ONE of the gifts of the Holy Spirit is Fear of the Lord. Fear of the Lord is akin to wonder (or awe): With the gift of fear of the Lord, one is made aware of the glory and majesty of God. Pope Francis said that “it is no servile fear, but rather a joyful awareness of God’s grandeur and a grateful realization that only in him do our hearts find true peace.”
A person with wonder and awe knows that God is the perfection of all one desires. This gift is described by St. Thomas Aquinas refers to that fear of separating oneself from God. He describes the gift as a "filial fear," like a child's fear of offending his father, rather than a "servile fear," that is, a fear of punishment.
Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. It is the perfection of the theological virtue of hope.
We have to nurture what the Holy Spirit has given us. Once we lose them we are also restrained from having a good relationship with God. Among the gifts of the Holy Spirit, It is the fear of the Lord that we should nurture.
One loses this easily. With the humanistic and materialistic environment we have today, it seems that our “filial fear” according to St. Thomas would often be replaced by our attachment to material things and wonders.
Today, our time with the Lord is replaced by the monster on top of our tables, the monsters on our pockets and the monsters on our laps. Evil is no wise that it has separated us from God. The electronic gadgets have drawn us away from God.
Contemporary knowledge, philosophies, and thoughts have distorted our notion of God. It has even made God lower than our beings and worst, God is no longer a Being we have to fear but he becomes very vulnerable like us. We no longer have that filial fear but we have that fear and anxiety that God is supreme than us and not as our equal.
Lately, the President called the God of the religious men and women (Catholic) as a stupid being. His supporters are quick in defense of their human leader. They justify the statement as referring to how the religious acted that made God stupid and not that he was attacking God.
However, no amount of explanation is needed. It was very clear that Digong has really destroyed the name of God. Whoever shall have heard of that will immediately think that the President disrespected God.
What saddens me most today is that we did nothing. We are angry, we are shamed, we are aghast against the state but we remain to have these feelings while the culprit runs free and justifies his acts and words. We have to remind ourselves, that if our chief executive could say these things about God, our Father, how much more and what more could he do to us, his mere equals or worst his subjects.
In history, most leaders and kings who have lost their focus and respect on the Almighty have been smitten down by a cold blow of wind. Leaders have fallen for they thought they have all the powers in the world and failed to acknowledge the presence of God. They only failed but they have not insulted God in the way our leader did.
We have to pray for forgiveness, lest we are to suffer from the consequence of what the President did. While we suffer, he could just still enjoy the perks of being a president.
But to the Filipinos, we have to seek forgiveness for we have chosen a leader that would bring us farther away from our beloved God. We pray for the Holy Spirit to give him the gift once more of “Fear of the Lord.”