We are all afraid

I have a friend who is struggling with joining the priesthood. He has had an encounter that makes him echo the same feelings I do often

Amazing Grace how sweet they sound that saved a wretch like me. I once was lost but not am found, was blind now I see

The friend is great with girls. And he often wonders how he could picture himself as a priest without all the love he could have with a girlfriend or a wife. He hasn’t any ill-intentions with women only difficulty in discernment whether God requires him to live sanctity with a family and i.e with women and children or sanctity as a priest, with entire family of God.

What is my friend’s problem really? He is afraid. He is afraid whether he would be happy responding to the call of God, whether he can take a leap of faith, whether he can plunge into the water without knowing if it’s cold. When he pictures himself with a girlfriend, he pictures security and self-assuredness. He is assured of love.

But living in obedience to the will of God is much more than being assured let alone the danger of our own understanding and limitations of assuredness. It is about what is right. How can he ever know if he will be happy? All he can do it trust in God that He will take care of him. Somewhere deep inside he fails to trust God. There is a lacking of faith.

We are all afraid though. My friend shouldn’t be singled out though his problems are more tumultuous in proportions. We are all afraid of not being happy in life. Hence we choose things that fit our ‘idea’ of assuredness of happiness. In doing this, we take refuge in our own limited understanding of scheme of things.

Often we know some things are more right than others or nobler or more righteous. But this world has so skewed our standards of defining happiness that we are afraid of doing now what our hearts are inclined to. When we choose things that fit the ‘understanding of peace’ that this world has to offer, the assuredness, we often abandon the idea that God is really the source of all joy because we have gone with what we already have as opposed to choosing what are struggling with.

We are afraid we may not find joy by our choices and it presupposes a lack of faith in the belief of another world. We choose as if this world is all we got and our choices are not changing us according to our real purpose that finds its fulfillment in another world, the world to come. So we go with what is safe than what is courageous. We go with timidity rather than conviction. We go with natural rather than being supernatural.

The choices we make when we are afraid tell us so much of our real faith in God. It tells us where we stand in the scale of humility. As a child cries in the dark and runs towards his mother, our choices show what we think of ourselves, whether we truly believe we know very little, we are very little and completely depend on God and hence affirm our humility or whether when having to make these decision we run in apprehension to assuredness the world has to offer.

A mother loses her son and wonders if she can continue life without him. A man who is afraid of losing a job or quitting one as it is bereft of meaning. Parents have to live with dissenting children or betrayals. We all have something to be afraid of. We can have faith that this world is not where happiness lies so let us not pretend that we can find it if we try unless God wills to give.

We can go against the currents of this world filled with imperfections and an endless pursuit of self-assuredness. Or we can go with life as if we are sailors trying to rescue the sea of life. We may try to hold everything within our clasp but the nature of this world is such, it is going to perish, the sea will slip away from our fingers. Every choice made for worldly things or purposes will inevitably fade away along with its pleasures, comforts and fancies. But if one makes a choice contingent on faith, the hope that one day knowledge will replace this faith and with trust that is moved with love, these will remain¹

1 Corinthians 13