St. John of the Cross once proposed this axiom” “Learn to understand more by not understanding than by understanding.” Now imagine that someone who has known you deeply for a long time comes up to you and says: “You are a mystery to me. I’ve known you for most of my life and I still can’t figure you out. Sometimes I think I understand you, but you constantly surprise me. “There’s a depth and a complexity to you, something beyond me, that I’ve never fully grasped and I feel good about that. It adds to your mystique! All these years – and I am still just getting to know you!”
Wouldn’t you fell more understood, in this case, by not being understood? Wouldn’t you feel freer to be yourself and more valued as a person? When Scripture says “fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom,” essentially this is what it has in mind, namely, the kind of reverence and respect that backs off and lets others be fully who they are. To properly fear someone is to be afraid of violating them, of not respecting them properly.
Fear is almost never seen as positive. Fear connotes repression, timidity, oppressions, lack of nerve and immaturity, all of which are bad. There is in our culture a neurosis and a paranoia about fear of God…A certain fear is not only healthy, it’s necessary for love, peace and happiness. A healthy fear is not a fear of punishment or of experiencing guilt. God is not threatened by human creativity. God is trying to set us on fire.
Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. It is also the secret to love, harmony and respect…If we each had the wisdom that comes from fear of the Lord, the face of the earth would be renewed because our marriages, families, churches and places of work would explode with new meaning as we began to understand more by not understanding and began to see things familiar as unfamiliar again. [Adapted from Ron Rolheiser’s “Gifts of the Holy Spirit – Fear of the Lord” March 1998]