25th Sunday in Ordinary Time
R. The Lord upholds my life.
Written by Allyson Gary
Let’s talk about fear. As one of the most powerful emotions we face, fear can be both motivating and paralyzing. I think we all know the power of fear because we see it every day.
Anxiety is washing through entire generations growing up now because all they see, beamed directly into their brains for hours on end, is how scary the world can be. Speaking as someone who has an anxiety disorder, it’s so easy to give in to fear. Our biology answers fear in a very direct way: our pulse races, we sweat, we feel itchy and anticipatory, all because after generations of evolution, our bodies have prepared us to survive attacks from external forces. And that fear, when it’s an answer to a direct external threat, is good for us because it keeps us alive. It’s instinctual. That’s what I mean when I say fear is often motivating.
But too much fear can also be paralyzing. When your brain floods with that initial burst of cortisol, our stress hormone, it can send us into fight or flight. But, if too much of it bathes our brain for too long, we freeze. Like a deer in the headlights, our body stops working. We know what we should do, but we just can’t make ourselves do it. And if you spend most of your life stressed by everything that could possibly go wrong, you lose the ability to cope. Despair creeps in; you become hypervigilant to the point of alienation. Everything seems like a threat. And this is not how God wants us to live.
If we are to love, as Jesus loved, we accept that there will be danger. We accept that there will be loss. We accept that there will be suffering. So, what’s the only tool in our arsenal that can defeat fear? Hope. The faith we have of our eternal life with Jesus can give us hope. The love that we feel for one another, that beautiful gift of community given to us by God, can sustain that hope. Like love, hope is not just a feeling that is here one moment and gone the next; it is an action, something we must practice every single day.
What’s one small action you can undertake this week to maintain your hope in the Lord?
Allyson Gary is a writer and podcaster based in Southern Louisiana. She is the host of Memento Mori: The Podcast, available on Spotify, where she talks about everyone’s favorite topics: death and grief. Follow her show on Instagram and be sure to send her lots of compliments because she can only function with a near constant stream of people reassuring her that they still like her and have not decided to hate her in the three minutes since she last asked.
Pray with today’s psalm.