For Colleen … and all who need to feel the fire

But love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return. Your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High; for he is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked.  Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.

I wonder how many of us feel like my cousin, Colleen. ‘I need a hug,’ she wrote, responding to a recent post. ‘I am scared to death every day I wake up. Any specific prayers or thoughts you can give me would be appreciated.’

If only there was a magic prayer to cast out fear and evict our worries and anger, amid the political upheaval that bombards our consciousness every time we watch the news, wondering, good Lord, what next?

For Colleen, the main demon is fear, for me it is anger at the brutal callousness and cruelty to human beings at home and abroad, evident in the actions of the current administration, cutting humanitarian aid and tossing committed public servants to the curb … with utterly no discernment about what is good, just and necessary.

Although our demons differ, Colleen and I—millions more, I suspect—face a spiritual crisis, as anger, fear or other demons like helplessness and despair claim ever-larger swathes of our consciousness.

We need to exercise an eviction notice or, better, perform an exorcism before the enemies of love possess our hearts. Anger, even righteous anger, can quickly metastasize into hatred, fear into immobility, despair into cynicism and helplessness into melancholy and sad despondency.

While I wish I had a special prayer for Colleen … and myself, there is a way of freedom … however partial it feels, at times … a way we can walk, which requires daily attention and maintenance.

Silly, sappy and naïve as it sounds, love is the only road to freedom, the only power strong enough to exorcise the damnedable powers that bind our hearts and tie us in knots.

Love casts out fear, First John 4 says. It does a pretty good job on anger, hopelessness, helplessness and a host of other chains that bind the heart, too. I speak from experience; more significantly, so do saints, mystics and ordinary Christians from any time and place you can possibly name.

The love that frees does not emanate in our souls; although as a gift in our creation and renewed in our redemption, it burns there, too, a living flame of love, to be sought, fanned and tended anew each day.

The deep substance of our souls … is the love God is, Christian mystic, Julian of Norwich, tells us. We forget that … or maybe we never knew. Maybe we thought the surge of warmth, love and tears that bubble up, sometimes at the most unexpected and inopportune moments, is an aberration of little import, as opposed to our souls trying to break free and see the light of day.

Every day, we need to descend from our troubled minds into our hearts, there to find and feel the warmth of the flickering flame yet burning in us. Blow on those flames; stir love’s embers however you can. Savor whatever graces or memories, beauty or common moments awaken your heart.

And pray. Pray all your fears, your hopes and doubts and all the rest of it. Let it go, giving it all to Jesus, who bids you to come and sit in the sweet warmth of his love. You just may find the comfort and rest you need for one more day of loving your life and family and neighbors and this crazy, screwed-up world … and even yourself, which can be the hardest of all.

And Colleen, if none of this works, read Psalm 46, slowly, and remember who, in the last analysis, is still in charge.