New Week, New Month, Same Two Choices

Last night on the phone my dad reminded me of a priest who used to serve at the church I grew up in.  His name was Fr. Reginald.  He often gave these short, succinct homilies, with one main point that stayed with you because it wasn’t weighed down with a lot of extraneous rhetoric.

Today’s poem is like that.  Today is the start of a new week and a new month (and only three more months of winter here in the midwest!).  Yet this poem reminds us that in every moment, we have the same two choices–love or fear.  Despite the poem’s repetition of the words “there are” in each line, despite the insistence that love and fear are the only two states of being, you always have a choice about which to claim, to see, to believe.  This is not to imply that’s it’s an easy choice, because God knows, it isn’t.  Nor is fear a “bad” thing.  Without fear, there is no need for courage.  And luckily for us, no matter what, it’s a choice we get the chance to make, over and over again.

Love and Fear

There are only two feelings, Love and fear:
There are only two languages, Love and fear:
There are only two activities, Love and fear:
There are only two motives, two procedures,
two frameworks, two results, Love and fear,
Love and fear.

Michael Leunig (contemporary Australian cartoonist, philosopher, poet and artist)