Fear of losing the keys to heaven is no better than fear of losing the keys to the new Mercedes.
*Rav P. S. Berg. The Essential Zohar.
8Let all the earth fear the LORD;
let all the inhabitants of the world stand in awe of him!
9For he spoke, and it came to be;
he commanded, and it stood firm.
*Psalm 33.8-9 (ESV)
10 The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom,
and the knowledge of the Holy One is insight.
Proverbs 9.10 (ESV)
* * *
The Jewish mystical masterpiece, The Zohar, drawing from ancient Jewish faith, refers to authentic and inauthentic religious fear. There are, according to The Zohar, three ways to fear the Creator:
1) Fear due to the prospect of God causing us temporal loss.
2) Fear due to the possibility of God eternally punishing us.
3) Fear due to the greatness and governance of God.
According to Kabbalistic~Jewish mysticism, receiving from God and losing due to God balance each other in spiritual evolution. True Love of the Creating One remains the same whether we interpret our present situation as a time of blessing or un-blessing.
If we believe we are gaining something precious due to following the Divine Will, we love God. If we think we are losing something precious due to following the Divine Will, we love God.
The Zohar, then, like all monotheistic religion, links fear of God and love of God. This fear is authentic fear, the awe of God. Our love is the more beautiful for our fear; our fear is the more beautiful for our love.
The mystical Christian grows in both love and fear of the Holy One. We could say she grows in a loving~fear or a fearful~love of the Triune Mystery. Why? For in the mystical a person comes ever-closer to immediate awareness of the essence and power of God, not as a teaching, but as an experience.
Due to awe of God being loving, a growing sense of friendship with God does not cease. Awe of itself would leave us with a fear that is not loving~fear. Love allows us to relate in a familiar way with the Divine Presence, while awe gives our relationship with God the nature of deep, respectful, reverential veneration. Indeed, in contemplation we will find ourselves, at times, moving back and forth between expressive affection of love and an awestruck sense of the otherness of Divine Presence.
Ironically, the word "awe" comes from a root with a meaning "to be depressed." Awe is such inspired wonderment that the self recedes before the immensity of the Holy Presence.
Contemplation entails a consistent practice of holy silence and inner solitude partly due to need for receding of the self. Such silence and inner solitude is admission of the greatness of God. Silence and inner solitude welcomes Divine Nearness and Manifestation that we often push away by exertion of the self in the Divine Presence.
The church, certainly, is much lacking in balancing the receding of self and the exertion of self in worship and life. One reason is the church has great need of regaining a much stronger experience of religious awe. I was tempted to write that the church has lost almost all contact with awe. This latter may, indeed, be the truth. Neither the church nor culture supports awe well, and many of our religious leaders, in my experienced opinion, have little awe to show to those they are to be spiritual examples to.
When we lose touch with religious awe, we defy our natural place in the Kosmos and contradict the nature of Life, as well as fail to relate appropriately to God. Rav Berg notes that when we have spurious religious fear, this means that the emotion does not arise from anything foundational to our being. The opposite is true, also: Awe, or the fear of the Holy, is natural and essential to individual and communal well-being, for such felt-reverence is fundamental to being and world.
Trying to serve and love God out of motives to protect ourselves from temporary loss or eternal damnation have nothing to do with the fundamental essence of being or Being. Neither expresses loving~fear of God.
Finally, a loving~fear of God has the ironic effect of lessening other fears. A ground of our lessening of fear of others and consequences of making the right choices to follow the Will of Christ is an awe-loving of Trinitarian Mystery. I have seen this true in my own life, for awful~love of God has the counter-effect of all inauthentic fearfulness. Genuine fear transforms spurious fear.
*Brian K. Wilcox lives with his two beloved dogs, St. Francis and Bandit Ty, in Southwest Florida. He serves the Christ Community United Methodist Church, Punta Gorda, FL. Brian is vowed at Greenbough House of Prayer, a contemplative Christian community in South Georgia. He lives a contemplative life and inspires others to experience a more intimate relationship with Christ. Brian advocates for a spiritually-focused Christianity and renewal of the focus of the Church on addressing the deeper spiritual needs and longings of persons, along with empathic relating with other world religions, East and West. Brian has an independent writing, workshop, and retreat ministry, for all spiritual seekers.
*For replies and biographical information, as well as booking retreats or workshops, fill out the following form:
|
