Anxiety - a reasonable response

Daily Devotion - March 26

I will try to send a brief message each day while we are pausing gathering in person.
- Kara

I like to tell this a lot, so you've probably heard it from me, but here I go again.

A couple of years ago, on a road trip, I listened to a wonderful On Being podcast in which Krista Tippett interviewed Benedictine Monk David Steindl-Rast, who talks about the power of gratitude to reconnect us to God and each other, to ground us again in what is real.

But what stuck out to me most in this interview is how he answered her when she asked him about his perspective of living in a time where things seem so precarious and terrible.

She couldn't have known what was coming in 2020.  Nevertheless, his words made such an impact on me then, that I kept stopping and rewinding the podcast to hear them again, (while my kids groaned behind me in the car and told me to quit it).

This is what he said:

We must acknowledge our anxiety... We must acknowledge our anxiety, but we must not fear.  

There is a great difference. 

…Anxiety, or being anxious, this word comes from a root that means “narrowness,” and choking, and the original anxiety is our birth anxiety. 

We all come into this world through this very uncomfortable process of being born…. It’s really a life-and-death struggle for both the mother and the child. And that is the original, the prototype, of anxiety. 

At that time, we do it fearlessly, because fear is the resistance against this anxiety. See? If you go with it, it brings you into birth. If you resist it, you die in the womb. Or your mother dies.

So, anxiety is a reasonable response to a lot of human experience.

and we are to acknowledge it and affirm it, because to deny our anxiety is another form of resistance. 
But the fear is life destroying.

Anxiety is not optional in life, he says. It’s part of life.
 
But we can look back at our lives, at times we were in really tight spots, times of anxiety, and say to ourselves, we made it! We got through it! … In fact, the worst anxieties and the worst tight spots in our life, often, years later, when you look back at them, reveal themselves as the beginning of something completely new, a completely new life.

And that can teach us, and that can give us courage, also, now, that we think about it, in looking forward and saying, yes, this is a tight spot. …But, if we go with it,…it will be a new birth. And that is trust in life.

I have been thinking about his words today.
The grocery store was an anxious place. I felt anxious there.
But in the midst of the anxiety, and the care we took not to get too close to one another, we still saw each other, maybe more so.
We smiled, we nodded hello, we were careful to leave enough for others. When I thanked my check-out person, I choked up.  I am really thankful for her.

This is an anxious time.  Yes, this is a tight spot.  We are being squeezed.
What new life will come from this, we've yet to even speculate.
But the way God works is to bring us through death to life,
through fear to hope,
through anxiety to newness.

CONNECTING RITUAL:

Perhaps tonight before bed, whatever time that is in each of our homes, we might all receive this blessing, and so join our souls:

Lord, open unto me

Open unto me—light for my darkness.
Open unto me—courage for my fear.
Open unto me—hope for my despair.
Open unto me—peace for my turmoil.
Open unto me—joy for my sorrow.
Open unto me—strength for my weakness.
Open unto me—wisdom for my confusion.
Open unto me—forgiveness for my sins.
Open unto me—love for my hates.
Open unto me—thy Self for my self.
Lord, Lord, open unto me!

Amen.

• Howard Thurman (1900-1981)