A popular praise-&-worship song takes its title from the opening words of Psalm 89: “I could sing of your love forever.” The song stirs emotions to a blissful pitch of gushing adoration for the loving and healing God who allows us to lift our hands daily in tranquil praise of His never-failing mercy.

While awaiting a sham trial and certain execution for high treason, Thomas More prayed and wrote. Henry VIII had declared himself head of the Church of England, and the Catholic More, who had served the king loyally as chancellor, refused to break his spiritual allegiance to the pope. He was utterly alone at this hour of his life; his beloved wife and children implored him to overcome his scruple of conscience and sign the Oath of Supremacy. More clearly regarded his own suffering as an imitation of his Lord; his most beautiful prison writing is “The Sadness of Christ,” a meditation on the garden agony of Jesus, the innocent suffering servant.

I reached a new low recently when I felt an overwhelming and irresistible itch to catch up on emails mere minutes after my first check of the day, which happened mere minutes after I finished celebrating Mass. I had long lamented the sight of my students reaching addictively for their phones as soon as class ended, but the realization that the contagion had spread to me was a sad revelation.

The future is not simply an adventure; it’s the adventure, according to the Latin roots ad, “to, toward” and ventura, “what will come.” While many students eagerly anticipate the start of a new school year and engaged couples impatiently count down the days to their wedding, dread of the approaching unknowns is familiar to virtually everyone. Regardless of one’s age, fear of the future is a dominant emotion that inhibits our joyful living of the blessed adventure that God wishes every life to be.

Being a father requires a man to acknowledge his mortality. From a purely biological perspective, the sexual drive is a program for reproduction that presumes the death of the one generating new life. Leon Kass, a brilliant physician and philosopher, asserts this truth in a stark manner: “Sexual desire, in human beings as in animals, points to an end that is partly hidden from, and ultimately at odds with, the self-serving individual: sexuality as such means perishability and serves replacement. The salmon swimming upstream to spawn and die tell the universal story: sex is bound up with death, to which it holds a partial answer in procreation. This truth the salmon and the other animals practice blindly; only the human being can understand what it means.”