My Dear Parishioners:

Fear is a powerful human emotion.  Fear is designed by God for our survival.  We fear loud sudden noises, we fear the dark, we fear being alone with a dead body, we fear being eaten alive by wild beasts.  These are basic primal fears.  As a child, I used to fear being abandoned or forgotten by my mom and my dad because of a particular experience.  One day school had been out for more than an hour and my mother failed to show up as usual.   The dark shadows were lengthening but she was nowhere in sight.  In my panic I stopped every adult on the sidewalk in front of my school and asked if they knew if my mother would be coming for me, and of course no one had any idea!  That day, I feared I would be forever abandoned and left wandering on the streets of Saigon like thousands of other orphans.  That day, the fear of being forgotten on the street seared into my memory and my subconsciousness.  The fear of losing one’s parents follows you into adulthood, even late adulthood.  
 
[Last Sunday's] Gospel brings home another fear – the fear of drowning.  Imagine you are in a boat caught in a ferocious storm on the high sea far from land and from the nearest Coast Guard station!  Few situations leave men so helpless and despairing as storms at sea.  According to experts, "The Sea of Galilee, where the disciples were sailing in this case, is still known for the violence of its squalls, which arise and subside rapidly and unpredictably due to its peculiar geographical situation.  It is located at the bottom of a long funnel created by rows of mountains to the north.  Air traveling through the narrowing valley bursts onto the sea with the explosive force of a flash flood squeezed through a narrow tunnel.  In the midst of these gales, nature unleashes her full terrifying potencies, and human fragility is nakedly exposed."  It is quite clear that the Apostles, many of whom were fishermen by trade and familiar with boats and sea storms, feared for their lives.  In their panic, they woke up the Master and begged Him to help.  They had thought He couldn’t care less about the peril they were in!  
 
Pope Benedict in a homily long ago was speaking of a fear that is even more basic, more profound, more primal, more elementary than all the fears thus far.  He said that anyone who truly loves God knows that there is only one real fear: the fear of losing God.  For that reason we pray, “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil” – that is, from the loss of faith, from the loss of our friendship with God, from sin.  Anyone who abandons God in order to be free from God is a fool.  In life there really are people who are tired of God.  They sense God in their lives.  They can’t discount the fact that He might be real.  They can’t do away with the nagging fear of Him.  And so what do they do?  They chuck Him.  They chuck God in order to be free from the nagging fear of God they feel in their conscience and deep down in their soul.  They chuck God in order to get away from Him only to discover later to their great sorrow that they have become beholden to really awful tyrants who are absolutely ruthless and merciless, and who are bent on their ruin.  
 
I love Pope Benedict and what he says is Gospel for me.  And so, I truly believe Him when he insists that the one real fear I should have is the fear of losing God.  Every Monday and Saturday when Catholics pray the joyful mysteries, the last decade of the last mystery always strikes me at the heart.  I never fail to think about the dark terror and the paralyzing grief that overwhelmed the souls and the hearts of the Blessed Mother and St. Joseph when they discovered they had lost their Boy.  I think about the three days of darkness that enveloped the parents of the Boy Jesus when they did not have Him with them.  I think about the deep sorrows and the tears that blinded them on the way back to Jerusalem searching for Him.  And I always pray, “Lord, please do not let me lose You!”
 
As one gets older, the fear of losing God becomes more and more concrete: “Am I going to die a good death?  How do I make sure I get the Last Rites?  Who will call the priest for me?  Am I going to deny God even as I draw my last breath?  If the most adorable saint Therese of Lisieux was not spared the worst temptation of atheism, how would I avoid it?  Lord, do not let me lose You!”
 
But one doesn’t have to be as old and feeble as I am in order to feel this way about the four last things.  The fear of losing God is already concrete and real in the here and now if one is thoughtful: the sums of my human life would add up to nothing if God is left out.  All the calculations I have made in life would come to nothing, my entire life will eventually fail to compute, all the troubles and hassles I put up with don’t mean diddly squad, if God is not in the equation.   A long time ago someone told me, “Life is nothing, but a bunch of contradictions held together by grace!”  St. Paul said as much:

For . . . I do not understand my own actions.  For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. . . .  For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it.  And I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. . . .    I delight in the law of God in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind, making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members.  Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?  Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!

Without God, life is just a bunch of contradictions held together by nothing, which, in the end, will do us in.  That 95-year-old professor whose book was used as a basis for a Supreme Court decision came to understand this truth too late.  At 95 and a few months before his death, he told his grandson, “My life is completely pointless!”

With God, life makes sense.  With God, the contradictions in life do not render life pointless.  With God, the sums of life add up to something wonderful!
Padre