Fear not.

Does it make sense to tremble before God who shows us love through good times and bad?

SO, WHAT DO YOU DO, STANDING BEFORE THE TABERNACLE with an open can of beer in your hand? The soggy heat of August had subsided that late Sunday afternoon, bringing out more folks to the parish Summer Festival. I was on my way to the hall to get another rack of chairs for the chicken barbecue, a freshly popped cool one in my hand, and took a shortcut through the church. Suddenly I realized I was passing before that holy golden dwelling, and my reverent inner Catholic needed to do something. So I made a practiced ceremonial turn, and, tilting my head in a friendly smile, lifted my brewsky in a "this Bud's for you" salute.

"Have you no fear of God?" the old pastor wheezed after I recounted the event at lunch the next day. Well, no. Not really. At least not in that classic frightened of God sense I had as a kid, when a hot dog on the wrong day could slam-dunk me into a handbasket headed for hell and my only hope for going to heaven was if I died in that brief, grace-filled sliver of the week between Confession on Saturday night and my first mortal sin on Sunday afternoon when I would invariably get into a fight with my brother.

As near as I can tell, the "fear of the Lord," gift of the Holy Spirit though it may be, represents a prefatory response to the deity arising from a decidedly primitive understanding of how God works in the world. Look at a map of the Near East, what we commonly call "The Holy Land," the area of the globe from whence emerged the beginnings of scripture. It's not surprising that stories of mighty earthquakes and pyroclastic destruction pepper the Old Testament. Jacob and the boys grew up smack in the middle of one of the nastiest seismic rift zones in the ancient world. But they didn't know diddly about plate tectonics or divergent faults. The only force they could imagine powerful enough to rattle terra firma like that, or blow the tops off mountains, was God the divine self. And the only reason God would do something like that, one could reasonably deduce, was because he was divinely peeved about something, most likely something they did wrong.

Throw in floods, famine, plagues, pestilence, political and military disasters, and other catastrophes directly or indirectly attributed to the Wrath o' God, and you've got a Supreme Being you should be shivering in your shoes about.

Jesus tried to put the kibosh on such thinking, replying "neither" when asked in John 9 whether a man's or his parents' sins caused him to be born blind, and "by no means" in response to speculation in Luke 13 about the guilt of the victims caught in local political savagery and architectural mishap. But that didn't stop the author of the Book of Revelation from connecting the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 A.D. with the destruction of Pompeii in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius nine years later. Nor some years after that did it keep my exasperated mother from telling me that a painfully skinned knee was God punishing me for not cleaning up my room like I was supposed to.

And it doesn't help that we call all the wonderful things that happen to us "good fortune" and all the terrible things "acts of God." When's the last time someone told you that "God must've had a reason" for doing something just horrible, or that a painful tragedy was somehow "God's will"?

I don't think God does stuff like that. And I can't believe we're supposed to be living in terror of God lowering the cosmic boom on us. I don't think that's what God is about. The Catechism of the Catholic Church speaks of a "loving fear that we owe to God alone" but I don't understand what that could be. I think we sometimes try to justify a long tradition that has served well the agenda of the control freaks but doesn't hold up to the common sense God gave a billy goat.

Awe works better for me. I think God is pretty awesome. It amazes me how God works things out. A few years ago I visited the area devastated by the eruption of Mount Saint Helens and saw how it had recovered since its incineration. God has a marvelously creative way of digging us out of our worst nightmares. No matter how bad things get screwed up, God is there to save and make new. God leaves me awestruck.

There is a certain fear of things; the world can be a dangerous place. I live on an active fault myself. I fear the earth will shake one day and bring down my building with me in it.

Even so, this magnificent God, who created our imperfect earth, cares about me and will be with me when I suffer and sustain me when I die. Awed? Yes. Amazed? Absolutely. Dazzled? Beyond belief. Afraid? Never. If I'm supposed to fear God, I don't know how. My God is way too good for that.

By FATHER PAUL BOUDREAU, a priest of the Diocese of Norwich, Connecticut. He facilitates missions and retreats and is the author of the forthcoming book Today's Good News for the Everyday Christian (Twenty-Third).