The gift of the Holy Spirit: the fear of the Lord. It’s a gift. It’s not a curse.
We are not praying that we would be afraid of God. Rather, we are praying that we are able to approach Him; that we ought not run away from Him, but that we ought to run towards Him. Our prayer is that the fear of the Lord gives us the right way of approaching the Lord.
This analogy is lacking, but standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon—and if you’ve never done that, I highly encourage you to do it. There’s something profound about standing there, looking out at the immensity of the Grand Canyon. One feels profoundly small or insignificant. The sheer size of the Grand Canyon, the beauty.
Honestly, it’s humbling.
Standing there, I know that I’m safe. I’m not just going to fall off. But there’s a small twinge of danger that enters my soul—a fear of, “What if?”
If this is true for the Grand Canyon, it must be even more true with God. The fear of the Lord reminds us how good, how beautiful, how big God is, and how small we are in comparison to Him. The fear of the Lord is an appropriate reverence for God in His holiness. And again, if we can sit with that analogy—to be able to just sit and look at the beauty of God and His majesty.
The fear of the Lord produces in us a spirit of awe. When we encounter the Lord’s presence, we understand this is holy ground.
I imagine that it was the fear of the Lord when Peter was in the boat and he caught all the fish, and he just fell to his knees and said, “Leave me, Lord, I’m a sinful man.” The Lord hadn’t said anything about sin. But there was something about this encounter with the miracle of the Lord and His holiness that Peter responded that way.
Have you ever experienced this awe?
I’ve experience this many times over the past 2 1/2 decades and maybe even before I turned back to God. Whether approaching the Lord in the Eucharist or standing before the confessional door, or in a moment of silent prayer or even as I open the door of the Adoration Chapel and see Jesus standing there upon the altar looking at me. I’ve had this sense of awe and wonder as I stood looking out over the Teton Mountains and watching ‘Old Faithful’.
With each such encounter, I fall before the great majesty of God, like Peter crying that I am not worthy to be in His presence. These moments make me feel small but I know also God has shared His full Presence in that encounter that I may have a true sense of who I am before His Holy Holy Holy being. And that I may then fall upon Him in right manner – not fearing punishment but knowing His Divine Mercy and majesty.