The Bread of Anxiety

"It is but lost labor that we haste to rise up early,
and so late take rest, and eat the bread of anxiety.
For those beloved of God are given gifts even while they sleep."
--from A New Zealand Prayer Book, 1989

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That's from the service for Night Prayer, but I think about it all day.

There's this writer I really like named Lauren Winner who gave up anxiety once for Lent, which at first blush sounds like 1-800-Crazytown. But then I consider two things:

1) the amount of energy that goes into feeding something that falls away if I can just slow down enough to touch the most basic and beautiful facts about myself as a child of God,

and

2) the presence of mind required to disengage the automatic habit I seem to have-- that so many of us seem to have-- to just default to anxiety so much of the time.

Suddenly, giving up chocolate or deep-sixing Facebook for forty days seem like a little less of a challenge.

The simple, basic facts: God loves me and you and chooses me and you to step forward with the humility and confidence we all have as benefactors of his grace. We are children of light, and there's a lightness of being to that, a freedom completely anathema to the barriers we put in front of ourselves with our fears of failure and reproach.

Still, we look out our windows and see brokenness and violence and oppression and then turn around to see too little time with our own families and about six loads too many of laundry and we are reminded how difficult-- how much of a discipline it is-- to reorder our thinking.

I've often heard that, as believers, "we are in this world, but not of this world." This rubs me the wrong way for many reasons, not the least of which is the fact that it makes us sound like a bunch of space-aliens.



It also shoves us straight to our knees in a gesture not of humility but of pious one-upmanship, as if we're so focused on the notion of "the life that is to come" that we're content to watch this world bite and scratch itself to death. I also find it incredibly theologically suspect, since we worship a Savior whose entire M.O. was his presence down here in the midst of the muck and the mire. Jesus was both in this world and of this world while simultaneously being about its transformation.

The worst part of it, though, is how that stupid bumper-sticker phraseology embraces the transient side of our existence without honoring its intrinsic goodness. We were created by Good to be good and do good right here on Earth, and all in an incredible act of love.

Still, any time there's that much real love hanging around, there's the potential for real loss. Real loss is scary, and it's fear of it that prompts our anxieties, which is a lesson none of us needs to learn.

Least of all God.

The thing about it is, though-- and this is the place where anxiety starts to seem awfully flimsy-- is that through Jesus, love wins. Death couldn't hold him, and it can't hold us, and this is a reality we are gifted long before we actually die. Because we are God's body in the world, we are also his agents of transformation. And if God is doing something new and wonderful every day, and if every single day we have the chance to not only take part in the renewal of his creation but bring it about by loving each other, and serving each other, and lifting each other up when we stumble and fall--

well, should we really be that afraid of stumbling and falling in the first place?

Not only that, but if we could just step forward in the simple, easy rhythm of one foot in front of another towards whatever we're worried about, remembering who we are and whose we are and that it is our words and our arms and our efforts God uses to transform this weary world, I think it's pretty probable that we'd fall a lot less often anyway.

A true and salient fact: most of the time when we fall, we're tripping over our own two feet. We're falling because of and into our own anxieties.

I got to see Lauren Winner speak last month at the Lenten Lecture series at St. Paul's, and she not only referenced the year she gave up anxiety for Lent, she spoke about how the very things we most need to set aside are the things that insulate and buffer us from that which is Holy.

What kind of grace might we find if we have the courage to let our anxieties go? What might it be like to make ourselves truly available to God, and where he's leading us?

Remembering the prayer from the New Zealand Prayer Book, what kinds of gifts might we be gifted at our most peaceful, relaxed, and vulnerable?

I suspect that to deny ourselves the bread of anxiety means becoming a lot more open to the bread of life.