The first line of Psalm 64 leads a crucial prayer: Deliver us, O Lord, from fear of the enemy. In some translations, fear is rendered as dread.
Is this not fascinating? In life, there is plenty of wanting to escape conflict with one’s enemies (real or imaginary) but here, we pray to deliver our lives from dread of these people and conflicts.
Dorothy Day wrote that only when we are delivered from this fear can we get close enough to love. Put another way, in order to love our “enemies,” we have to first pray for the grace to see our dread and to overcome it.
I don’t think that this is something we can do of our own power.
Deliver us, O Lord, from fear of the enemy.
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