Why am I so terrified?

Homily

12th Sunday in Ordinary Time B2

23 June 2024

St. Lawrence Catholic Campus Center at the University of Kansas

AMDG

Why am I so terrified?

Most people think I have my act together. I don't.  My least favorite question in the world is this - Father, what are you afraid of?  I want to pretend the answer is nothing.  Yet the truth is I'm afraid of almost everything - failure, intimacy, suffering, and change.  Sound familiar?  Though I want so much to be courageous, I can wake up each day full of dread, terrified of what could go wrong.

Our faith if its worth anything is the power to live courageously.  Wouldn't you love to wake up and be excited to take on life as it really is, storms and chaos and all?  Can you imagine a life when you're no longer scared, not looking for ways to escape, avoid and hide, but excited to kick tail, and defeat many evils, especially through faith?  This is how you're made to truly live.

St. Paul reminds us that the love of Christ is the most real thing imaginable, and this love impels us to live courageously, meaner than hell.  Because someone has died for me with a love strong as death, I am urged to live out the truth of this love.  In fact, I am in anguish until I live with supernatural courage, and not for myself, but for Him who first died for me.

The love of Christ impels, urges, burns and bleeds and breaks, until I live no longer in the flesh, but in the Holy Spirit.  The grace of God, his unmerited love delivered precisely in a way that I can never pay it back, obliges me to instead pay it forward.  Every gift obliges the recipient to receive it and give it away.  This is most true of the grace of Christ, which I can't pay back, but must pay forward, until I fulfill the commandments of true peace, happiness and freedom - love one another as I have first loved you.

Back to those storms, and that chaos.  There is nothing that could possibly afflict you, that cannot be engaged by faith.  That's today's essential lesson.  Yes, there are things that are threatening to kill you right now - physically, morally, spiritually, mentally, emotionally and relationally - and there will be threats tomorrow.  So what.  Welcome to real life. Circumstances are supposed to be dramatic in every heroic human story worth living.  There is nothing that cannot be navigated courageously by faith.  Nothing.  Nothing.  Nothing.  Always, without exception, by the faith God has placed in you, you have the power to trust, to pray, and to give your life courageously in love before it can ever be taken from you.

This is the calm, the peace, the ability to fall asleep on a cushion even in the worst of storms, that no chaos can ever take from you.

Why am I so terrified, then?  It's because the struggle is real.  It's not fake, and not a game, and not something that you can escape, avoid or hide from.  It's because there's always a lot at stake.  It's ok to be terrified, so long as we know why we are terrified, and how to respond with courage and faith.

+mj