IN THE evening service of Compline, or Night Prayer, the ancient monastic office which closes the day, the hymn which for centuries has been sung as part of that office asks that God will preserve us from evil dreams, “from nightly fears and fantasies”. One of the psalms also prays for deliverance from “the pestilence that walks in darkness, and the sickness that destroys in the noonday”. The darkness of the night and the vulnerability of defenceless sleep are blessed and hallowed by prayer for God’s protection and the driving away of the destructive powers of evil.

But our fears and fantasies do not only belong to the hours of darkness, though they can indeed be powerful then, as stress and anxiety can disrupt our sleep. Our fantasies can play powerfully in the very different ways of both escape and control.

When such fantasies have become destructive to both ourselves and others the healing that is needed is for us to be enabled to recognise their source in our personal history and to be set free from the powerful shadows left by long-forgotten traumas and domineering parents.

In a very different way many of those who minister in the chaplaincies of the diocese of which I am bishop tell of those who come seeking in a place in the sun, an escape from the humdrum and the routine, the stress of living, and family problems, only to find that the place they had thought was paradise had been a fantasy — for of course they have brought with them much of what they sought to escape.

Our fears can be personal, but then there can also be the real fears that arise from the world in which we live. In the past, great plagues such as the Black Death wiped out cities and towns. Shrines were erected and pilgrimages made to avert the destructive, decimating pestilence that medieval medicine was powerless to cure. In Africa today, and elsewhere, the pandemic of HIV/Aids is no less a plague. Terrorist outrages, such as the recent bombs in Madrid, create — and are intended to create — a climate of fear, in which the possibility of death and destruction without warning, which cannot be guarded against, can change the ethos of society. The fantasies of dictators, and their own inner fears, can impose on whole nations the horrors of the gulags and the concentration camps. Fantasies and fears can beget terrible consequences.

To flourish as human beings we need to be delivered from the fears and fantasies which threaten to overwhelm us, and which can distort and destroy our humanity. The Christian teachers of spiritual wisdom point us insistently to the God whose perfect love casts out fear.

In the Gospels Jesus stills a storm on the Lake of Galilee, when the disciples are overcome with fear that the boat will capsize and they will drown. The old mythology of the chaos monster of the deep echoes in this story, but Jesus shows Himself as Lord of the wind and the sea. Immediately after this story there is another, of a man possessed by a multitude of demons, and again, just as the wind and sea are stilled with a word of peace, so the inner chaos and conflict of the possessed man is overcome by a word of peace and deliverance.

The biblical writers insist that there is one fear which is both necessary and not destructive. It is that “fear of the Lord” that is the beginning of wisdom. But what is meant by this “fear” is something akin to awe, and reverence, and wonder. It is a fear, the great Byzantine saint, Maximos the Confessor, tells us which is “linked with love and constantly produces reverence in the soul”. This awesome wonder is at the heart of the prayer of adoration in which we come before God in our need and seeking His grace, that we may be rooted and grounded in love, a love which meets our deepest needs and so dispels the fears and terrors of the night, of whatever kind.

As the Church prays at Compline in Lent, “Grant us your light, O Lord, that the darkness of our hearts being wholly passed away, we may attain at length to the light which is Christ.”

The Right Rev Geoffrey Rowell is Bishop of Gibraltar in Europe