In this section you can find a daily commentary on the Gospel of the Day.

Sunday 10 May 2020

Fifth Sunday of Easter

Word of the Day
Gospel of John 14:1-12

No to Fear

Do not let your hearts (Greek noun kardia) be troubled (Greek verb taràsso). The verb taràsso, “I agitate, move, disrupt, trouble, mess up, create disorder, confuse, disturb,” describes not so much a temporary doubt, or a moment of distrust or passing fear, but a real and true interior state. It indicates when a brief moment of non-faith becomes obstinacy, powerful rebellion, the clear choice to develop an obscure energy instead of light-filled one. It is fear, it is the emotional state when a heart begins to doubt. It is doubt that leads to the choice of non-trust. By creeping into the circuits of the mind, doubt  causes the heart not to have faith, not to love, not to abandon itself. The perturbation is attributed to the thinking organ of the kardia, the heart of the individual, where man reflects, thinks, imagines; it is the center of the individual’s personal life, the place of feelings, of memory, of the interior dialogue of meditation, of decision-making. It is the place where impure thoughts arise, and the most impure and obscure of all, the origin of many misfortunes, sufferings and disharmonies is fear, perturbation. Perturbation and fear understood not as a transitory emotional state but as a total upheaval of the person with regard to spiritual, psychic and emotional-physical spheres.
You have faith in God; have faith also in me is the Gospel procedure to overcome in any situation doubt’s poisonous effect concerning the value, the regality, the sacredness of one’s own life, doubt about the nobility of other people, doubt about God’s loving presence. Having faith is overcoming doubt which is the source of fear. Having faith, then, is overcoming fear, every fear, all fear. Not having doubts does not mean being arrogantly sure of everything, but always being humbly and tenaciously certain of God’s love. Having faith does not mean just believing in God, but it means trusting, trusting blindly in Him, entrusting oneself to Him always, abandoning oneself to Him always, placing everything in Him always and in any case.
Trusting is a precise type of interior dialogue in which one totally abandons oneself -- instead of to personal conclusions, judgments, conventions, convictions and human conveniences -- into the hands of He who can, knows, sees and loves. It is not cowardliness or irresponsibility, it is not running away from reality; it is simply and powerfully placing every reality completely in the hands of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit out of love and gratitude to remove the heart and the mind from the tangle of thoughts and the agitation of emotions. It is the faith and the abandonment that have the magnificent power to immediately pacify every agitated movement of the heart and of the emotions and to melt fear.
Basic fear is an emotion based on a choice, the choice to not trust in Love or the Spirit. Mary, the great Mother, is the teacher of the art of mediating and conversing with God. With her we can learn this marvelous experience and wisdom and we can say no to fear always and forever.