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.”

Mary is never named in the Gospel of John. In the only scenes featuring her, the beloved disciple refers to her simply as “the mother of Jesus.” Those two episodes act as bookends to John’s presentation of Jesus’ ministry, and highlight the role of Mary as mother both of the Church and of every individual Christian.

St. Benedict concludes the Prologue of his Rule for monks with an uplifting exhortation: “Do not be daunted immediately by fear and run away from the road that leads to salvation. It is bound to be narrow at the outset. But as we progress in this way of life and in faith, we shall run on the path of God’s commandments, our hearts expanding with the inexpressible delight of love.” For Benedict, the monastic life is a school in which the monks, who graduate only at death, never cease learning how to love the Lord. The relentless rigors of work and prayer stretch the heart, pushing it outward and generating an ever-greater capacity to love and be loved.