Saints for the Hard Days: Fear

Fear is the oldest feeling we have. Before we could name it, we knew it — the drop in the stomach, the tightening in the chest, the mind sprinting ahead to every way things could go wrong. You are not broken for being afraid. You are human. Even Jesus, in the garden of Gethsemane, sweat blood under the weight of what was coming. There is no fear you can feel that heaven has not already touched.

But here is the strange, stubborn thread that runs through the whole story of the Church: the people we call saints were not the people who never felt afraid. They were the people who felt afraid and went forward anyway. Joan of Arc was nineteen and terrified of the fire. Thérèse of Lisieux, the gentle “Little Flower,” lived with panic attacks and a religious anxiety so severe she later said that without her faith she might have taken her own life. John of the Cross wrote the most luminous words about God’s nearness from the floor of a prison cell, in the dark, feeling nothing. Mother Teresa smiled at the whole world through fifty years of interior darkness. Padre Pio, who could read souls, still had to tell himself daily: Pray, hope, and don’t worry.

That is the good news this book is built on. Sanctity is not the absence of fear. It is what you do with your hands while they are shaking.