At the top of my desktop computer monitor, I have just reinstalled (with fresh cellophane tape) a little plastic “prayer card” I bought at a local store that sells myriad devotional supplies for Kansas City Catholics. I like the fragrance in there, among other things. Candles. Incense. Books fusty in spirit, if not in age. Rosaries. Figures of the Virgin Mary and Jesus sized for dashboards or home prayer corners or church altars. Wandering around in this store, as a lifelong mainline Protestant, I feel a bit bereft of some elements of awe and worship that my tradition has typically rejected. Occasionally I step over the line. My prayer card, with its admonition from a 16th century Carmelite nun and mystic, has become my mantra (to mix up the traditions of one faith and yet another.)

Do not be afraid.

Let nothing disturb you,
Let nothing frighten you,
All things are passing away:
God never changes.
Patience obtains all things.
Whoever has God
Lacks nothing;
God alone suffices.

St. Teresa of Avila

I admit to a certain irony, in view of the fact that I have pasted that little card over the camera on my computer lest someone use it to spy on me, with or without the alert of the little green light. At times, I’ve shown up fuzzy on my ZOOM square, having forgotten to remove the protective prayer card. Am I really afraid of being spied on via my own computer? Dunno.

Over time, regarding this card, I have come to realize that the admonition from St. Teresa most apt to my usual state of mind is actually this one: Patience obtains all things. Does that apply to the endless irritating waits while the “beachball of death” tells me that my computer is “thinking” but not delivering the information I demand immediately? That’s only the iceberg tip of my impatience. I might embrace the illusion that I live life fearlessly. But patiently? Not so much.

And so my thoughts leap to the thing of the day.

A pundit in the Washington Post, Lawrence Downes, comments on the recent kerfuffle in the Catholic Church over the exact wording of the rite of baptism. Apparently, in Phoenix, a long-serving priest, in an effort to be inclusive in a modern sense, used the word “we” instead of “I” in pronouncing the blessing of baptism. According to higher authorities (but only as high as The Vatican), this mistake nullified the effectiveness of perhaps thousands of baptisms and subsequent marriages. Downes says drily, “Will God overlook this mistake and embrace the blameless faithful anyway, or will he be a jerk about it?” I say, with St. Teresa:Do not be afraid.

Daily headlines indicating that the inmates are running the asylum worldwide provide enough reasons to fear, if you let details like gun violence, mass starvation, the demise of democracy, and universal economic collapse bother you. Never mind, I insist, what the wording was of your baptism, or even whether or not you were baptized, or even whether or not you “believe in God.”

I have two books on my Kindle which feed my current reflections: The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by Graeber and Wengrow (anthropology professor and professor of comparative archaeology, respectively) and The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking) by Katie Mack (theoretical astrophysicist). I lean towards astrophysics above anthropology as an area of interest, especially when it comes to my faith and theology. I find speculation about dark matter and dark energy more intriguing than speculation about the Dark Ages (and long ages before that). Point being: all our science and technology and psychology and human history have barely made a dent in what we don’t know. Furthermore, at this stage of human development (using the term loosely) we can no longer throw “God” into that immense vacancy as an excuse for ignorance, let alone for violence against other human beings.

For today, let me declare, in faith: God’s got this.

In the past two months, I’ve been a bystander in the deaths of six people within my circle of family and friends. None was from Covid. None from violence. Not all were elderly—-that is, my age, when death inevitably moves closer and closer to home. What shall I be afraid of?

Perhaps there was a dawn of everything, meaning human consciousness and the mystery of the mind. Perhaps there will be an end of everything in a sudden bubble of destruction called vacuum decay. What has this got to do with how I feel, how I act, how I live this very morning as I write?

All I can really do is call your attention, whoever you are, to the sheer grace and beauty of creation, the miracle that you’re a part of it, and the absolute assurance that you are loved.

Just say yes, okay, I get it. Do not be afraid.