The Cheap Perfume Route

This essay appears in Issue 28 of The Mockingbird magazine, now available to order.

There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear, for fear has to do with punishment. And whoever fears has not reached perfection in love. We love because he first loved us. (1 Jn 4:18–19)

These are some of the most beautiful words in the New Testament. John is describing the heart of our faith as it is lived and experienced. I want to unpack what this means.

The late writer David Foster Wallace once was asked what the point of life is. He said, “The job that we’re here to do is to learn how to live in a way that we’re not terrified all the time.”

“Terrified” is an admittedly strong word. You may say, I’m not terrified all the time. I have my anxieties and my fears, but “terrified” sounds like an overstatement. Maybe you know someone, though, who is terrified. Terrified of the future. Or terrified for his or her children’s safety and constantly over-controlling them. Maybe terrified about the direction of the country or of this or that institution.

As grandiose as those fears are, according to most psychologists, the fears that influence and shape our daily life are much smaller. One of the all-time greatest articles from the Onion has to be: “Anxiety-Ridden Man Rightly Ashamed of Every Single Thing He Does.”

“Tim’s the kind of guy who is forever second-guessing his behavior as if the people in his life are constantly scrutinizing every single move he makes. And he’s completely right about that. We are,” says Paula Ramirez, a coworker. “Anytime he’s […] obsessively reexamined something he’s said, his fears have been entirely reasonable, given our nonstop monitoring of his behavior.”

The piece gently lampoons the way many of us think. We are afraid that our friends are thinking about us and judging us, when in fact, they’re mostly thinking about themselves.

Nonetheless we are afraid of other people. Not just what they’ll think of us; we’re afraid of what they’ll do to us. We are afraid that they’ll reject us if they see who we really are without our makeup on.

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Movie star Demi Moore was once asked what she’s most afraid of. This is a woman who’s been a box office mainstay since the mid-1980s, whose films have grossed hundreds of millions of dollars. (And in 2025, at age 63, Demi graced the cover of People Magazine’s “World’s Most Beautiful” issue.) She said, “What scares me is that I’m going to ultimately find out at the end of my life that I’m not really lovable. That I’m not worthy of being loved, that there’s something fundamentally wrong with me.” Two weeks later, she checked into rehab for an eating disorder and for drug addiction.

Her response reminded me of a clever New Yorker cartoon of two middle-aged women jogging together. One of them looks at the other one and says, “I’m thinking about letting myself get old.” The joke is that we treat aging as if it were a matter of willpower and consent, when of course the opposite is true. But the cartoon articulates the pressure that people feel to hang onto their youth at all costs. This is because we equate youth with beauty and beauty with love. We know we shouldn’t do this, that it’s cruel and self-defeating to do so, but that lesson is notoriously hard to internalize.

Demi is getting at something that the apostle John talks about in his letter. Fear has to do with punishment. And what is punishment, if not the expression of a guilty verdict? As a result of your wrinkles, you have been found lacking, condemned. The punishment for this transgression is collective indifference at best, public shaming at worst, a dearth of good roles and employment possibilities at minimum.

You and I may think of punishment predominantly in legal terms, such as paying a fine or going to jail. But we punish people in all sorts of ways. My two-year-old son is a very exuberant and lovely boy, but he recently went through a biting phase. Now he’s in a phase where he occasionally will reach out and hit me or my wife in the face. We know it’s not a contemptuous act, but we’d love for it to stop, especially where grandparents are concerned. We’ve been told that the most effective way to discipline him, since he’s still relatively pre-verbal, is to remove ourselves from his orbit. Punish him with our absence.

Of course, we do this to adults too. Have you ever shut down when you felt attacked? Have you ever become passive aggressive or given someone the silent treatment? Maybe you’ve done the opposite and punished someone with your words, with your yelling, with your criticism.

Perhaps your fears are justified — Hollywood certainly punishes women for aging — but maybe they aren’t. I’m not here to debate the legitimacy of what you’re afraid of, or the punishment that looms in your mind. I’m merely here to say that John the apostle seems to think there is an inverse relationship between fear and love, that the extent to which fear is present, love is not.

That’s what he says: “Whoever fears has not yet reached perfection in love.” To the extent to which love is present, fear will not be. Think about your personal relationships: your relationship with your parents, your friends, your spouse. What percentage of each relationship is characterized by fear? Around whom do you feel the need to keep up appearances? Who in your life do you tiptoe around? Maybe you grew up with an alcoholic in the house. People are constantly afraid of setting off an alcoholic, triggering their temper and thereby their next drinking episode.

Parents often fear their children. We’re afraid we’re going to do something wrong — cut the sandwich incorrectly, use a suboptimal tone of voice — and our child is going to punish us with a fit or tantrum, or by sulking. Maybe you have a relationship with someone who is always looking to you for validation or vice versa. The extent to which you look to another person for validation will be the extent to which you are afraid of not getting it.

What do we do with all of this? How do we increase the love side of the equation and reduce the fear? We know that telling a terrified person not to be afraid seldom has the intended effect. It certainly hasn’t worked when others have told us to get a grip. We also know that you cannot threaten someone into loving you. No one is ever punished into loving.

Thankfully, the good news that John is getting at is not a strategy. John is proclaiming that perfect love lies at the heart of the universe, at the heart of who God is, and that love, by definition, has no fear in it. It has no fear in it because it is not indexed to appearances or accomplishments, to what others think of us or even what we think of ourselves. It is not indexed to our response to it. It is indexed only to God himself. That’s what makes it so beautiful.

Owen Rival, Out of Toilet Paper, 2024. Acrylic on canvas, 24 × 17 7/10 × 1 1/5 in.

I make these claims not because they sound so sweet, but because this is how Jesus loved. The love of Jesus went all the way. It did not hold back. It was not remotely touched by fear, not by fear of what would happen to him or fear of what would happen to those he loved. He wasn’t afraid of what people might do or say. He wasn’t afraid of what he might find out. He wasn’t afraid of what that love might or might not produce in its object.

Remember, John was one of those disciples who fell asleep in the garden of Gethsemane, right before Jesus was arrested before his crucifixion. Jesus loved people in their weaknesses, at their ugliest moments, and in the midst of their unlovability. That’s how he loved John: with a kind of love that didn’t do away with punishment but suffered that punishment in his stead.

What I’m trying to say is that the great engine of Christian love — its starting point — is prior belovedness: belovedness at the point of failure and shame and guilt. It’s the kind of love that sacrifices itself, not because it has to, but because it wants to. That is the kind of love that casts out fear.

I’ll close with a story I heard on the NPR radio show Snap Judgment. When host Glynn Washington was a young boy in the 1980s, his family moved from urban Detroit to rural Michigan. He recalls the first day of school in this new setting. Glynn had his Trapper Keeper, he had a new haircut, and his clothes were clean. He was excited. As the bus approached his stop, he could hear the kids yelling at each other. They sounded like they were having fun. The moment he stepped on, though, it got really quiet. These are his words:

See, we were the only Black folk from miles around. So I went to sit down next to a towheaded boy, and he spit in the seat where I was supposed to sit. So did the next boy and the girl behind him.

I kept walking further, and the bus driver’s yelling at me telling me to sit down. “We gotta go!” I finally get to the back of the bus and there’s a little girl with her backpack in the empty seat. I can’t turn around. I just can’t. I’m too afraid. This is the first day. She slides the bag to the floor and I sit down.

Glynn and his seatmate didn’t speak that day or any of the next ones. But they sat together all fall. He eventually found out her name was Mary Jo. Halfway through the year, the administration switched up the bus route, so that instead of being the last kid picked up, Glynn was the first. The bus was empty when he boarded it, but out of force of habit, he took his normal seat in the back.

In rural Michigan, the winters get very cold and many of the residents don’t have much money. Many lacked the funds to insulate the pipes in their houses properly. This meant that when the less privileged kids got ready for school, they often didn’t have water for washing up or taking a shower. This left two choices: They could either go to school stinking of farm, or they could mask the smell with cheap perfume. One particular day, Glynn tells us, Mary Jo went the cheap perfume route. He continues:

The second she got on the bus, it was like someone had slapped you in the face. It was like rotting flowers pressed on top of barn filth. Everyone started hollering and carrying on.

Mary Jo held up her head and looked to the back of the bus trying to catch my eye, but I turned my head away. I hoped she would get the hint. I didn’t want her to sit there with me. I wanted her to sit anywhere else. And then before I knew it, she was standing right next to me, looking at my backpack blocking her.

For a long moment I looked straight ahead of me, and then I was so ashamed. I moved my bag to the ground, and she sat down next to me. The bus kids turned around and held their noses and made fun of her. They screamed at me for allowing her to sit next to me, but for the first time, I didn’t care. I didn’t care what they thought, if they punched, if they swore.

I only knew that I wanted to say something to Mary Jo. I wanted to say, I’m sorry. So instead I said, “Hey, my name is Glynn.” And Mary Jo said, “I know your name.” And we talked, two little kids in the back of the bus talking.

Glynn and Mary Jo witnessed the unblemished truth that mercy begets mercy. Real love does not shy away from either “barnyard filth” or the shame that accompanies it. It targets the back of the bus every time. The cheap perfume route is where such love blossoms.

Thankfully, the gospel is not a command to summon this kind of love from within. Nor is it an injunction to stop being afraid. The good news is the rock-solid proclamation that in Christ you have been loved by God like this, right in the midst of the terrifying and less-than-beautiful reality of your life. We love because he first loved us. That is the love, to quote Dante, “that moves the sun and the other stars.” Amen.