“Fear Not!”
(3/16/23)
[“(M)ay no adversity paralyze you. Be afraid neither of the world, nor of the future, nor of your weakness. The Lord has allowed you to live in this moment of history so that, by your faith, his name will continue to resound throughout the world” (Benedict XVI [1927-2022]).]
O Lover,
Coming across the recently deceased pope’ s words has reactivated some pondering I have been doing regarding the temptation to live fearfully. Insofar as we push aside our distractions and illusions we cannot but acknowledge that this temptation is treacherous, multifaceted, shapeshifting, and forceful in our troubled times. Benedict’s three-fold parsing of this temptation—fearing the world, the future, and one’s own weakness—provides the skeleton for this prayer to You, O Lover.
First is fear of the world, a temptation which elicits a raft of questions. Is the created cósmos a sphere alien to You, one thus to be escaped, stoically endured, or declared ripe for burning? Or is it Your playground, its totality Your Beloved Community, Your primary domicile? Is the world’s beauty mere distraction, seduction, or illusion? Or does that very beauty point, however implicitly and incompletely, to Your immanent, ennobling, and aggrandizing residency? Is the world something we are just “a-passin’ through,” or is it both our home and the venue of Your total, unconditional, and irrevocable solidarity with the creation? Is the final word for the world entropic, or is it to be found in Your expansive embrace where “all shall be well” (a la Julian of Norwich)? Is the better image for the world’s prognosis, O Incarnator, a cold cinder or Your very body? Shall we live in this place fueled by fear or by faith?
Second, fear of the future. Widespread today across ideologies, nations, international boundaries and generations is a retro-impulse, a yen for an earlier more stable version, an alleged golden past. Contributing to this impulse is a perception of the future as a sphere of chaos, depletion, entropy, and cultural self-immolation, an assessment against which, when based solely on the empirical, I cannot argue. But there is a counter-contingent, variously under the banner of the “all in All” (St. Paul [I Cor 15:28]), “Christification” (Teilhard), or “Totality” (Hadewijch of Brabant), for whom the future is the arena of Your consummatory oneing. To these I daily seek to join myself, O Lover; to You, crafter rather than ligaturee of chrónos, I pray “come quickly” (Apoc 22:20).
And third, fear of my own weakness. In her Showings (ST,24) Julian of Norwich writes of a two-fold “sickness,” of “two secret sins.” The first consists of impatience with our own self-destructive propensities; the second is despair lest we be in over our heads with You. Both are fears lest our apertures be too measly to receive the tsunami of Your Love. There is much irony here: our enormous needfulness of You is precisely what obstructs our assent to Your lavishness; our perception that You are too good to be true can drive us from You. Of the three fears, this just may be the point of my greatest vulnerability. In a word, You boggle me.
Regarding the aggregate of these three fears, it is no mere coincidence that both the nativity and Resurrection gospel narratives repeatedly resonate with the exhortation “Fear not!” In both of these sequences the fear within the discombobulated recipients of Your self-disclosure—from Joseph (Mt 1:20), Zechariah (Lk 1:12), Mary (Lk 1:30) and the shepherds (Lk 2:10) to the women at the tomb on Easter morning (Mt 28:5-10; Mk 16:8; Lk 24:5) and the sequestered disciples (Jn 20:19-26; Lk 24:36)—is addressed by Your Anointed’s “fear not” or “Peace be with you.” Particularly in the Resurrection texts Your Christ’s greeting is spoken into the imploded wasteland of the disciples’s hopes and dreams, the “we had hoped” (Lk 24:21) of the Emmaus duo scoring their own weakness. To all of these Your Christ extended Your shalom.
O Lover, is not one of the major contributing factors to the transformation of a dozen cowering apostles into Your irrepressible instruments for the proclamation of Your Evangélium (“Good News”) throughout the Mediterranean world and beyond, their receptivity to Your emancipating “fear not”?
