With fear of God, with faith and love

Priest Cassian Sibley writes:

It isn’t the impiety or blasphemy of the atheists that gets to me in our culture – that is, after all, to be expected. It is, rather, all the people who claim to believe that God exists, whilst being apparently unaffected emotionally, intellectually, or ethically by that belief that I find disturbing.

Actually, it is the emotional thing that gets to me the most. A person so enslaved by a vice or an addiction that he doesn’t really want to be good in spite of his belief in God is something most of us can understand, I think, as is the fact that many people are stupid enough or confused enough that they can find it difficult to make their belief sets consistent, or to grasp the implications of their faith upon the rest of their convictions. But for one to claim to believe in God whilst lacking any sense of reverence, awe, or fear, is difficult for me to understand. I find it maddening, actually. Glibness in the face of the Uncreate, the Power that made the universe and all that is within it, and Who will judge all things is… well… moronic. Like everything else in our society, it has a left and right hand version – conservative and liberal, fundamentalist and modernist believers are often glib in different ways, and in different circumstances, but the underlying impiety and absurdity of it is the same.

On a related note – a priest who does not serve the liturgy with some degree of fear and awe is a lunatic. Fear isn’t the only appropriate emotion for a priest to feel, of course, and shouldn’t be. Fear of the Lord is only the beginning of wisdom, not its end. If it isn’t there at all, however, then I suggest that the priest in question has no idea at all about what he is doing in the altar.”