"Fear of the LORD"
The First Step of Love
by Mark Mosley, M.D., M.P.H.
Feast of St Job the Prophet
Anno Domini 2020, May 6
“Fear of the LORD” has always been a difficult phrase for me. I have heard people soften it by claiming, “The Bible just means respect.” But it still sounds like a really tough Father; maybe just one who doesn’t beat you.
So, what if the fear is not a reflection of the character of God, but rather a reflection of our own neurochemical state? What if the “fear of the LORD” is not defined by punishment? And beyond that, what if all fear is not limited to a reactionary fight, flight, or freeze?
Can there be a fear that draws us? A fear that “scares” the heaven into us. Can there be a fear that we exist with that activates us, even elevates us, not just in our brain and body, but also in our “heart”? A beauty that “takes our breath away.” Doesn’t God use a very primitive chaotic condition, and create and elevate a holy ground from it?
We are organisms of biological homeostasis. We are created both individually and socially to maintain order. We are creatures of form, pattern, repetition, habit, order, organization, ritual, rules, and law.
When something does not follow form—whether that form is instinct, biological homeostasis, personal preference, social norm, family tradition, religious teaching, or government law—it makes for adrenaline and intense nervousness.
Uncomfortable, nervous, anxiety, fear, panic—each may have their situational nuances, but neurochemically they are all the same. The most primitive portion of our brain, shared by most animals of the world, is a fight, flight, or freeze response which occurs so lightning fast that it transmits automatically before
any rational thought. This
is our innate reaction to a Creator Who is beyond and before
all that we can think and imagine. A God this immense is a threat to the allowance of our small existence.
Rightly understood, the fear of the LORD is not centered in destruction; it is centered in creation. Not the appeasement of a human-like anger; but the experience of an unthinkable mystery. The fear of the LORD is not the enforcement of cosmic rules of thought and behavior—it is the breaking of them. It is not tending the fire of an offering against His wrath; it is standing in the fire with Him without being burned.
What does one do then with the theological, philosophical, cultural, or even just personal emotional response to this
idea of fear? I believe we look upon the Holy Mountains where God has shown Himself to humankind—places of transfiguration—where men see but cannot look, where they know without understanding, and where things burn without being consumed.
Isn’t courage simply the transfiguration of fear? The fear is not gone—it has simply been purified. In this same way,
- wisdom is the transfiguration of law
- love is the transfiguration of fairness
- beauty is the transfiguration of pattern
- worship is the transfiguration of ritual
Truth does not trap and contain; it sets free.
Animals cannot have their fear transfigured. But humanity takes their instinct and transfigures it into a creative act. In Christ, we understand that we are “little gods” (i.e., Christians, little christs). We take the chaos and bring new order. We break the familiar boundaries of thought, feeling, and action—and create. When we create, or enter into another’s creative act, it is exhilarating, awe-inspiring, “breath-taking,” and dopaminergic. It is the chemicals of fear that create this euphoria against pain. Fear of the LORD is our fear transfigured.
We stand in the awe of this fear. We bathe and bask in its beauty. We deeply breathe in its life-giving adrenaline without fighting, fleeing, or freezing. In creativity, we safely feel God with us. This freedom with fear
is the first step of love.
Mark Mosley
has done emergency medicine at Wesley Medical Center in Wichita, Kansas for over 25 years. He is boarded in Internal Medicine and Pediatrics. He received his M.D. from the University of Oklahoma. He earned his Master’s in Public Health in nutrition from Tulane School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine. He is married to his wife Jane and has five children. He attends Saint George Orthodox Christian Cathedral.
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"What is it that has ordered the things of heaven and those of earth, the things which move through the air and those which move in the water; nay, rather the things which proceeded them: heaven and earth and the natures of fire and water? What is it that combined and arranged them...set them into motion and put them on their unceasing and unhindered course?..But who is the architect of these things? Or did not he who made them also bring them into being? We shall certainly not attribute such power to spontaneity." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 3 This comes after St. John of Damascus sets out to delineate between the created and the uncreated, a fact which, while at the core of existence, seems for him to be, for this very reason, the simplest to believe. Everything but God is created and, thus, susceptible to change. This means people, but this also means demons, angels, the rest of the created order across the entire cosmos. Everything is vulnerable to unrest. Except for God. If you have ever tried to explain the Holy Trinity to a child for the first time, maybe you have felt as I have the weightier, inexpressible side of God's unchangeability: how do I possibly communicate this essential fact to the person in front of me? (This is usually when my faint stutter starts to pop up again.) I like that here, like St. Patrick reaching for a three-leaf clover, St. John brings us back to earth to better understand the cosmos. Fire and water are no less mysteries than heaven and earth. And yet here we are, cooking and washing, eating and drinking, filled and sustained on what we can neither fully explain nor claim to have created. Only God is unchanging. Vice versa, God is the only constant we need. Maybe the rest is better left unsaid. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
"Now, one who would speak or hear about God should know beyond any doubt that in what concerns theology and the Incarnation not all things are inexpressible and not all are capable of expression, and neither are all things unknowable nor are they all knowable. That which can be known is one thing, whereas that which can be said is another, just as it is one thing to speak and another to know. Furthermore, many of those things about God which are not clearly perceived cannot be fittingly described, so that we are obliged to express in human terms things which transcend the human order. Thus, for example, in speaking about God we attribute to Him sleep, anger, indifference, hands and feet, and the like." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 2 When I was studying Fiction in graduate school, one of the first methods I learned to really situate the reader in the story you were about to tell them was disorientation; if you wanted to ground them in one story, first you had pull the rug out from under their feet. So it's fitting that in the beginning of St. John Damascene's On the Orthodox Faith, before rebuilding our foundation, he first puts us squarely in limbo, seesawing back and forth between certainty and uncertainty. To paraphrase, there is no doubt (certainty) that about God some things can be expressed...but not all things (uncertainty). Some things about God are truly knowable (certainty), but some are unknowable (uncertainty). Oh, and while we're speaking about God (certainty), let's admit there's a gap, too, between what we say and what we know (uncertainty). My favorite line in this spiraling excerpt, "...it is one thing to speak, and another to know," takes me back to the final lines in Wendell Berry's poem, "How to Be a Poet," which he wrote primarily as a reminder to himself: Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came. Wherever your preferences fall on the cataphatic or apophatic spectrum of theology (whether you lean more toward what we can say about God or what we cannot), Berry's poem, I think, would nod along with St. John: before we say too much, let our words be preserved by the silence from which they came. I'm thinking of the silence, that filling, restorative quiet I feel when I step into a cathedral or in some of my favorite moments with my kids in the early hours. Even before praying, can we hear the One already praying in us? Let's start there. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
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