musician—a wonderful combination. You told me before the program that you keep trying to reinvent yourself.

Landgraf: I do.

Talbot: How did you become all three and how do they work together?

Landgraf: Well, I think of what I do as a little bit of science and a lot of art, and I think one of the sweetest names for God is Creator and I think of God's creativity as residing with me and God constantly trying to call forth that creativity.

Talbot: In our final minute, that creativity and being called forth is something you must focus on in your book, What To Do About the Third Third of Your Life.

Landgraf: Well, that's right.

Talbot: What are you going to do?

Landgraf: I'm doing it and I'm actually living it right now. What I decided to do when I hit sixty was to—and this isn't everybody's calling—quit reporting to boards of directors or boards of anybody and to start reporting to just God and me and my wife, I guess. And so I'm now doing a patchwork quilt existence. I do speaking like this. I do music and art. I'm writing a Thanksgiving anthem at the moment that I just feel like doing. And I'm doing a practice of psychotherapy and spiritual direction on a part-time basis.

Talbot: And performing jazz.

Landgraf: And performing jazz.

Talbot: It's wonderful to have you back, John. Thank you so much.