Australian Consolation: Anxiety

Interesting to cast anxiety as, in part, a byproduct of freedom. Especially for Protestants and especially as we move toward the primacy of individual conscience, the anxiety increases. In a cracked world, how do you discern whether you are doing the right thing? Is my (free) decision really God's will or am I looking through the lens of a world that is so warped I am headed away from God? Jesus would seem to have addressed this anxiety in parables like the Good Samaritan and to have said that religion can get so warped that it can lead us astray. However, complicating all this is that we're often not truly free (or don't feel free), even if we can discern God's will and this also produces anxiety. A single mother may ask, do I tend my sick father at the cost of my job or it more important to keep the job to support my children? What if my prayer life is leading me to stay home from work to tend to my mother, but my head is saying I just can't jeopardize my job? That's where social justice and building a just society becomes so important.

Interesting! This seems to agree with a 2004 sociological study of attitudes toward religion in Europe and the United States by Inglehart and Norris, called Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide, in which they found that religious participation tends to decline along with the decline in economic security and the increase in health care. They attributed the higher levels of religious participation in the Untied States to greater economic insecurity (due to our individualistic free-market political culture) and the lack of universal health care.

The one area of unfulfilled need that they found in what they called the ‘postmodern’ democracies of Europe that tended to create space for spiritual interest was what they called “unfulfilled sense of personal purpose or significance.”

Although I think their study was a bit reductionistic, it agrees with this post about the redemptive role of anxiety. I am reminded of James’ observation that the “poor are rich in faith.”

I live in an area smothered in good Reformed theology. You would think, given that theology, that there would be no anxiety here. Why? Because all that happens is, in fact, God's will. What's to be anxious about? Yet, I find anxiety-ridden believers everywhere. Isn't this curious?

I always seem to have anxiety knocking at my back door.

Jamieson (Chrysalis) spoke to one aspect of anxiety for me when he suggested we need to think about how to do what we are called to do but not focus on the intended impact of doing it. I have a (cracked) internal desire for control. This leads to worrying about the many variables and future eventualities which I cannot control.

Often, the times when I feel most at peace and at rest are when I return to the thought of the grain of wheat falling into the ground and dying. I picture my own personal ambitions and desire for success, etc. dying - just as if I were killed in some tragedy. I picture living a new life for which I don't set the parameters, which I don't control, and I don't answer for all the outcomes.

In some ways, I think this process coincides with the process of putting off the old and putting on the new (Gal 5, Eph 4, Col 3). Undo anger, rage, worry, etc. in some part come from fleshly attempts at control. Peace, kindness, gentless, etc. result from new life in the Spirit.

The relationship between health care and anxiety is an interesting one. Most of the prayer requests at my church revolve around health care, but much of health care is about utilizing known cause and effect relationships in which the outcomes are highly predictable.

In those highly predictable cases it is unclear to me just what we are asking God to do on the medical front. Some take a rational view and say there is little need to be anxious. Others look to God to reduce their anxiety.

Brian #7,
Your comment did bring a smile to my face. I wonder if our psychologically-trained theologians here at JESUS CREED will speak to the emotional spin-offs of theological positions?
The killer for Calvinists is thinking, "Oh my God, He has decreed my anxiety! What shall I do?"

What does your wife have to say on this subject, being a psychologist and all?