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Fear of the Lord: Gifts of the Holy Spirit, Part II

Associate Pastor's Column

Sunday, January 29, 2006

  The fear of the Lord is the beginning of Wisdom (Ps 111:10). Both fear of the Lord and wisdom are among the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit.

            Earlier I began a series on the gifts of the Holy Spirit, and now it’s time to go through each one of them one by one, beginning with, of course, the beginning.

            I compared the gifts to sails which the Spirit fills as wind to move our souls, in contrast to the virtues which are the oars by which we ourselves need to labor to advance.

             Also, I earlier mentioned that all the gifts are supernatural and permanent qualities of the soul which render us more obedient and docile to the Holy Spirit, who acts in us. The gifts, the virtues and the sacraments are the chief means of growing in the spiritual life, and are all interrelated.

            Fear of the Lord is the movement of the soul away from sinning against God.

            All fear is a movement of the soul, as for example an emotion. The emotional movement of fear always refers to something bad in the future. Something presents itself to us, and we are afraid it will hurt us, humiliate us, destroy us, steal from us, and so forth; so we feel fear. If it is very intense, it can be more than an emotion, a strong passion. If it is not at all intense but light and pervasive, it can be a sentiment of fear.

            Some fear is a good thing. We should fear angry dogs, dark allies, threats from scary looking strangers, fire, sickness and the like; this is real fear. Fear can be a imaginary, on the contrary, when we feel the interior movement of fear, but we don’t have a real reason for which to feel fear; or when we fear things we should not, like for example God’s forgiveness in the sacrament of reconciliation.

            Real fear can be further divided, depending on whether it is servile fear as when we fear punishment, or loving fear as when we fear being separated from the object of our love, such as a person. Servile fear is full of selfishness and hatred; loving fear is full of affection and love.

            Furthermore, the fear of the Lord appears frequently in the book of Proverbs, always being synonymous with humility, obedience and submission to God’s holy law.

            The fear of the Lord, therefore, is not the fear of punishment. It is the fear of being separated by God due to our own sins. It is the threshold of love. This is why the shoot of Jesse in Is 11 will delight in the fear of the Lord.

            All of this explains why St. Augustine says Exposition on Psalm 19, says, about verse 9, “‘The fear of the Lord:’ not that distressing fear under the law, dreading exceedingly the withdrawal of temporal goods, by the love of which the soul commits fornication; but that chaste fear wherewith the Church, the more ardently she loves her Spouse, the more carefully does she take heed of offending Him, and therefore, perfect love casts not out this fear, but it endures for ever.”

            Wisdom, we shall see later, perfects our love for God. And since fear of the Lord helps us love, it is the beginning of Wisdom. Let us therefore be full of the fear of the Lord with love, and delight in this gift of the Holy Spirit.

            For overcoming our sins is the first step towards our eternal hope, a purgation which will be followed by illumination and then by union with God; but of these three stages of the spiritual life we will speak another day.