Offering Tomorrow
“Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble” (Matt. 4:36). “Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God” (Phil. 4:6).
There’s a lot of talk these days about ‘anxiety.’ Like all words that get used casually and frequently, there comes a point when we need to redraw some definitions. Anxiety is a word that likely comes from a very old word meaning “to choke.” It describes the sensation of having one’s breath cut off–and the panic that results from the sensation. In more recent use, anxiety refers to a clinical psychological diagnosis referring to a spectrum of nervous conditions arising from a spectrum of causes ranging from heredity to traumatic experience. In popular use, it is often used as a synonym for ‘worry,’ when concern for the uncertain outcome of an event becomes distracting to the point of interrupting our lives.
When the Bible talks about anxiousness, it’s talking about the meaning we assign to worry over the future and our desire to control it. The Bible likes to talk a lot about our desire to be in control. This has been a problem for us since the Fall (maybe even a cause of the Fall). It’s important to distinguish this from the other uses of ‘anxiety’ because the Scriptures aren’t talking about struggling with a psychological condition, or experiencing a normal emotion that arises over uncertainty. It’s talking about the story we tell ourselves about what our smallness and relative powerlessness means, and what we should then do about it. It is important to remember that we are not our worry and that we have an important choice to make when anxiousness arises.
When Jesus tells us not to be anxious, it is a call to an astonishing degree of trust. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus teaches us that faithfulness requires us to hold our lives with an open hand before God, always offering our lives to God with thanksgiving and receiving our lives back from Him with blessing. In practice, this looks like a lot of things modern culture tends to disdain: humility, reliance on community, quietness, and a commitment to slow change over a long time. When St. Paul calls the Philippian Christians to this manner of life, it is a call to be willing to lose in the eyes of the world so as to win in the eyes of God.
When we experience anxiousness, we can practice telling a different story about it. The impulse will be to try and grab control in some way. Our Christian formation means saying ‘no’ to that impulse and replacing it with a practice of entrusting ourselves to God and the support of our fellow Christians. Ultimately, this is the fruit of sanctifying grace in our lives as we submit ourselves–souls and bodies and yes, even the things we’d really like to micromanage–in a continuous oblation that we offer to God. It is only when our lives become shaped by this habitual self-offering that we are able to loosen the clenched fist we have around our lives. As this becomes our habit, we will learn to see both times of relative peace and times of relative concern as opportunities to grow in trust.
Growth in trust is the fruit of Easter because it is the practice of stepping away from the old patterns of life into the new, but unfamiliar life that the Lord provides us through the Resurrection. When Christ comes to His disciples on the first Easter, He finds them huddled together in a room not unlike the one they last occupied before the Passion. When He comes to them again, He finds His inner circle of friends having returned to their fishing trade. The Resurrection narratives repeatedly show us how our inclination will be to go back when our Lord wants to send us forth. Jesus is aware of our hesitancy and the reasons for it. As He confirms for St. Peter: “you will go in a way you do not want to go.” As we hope to share in the glory of the Lord’s new creation, so we will all have to embrace the death of the Cross as it touches every atom of our lives. But the way He leads us now far exceeds what we would choose for ourselves, and we never get the opportunity to see what this is unless we practice, even for a moment, saying ‘no’ to the impulse to collapse the future into a set of options about which we already feel at ease.
Confronted with my own hesitancy to leave behind the life of the old man–the manageable life–in favor of the life of the new man whose horizons I cannot comprehend, I am reminded of a prayer by Thomas Merton, a prayer I intend to pray a lot this Eastertide, and one I offer to you:
“My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it. Therefore I will trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.” (Thomas Merton, 1956)