God gives us the gifts we need, not the gifts we necessarily want. Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof famously complains, “If wealth is a curse, O Lord, then smite me!” But his old friend, in his love for Tevye, leaves him poor—and Tevye.
On the other hand, in Confirmation, God does give gifts, first among them a gift our culture despises. Sirach 1:12 sums it up: “To fear the Lord is the beginning of wisdom;/she is created with the faithful in the womb.”
We don’t much care for the fear of God these days. We prefer to hear about self-empowerment, self-esteem, self-affirmation, and just plain self. We have whole magazines devoted to the notion that the first shall be first, that you must find your life in order to find it, and that the way to happiness is to seek first the things of this world. Fear of God doesn’t fit into programs like that. It’s “disempowering”, doncha know; an affront to our dignity and a relic of that nasty Old Testament God who wants everybody to cower before him like the Great and Terrible Oz. We’ve outgrown all that.
But, of course, there’s fear and there’s fear. And the funny thing is, as our civilization is discovering, when you get rid of the fear of the Lord, you don’t get fearlessness. You get servile fear: fear of What People Will Think, fear of environmental disaster, plague, terrorism, political incorrectness, death, STDs, war, divorce, economic meltdown, the future, headlines, and things that go bump in the night.
It is often only belatedly that we come to realize that the Gospel comes, in part, to cast out such cringing, crawling servile fear. When we do finally take a hard look at the fear of the Lord, we discover that Jesus feared God, but He never cowered before His Father. On the contrary, His courage has been the model of the courage of all the saints. There is a confidence, a free and easy step, in the stride of the saints that is in sharp contrast to the craven cowardice of the rat-faced little bureaucrats of atheistic totalitarian regimes who began with bold promises to liberate us from the fear of God and ended in lickspittle prostration before the terrors of Mao, Hitler, and Stalin. For the fear of God is the awe and reverence due what is truly good, not a mere cowering in the face of Power. If you want to get a glimmer of it, look not to the Cowardly Lion trembling before the terrors of Oz, but to the sense of awe any sane person should feel under the immensity of a summer night—and before its Maker. That feeling of delighted humility, of knowing just how small you are in the face of the immeasurably Good and Beautiful Power: that’s the first gift God gives us and it is meant to turn us, not into dogs, but into children who forget ourselves and the burden of pride in our joy at the sight of God.
This strange combination of fear and delight is, in fact, one of the special graces of childhood which we are graced by the gift of fear to bring into our adult lives. It’s the mystery Kenneth Grahame hints at when Ratty and Mole have their own encounter with the Ineffable in The Wind in the Willows:
Rat! he found breath to whisper, shaking. Are you afraid?
Afraid? murmured the Rat, his eyes shining with unutterable love.
Afraid! Of Him? O, never, never! And yet — and yet — O, Mole, I am afraid!
Then the two animals, crouching to the earth, bowed their heads and did worship.
We likewise discover the strange truth that we become taller when we bow. We fear God in order to become small enough to receive his humility and his life. Never was God more to be feared than in the hour He hung helpless and powerless on a Cross. That same goodness, now invested with all power and authority, will judge us. But He will do so with mercy. Let us fear Him lest we become like someone other than He.
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2 Responses
I’m very intimately acquainted with fear. Throughout most of my childhood, I was subject to an extensive amount of physical and psychological abuse, to the point where that emotion permeated my every thought and action. For the longest time, fear was the primal emotion I associated my father with the most.
So I know what it means to fear someone. Fear paralyzes. Fear cripples. Fear distorts your sense of proportionality and justice. Fear makes it so that outward compliance is prioritized above everything else, even as resentment, disdain and contempt fester just beneath the surface. Any obedience compelled by fear, is at best temporary and at worst, malicious and opportunistic.
That said, I think that your reference to “fearing God” is anachronistic. Because what you describe as “fear” is not actually fear as we understand it, but it is something more akin to “respect”, which is the result of being afraid to disappoint a person, not so much about being afraid of the person themselves.
I think this is a distinction that gets lost on many Christians today, so they probably conceptualize God as someone who more closely resembles a Trump-like figure, that is, someone who must be obeyed without question and be told they are always right even when they’re wrong.
I would venture to say, that its that distorted view of what it means to “fear God”, that is more closely associated with our colloquial use of the word “fear”, that in large part helped get us into our current mess.
It’s fear as lovers of God have always understood it. The kind of fear you describe–fear born of abuse–has always existed and has always been distinguished from and condemned by the Christian tradition as “servile fear”, a thing the Jesus delivers us from, not condemns us to. The fear that is a gift of Confirmation, good fear, is a fear born of awe and respect, which is what you are edging toward recognizing in your third paragraph. That many Christians now, as always, confuse servile fear with holy fear or the fear of the Lord is why the Church has to keep teaching exactly this distinction, because humans have never stopped confusing the two. Eradicating the fear of the Lord from the Tradition will not eradicate fear born of abuse from the human condition. It will simply make sure that men like Trump, who have no fear of the Lord whatsoever (and, by no coincidence at all, no experience of a loving father deserving of respect) will live by and inflict on their victims the servile fear the Christian tradition condemns. I am grateful for my experiences of holy fear, precisely because they stand in sharp contrast to the abusive servile fear I have so often experienced in this world.