It was a picture perfect fall day with sugar maples spreading the colors of flame across the landscape that rolls east from the prospect of Queen Street. It was the kind of Saturday afternoon that makes the spirit expand, where the cares of the world recede as the beauty of the world intercedes. It was that kind of Saturday at least until the men in gas masks and moon suits strolled into view, examining and collecting mysterious piles of white powder that trailed from an area behind St Rose Church and the Middle School along Queen Street and even down to Elm Drive.

When Newtown’s emergency services, the state Department of Environmental Protection, and even an FBI agent turned up with their roadblocks and spools of yellow crime scene tape, our expanding spirits contracted sharply and were stuffed abruptly into that tiny claustrophobic box each of us carries around in our mind – a box labeled “fear.” The substance they were examining and collecting was flour, which is more evocative of feasting than fear. Hikers marking a trail had spread it quite innocently. But for a while, anyway, sorcerers of terror on the other side of the world had turned flour and the innocent acts of hikers into a weapon against people they didn’t know in a town they never heard of.

Fear is the most subtle and debilitating of weapons. It is more stealthy than a B-2 Bomber, never registering on the radar of our consciousness until it strikes. It turns almost anything in our experience – even baking flour and nature lovers – into a threat. It seduces our imaginations into treason, betraying our strengths as Americans, which are our openness, our trust, and our willingness to embrace that which is new or different or even strange. FDR knew what he was talking about at the outset of the World War II when he identified fear itself as our most fearsome of enemies.

Along with our resolve to vigorously protect our nation and ourselves by taking every precaution and guarding against every imaginable threat, we should also be resolved not to be psyched out. Even when the threats and horrors of the world draw near, we should remember that on the battlefield of our own consciousness, where terrorists have aimed the subtle weapon of fear, we always have the advantage of choosing our own attitude.

Among those who suffered the worst threats and horrors of the last century – the Jews of Hitler’s concentration camps – was a sensitive and perceptive psychiatrist, Victor Frankl, who watched his fellow inmates as they coped with circumstances far more fearsome than we can imagine, even today. He noticed some extraordinary individuals who had conquered fear completely, showing compassion to others, sharing their last scrap of bread, and affirming life by staying open to others. We conclude this week with what Victor Frankl concluded from watching these remarkable people: “Everything can be taken away from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”