The Weekly Word for June ll is Fear of the Lord

Contemporary mystic Annie Dillard writes this about Sunday worship: “Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke?…we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offence, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.” *

When I first began pastoral work I got a taste of the power about which Dillard writes. I was companioning someone through the service of Reconciliation of a Penitent — my maiden voyage into this particular rite of the Church. It is a holy thing to be entrusted with the brokenness and aspiration of a fellow traveler. The place where she spoke and I listened became holy ground. And, as I read the Prayer Book words that assured her that she was forgiven a strange thing happened.

It was for all the world as if a little door opened in my head on a Hugeness that was both presence and immeasurable space, full of fire that did not consume and wind that had no beginning and no end and blew through everything. And, somehow, in a way I am unable to explain, I realized that this wildly vital Hugeness was Love, with a capital “L”.

The door didn’t stay open more than a second or two, which is a good thing. Because, if it had, I probably would have fallen on my face or passed out cold, which would certainly have unnerved the person I was supposedly pastoring.

This experience transformed my relationship with the expression “the fear of the Lord”. Up until then, I’d struggled with that concept, imagining a God who depends on intimidation in order to get us to toe the line.

I’m all for the God of Love. I’d just never realized that love could be so immense and so alive. When that door opened I was stunned, amazed, enthralled and, yes, afraid; afraid that that Love, as Dillard says, might draw me out to where I could never return.

So, I shut the door.

And I’ve been trying to open it again, ever since.

Deborah Pender Hutchison
Lay Pastoral Associate

* p. 40, Teaching a Stone to Talk