"Blessed are those who fear the Lord"

By Fr. ROY CIMAGALA, roycimagala@gmail.com
February 13, 2025

THAT’S from Psalm 128,1. The verse is often used as a responsorial psalm in many of the Masses during the year. And it definitely talks about a healthy kind of fear that is nothing other than a gift of the Holy Spirit. It’s a fear that protects and prevents us from offending God through sin, through disobedience to his loving and saving will for us.

We have to know when to be afraid and when not. We have to distinguish between a good fear and a bad fear, a healthy one and a sick one. We need to know how to handle and deal with our fears that are unavoidable in our life.

Fear is an emotion that we need to educate also. It just cannot be on its own, guided only by our spontaneous judgments and reactions, and appearing when it’s not supposed to, and not appearing when it’s supposed to. It has to be grounded and oriented properly, expressing the sublimity of our dignity as persons and children of God.

We need to fear because that is what is proper of a child of God as we all are. There’s always a healthy kind of fear involved in any relationship that is based on love and respect. It is the fear of not offending the other party. And this is much more so if the other party is superior to us. If the other party is God himself, then this filial fear is absolutely needed.

Besides, such fear can trigger a series of good effects. A passage from the Book of Proverbs affirms this. “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” (9,10) Pope St. Gregory the Great, in explaining the dynamism of this filial fear, says:

“Through the fear of the Lord, we rise to piety, from piety then to knowledge, from knowledge we derive strength, from strength counsel, with counsel we move toward understanding, and with intelligence toward wisdom and thus, by the sevenfold grace of the Spirit, there opens to us at the end of the ascent the entrance to the life of Heaven.”

With this fear of the Lord, we acknowledge we are creatures who are always dependent on God. This is what is called the ‘poverty of spirit’ that figures in one of the beatitudes, “Blessed are the poor in the spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

It’s this fear that we should foster, especially these days when we see a lot of people who are not afraid anymore to offend God. Though to be fair, we can also say that many do not fear God anymore because in the first place they don’t know him. No one fears what he doesn’t know.

We have to acknowledge some facts that we can gather nowadays. Like, there definitely is a lack of religious formation among many people, especially the young ones. This is aggravated by the fact that the reception of the sacraments is getting less and less. There is also a shortage of vocations and the rate of fidelity and perseverance to one’s vocation is low.

There is also a loss of the sense of sin even among Christians. And those who appear to be Christians often lack consistency with their faith when scrutinized. There definitely is a great need for catechesis and pastoral accompaniment.