BEING ANXIOUS

It is so very easy for us to get our priorities all out of kilter. We worry about so much that is out of our control and will never be in our control or anyone else’s for that matter. My Mother told me on the occasion of her 90^th birthday that her one regret in life was that she did just that: worried about things that she could not control and, even worse, about things that never came to be. Don’t we all?

In this very materialistic society in which we live, most of us tend to be anxious about our possessions: how to maintain them, how to obtain more, even what to do with them because we have so many and so much. We have more than enough, every one of us, yet we worry that we do not have enough, that we will lose what we have, that…well, you know the drill.

Perhaps the words of Saint Gregory the Great might pull us back to what is truly worth worrying about. He says: “Be not anxious about what you have, but about what you are.” Our possessions do not make us, but who we are often defines both our attitude toward material possessions and determines how we use them. We are children of God first, last and always. Thus, whatever possessions we own, whatever gifts we have, wherever we are and in whatever we do, all should reflect that truth. That is truly what we should, must, be anxious about if we are going to worry and fret about anything.

So how does a child of God live? The temptation is to be cautious in everything so as not to say or do that which a child of God would not. Then we could be assured that our anxiety level would remain low and at an even keel. Maybe so; but is that living or simply existing? And is that how a child of God – or how Jesus himself – would live?

Annie Dillard, in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek observes:  “There is always an enormous temptation in all of life to diddle around making itsy-bitsy friends and meals and journeys for itsy-bitsy years on end. It is so self-conscious, so apparently moral, simply to step aside from the gaps where the creeks and winds pour down, saying, I never merited this grace, quite rightly, and then to sulk along the rest of your days on the edge of rage.”

She continues: “I won’t have it. The world is wilder than that in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright. We are making hay when we should be making whoopee; we are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain, or Lazarus. There is something deadening about going through life cautiously.”

A cautious person may never be anxious but he is also not living fully. Because stepping out into the unknown is fraught with danger, physical and spiritual, we often choose to err on the side of caution. The challenge always before us as a Christian and as a community of Christians is, as Dillard asserts, to raise Cain and Lazarus, to bring new life, resurrection, to what was once dead. It is also to create new life where there is none. That’s exciting stuff, dangerous, to be sure, filled with anxiety at times. Yet, as Gregory reminds, if we are about being who we are, a child of God, then we really do not have anything to be anxious about, do we? WJP