Mgr Kieran Heskin

Sacred Heart Church, Ilkley

THERE’S an apocryphal story of a spy who was captured and sentenced to death by a general of the Persian army. This general had the strange custom of giving condemned criminals a choice between the firing squad and “the big, black door.”

The moment for execution drew near, and guards brought the spy to the general. “What will it be,” asked the qeneral, “the firing squad or ‘the big black door?’” The spy hesitated for a long time. Finally, he chose the firing squad.

As they led him away, the general turned to his aide and said, “They always prefer the known to the unknown. People fear what they don’t know. Yet, we gave him a choice.”

“What lies beyond the big black door?” asked the aide. “freedom,” replied the general. “I’ve known only a few who were brave enough to choose it.”

It’s second nature to us to fear the unknown. We can torment ourselves at various times in our lives with a whole range of fears: the fear of dying and the fear of living, the fear of failure, the fear of not being loved, the fear of loneliness, the fear of not of having friends, the fear of running short of money …

If only we could entrust the future more to God and put our trust in him who alone sees the future and holds it in his hands. If only we could adopt a stance somewhat similar to that advocated by Dietrich Bonhoeffer in one of his sermons: “To believe that the Almighty God is our father and our Lord. To believe that for God, our greatest cares are like the worries of small children in their parents’ eyes; that God can turn things around and dispose of them in no time at all; for God it’s easy, not hard at all. We must believe that a thousand years in God’s sight are like a day (Ps. 90:4), that God’s thoughts are higher than our thoughts (Isa. 55:8–9), that God is with us in spite of everything”.

Lifting our spirits, he will enable us to rediscover hope and purpose as we try to envisage futures in both this world and the next vastly different from the current reality. He will be our strength and support through whatever is to befall us individually and collectively.