Demons and Dogs
at the Door
I am the
LORD, your God, who grasp your right hand;
It is I who say to you, Fear not, I will help you.
(Isaiah 41.13)
So
Many of us Live under the Pall of Fear!
It
is very real to us. It influences many of our decisions,
infects our judgments, and motivates a great deal of what we
do in our daily lives. It is often a driving force, not necessarily
overwhelming, but most often subtle, and for its subtlety more
sinister.
It stands, as it were, a demon lurking at the door, and we place
our foot against it lest the door open and it spring upon us!
We offer it pagan sacrifices to appease it, placate it, to keep
it at bay: we offer our will (what we choose
to do, but much more often what we choose not
to do), our happiness, our peace of mind,
our freedom (from worry, anxiety) for somehow, we
have come to believe that unless we offer these sacrifices,
the demon Fear will lunge upon us just as
it threatens to. In fact, we do worse: we convince ourselves
that our having made such pagan offerings to the demon
Fear have alone warded off these great evils, averted
the impending catastrophes that are held, like vicious hounds
from hell by a leash, that at best, is but the merest thread.
How often our offerings have been accepted! The looming catastrophe
has been averted! We have made the appropriate sacrifice and
we have been given a reprieve but, we know, only for a time.
Good thing we worried! Good thing we bit our nails, lost
sleep, even a portion of our sanity imagine what would have
happened had we not feared? Good
thing we lived in misery before it had opportunity to
crush us!
We are such fools! We refuse to acknowledge what has
NOT happened and fail to subsequently
realize that our fears, our worries, were groundless, needless.
No ... we still offer our sacrifices to the dogs at the
door, and say to ourselves, our fears were
real! Such and such could have
happened! Even though it did not. Even though it never
did!
You could have died in your sleep
last night. The world could have ended
yesterday. The litany is endless of all that could
have happened and did not.
Shall we fear all that could happen
and will not; or would we do better to
hope for a great good that
could happen, and that it likely will come upon
us at any minute! That our deliverance, our blessing
and not bondage is at hand! That good awaits
us!
Avoiding Misery
by ... Co-opting it?
Why? Not because it is more sane, more rational, more reasonable
(given the years youve spent in misery attempting to avoid
that very misery ... that never happened) all these
things are good and compelling reasons (far better and more
compelling than the pretending that there is a demon or a dog
at the door). The real reason is given in a reading from Isaiah:
I
am the LORD, your God, who grasp your right hand; It is
I who say to you, "Fear not, I will help you.
The dog at the door, that lurking demon of fear that would rob
you of all happiness and hope, is a fiction. God is not.
What does He tell you?
Fear
not! I will help you!
God is saying that to you.
God! He is no liar like that demon at
the door (which flees from His Presence!).
He comes with good tidings!
Fear not!
He comes with absolute assurance,
I I, God will help
you!
Instead of putting your hand in front of your face before the
menacing phantom and fiction at the door (which never came and
never will), do what God tells you: Take His Hand!
I am the LORD,
your God, who grasp your right hand
But you you must first reach out to take
His Hand!
You were quick enough to take the leash of the dogs that drove
you to misery. And they were all of your own making.
Stop pretending to be a creator! All you create are fears and
worries and anxieties each one of them equally useless.
The real Creator is reaching out His
Hand to you and given the fact that what He creates is good,
your chances of obtaining the good, the desire of your
heart, are far more real, than your chances ever were of having
that grand piano drop on your head you know, the one that
you have barely kept suspended over you by your senseless fears
for so, so, so, long!
You will one day come to
realize that it never would have fallen .... because it was
never there.
But God is.
Editor
Boston Catholic Journal
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Totally Faithful to the
Sacred Deposit of Faith entrusted to
the Holy See in Rome
Scio
opera tua ... quia modicum habes virtutem, et servasti
verbum Meum, nec non negasti Nomen Meum
I
know your works ... that you have but little power,
and yet you have kept My word, and have not denied
My Name.
(Apocalypse 3.8)
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