Fear

From an address to the Palm Beach Diocese Southern Deanery Council of Catholic Women, May 21, 2023

At the last Southern Deanery meeting, I was trying to throw an opening prayer together, and someone suggested a prayer on fear. I didn’t end up using that prayer, but it did get me to start thinking of fear, and the effects of fear.

One of the best things I ever read about fear was about a woman was terrified of thunderstorms, so terrified that she would hide in a closet. Her husband and her children didn’t understand her fear, but supported her nonetheless. One day, she stopped being afraid of thunderstorms. She no longer needed to hide in the closet. “What changed?” her children asked. It was simple, she said. The worst thing she could imagine had happened: her husband had died. The thing she feared the most had happened, and yet she found the strength to move forward.

We’re all afraid of something. Maybe it’s something easy to describe; maybe it’s something we see in our nightmares. We all have fears, fears that something will happen, fears that something won’t happen. Fears that we talk about, fears that we keep hidden away. Fears that maybe are reasonable; fears that maybe are unreasonable. There’s different factors that make a fear reasonable or unreasonable. For example, if I, living in south Florida, was fearful of a volcanic eruption, that would be unreasonable and unrealistic. On the other hand, if I lived in Hawaii, it would be unreasonable and unrealistic for me to worry about being bitten by a venomous snake. (Did you know that at least one species of venomous snake is found in every state except Hawaii, Maine, Rhode Island, and Alaska?)

But our fear, for the most part, boil down to one thing: fear of change. The bigger the change, the more fear. We fear the unknown, and our fear subsides the more we know about exactly how things will be different. When we don’t know how, the fear grows.

And so the thing we fear the most is, quite often, death. Death is, certainly, an ending. It is also a beginning. But that beginning is one we can only grasp nebulously. Even if we take Jesus’ statement “my father’s house has many rooms” quite literally, we still don’t know what that house looks like, or how big the room is. We can’t imagine life without, well, life.

When we have fears, it is to our faith to which we need turn in order to move forward from fear. When that fear is death itself, we have only our faith to rely on.

There is only one thing about heaven that we can state we know as fact: heaven is a place of perfect happiness. That perfect happiness comes from being in the presence of God, from enjoying the beatific vision. And I know, with every fiber of faith in my soul, that to be in the presence of God will be to rest in perfect happiness, beyond anything we could imagine on earth.

But here’s the conundrum: I also know that I cannot comprehend how I could be perfectly happy if I am not reunited with loved ones that have gone before me. I long to be reunited with my husband; I long to see my father again. My puny little human brain cannot understand how my happiness could be complete if I were to be separated from them for all eternity.

So I keep the fear at bay, though not completely. I trust in God; I have faith in my faith. I say “yes, Lord, I believe.” But in the dark of night, when nightmares come, that faith may seem to flicker. The Bible tells us “Trust in the Lord with all your heart, on your own intelligence do not rely” (Proverbs 3:5) I need to stop trying to answer everything with pure cold logic, and instead listen to the words written on my heart. For, always, our help is in the name of the Lord, who made heaven and earth.