FROM FEAR TO LOVE
It’s not just another phrase. This command, charged with mystery and promise, is the key to Christianity: «As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you: remain in my love». We are touching here the very heart of the Christian faith, the ultimate criterion for discerning its truth. Only by «remaining in love» can we walk in the true direction. Forgetting this love is to be lost, to enter into paths that aren’t Christian, to deform everything, to contradict Christianity at its root.
And yet, we haven’t always remained in this love. In the life of all too many Christians there has been, and still is, way too much fear, way too much lack of childlike trust in God. The preaching that has nourished those Christians has much too often forgotten God’s love, thus strangling that initial joy that was alive and contagious in Christianity.
What was once «Good News», because the unimaginable love of God was announced to people, has become for all too many the bad news of a threatening God, that is almost instinctively rejected because it doesn’t allow us to be or to live.
However, Christian faith can only be lived, without betraying it essence, as a positive, trusting and joyful experience. That’s why at this time in which many abandon a certain kind of «Christianity» –the only one they know– we have to ask ourselves if, in the unfolding of this abandonment, along with other factors, there isn’t hidden a collective reaction against an announcement of God that is hardly faithful to the Gospel.
The acceptance of God, or God’s rejection, comes into play for the most part in the way in which we feel it before us. If we perceive it only as a relentless watchman of our conduct, we are going to make every attempt to flee from it. If we experience it as a friend who drives our life forward, we will seek it out with joy. That’s why one of the greatest services that the Church can do for the human being is to help him pass from fear to love of God.
Without doubt, there is a fear of God that is healthy and fruitful. The Scriptures consider it «the beginning of wisdom». It’s the fear of wasting our life, closing ourselves off from God. A fear that awakens us from superficiality, and lets us turn to God. But there is a fear of God that is bad. It doesn’t come close to God. On the contrary, it gets more and more away from God. It’s a fear that deforms the true being of God, making God inhumane. A damaging fear, without real basis, that strangles life and the healthy growth of the person.
For many, this could be the decisive change. Passing from the fear of God, that brings about nothing but a more or less disguised rejection, to a trust in the One who brings forth in us that joy promised by Jesus: «I have said this so that my joy may be in you, and your joy may be complete».
José Antonio Pagola
Translator: Fr. Jay VonHandorf
