Sermon: Peace in the Storm

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Peace in the Storm: Anxiety

By Charles Rush

March 15, 2009

[ Audio (mp3, 6.7Mb) ]

e of the joys of having my children when I was young is watching my friends endure what I have already been through. I got an e-mail recently from a friend from college that was care-free and pretty wild in school. Today he has all the same worries that a father of small children has. His oldest daughter is about kindergarten/first grade. She plays regularly with the boy next door. Several times, her mother has discovered her playing doctor with the boy next door. Dad was brought in to talk to her. They talked about this and that. Finally, Daddy says, ‘so honey, you are getting to an age where I don't think you should play doctor with your friend Justin any more'. His daughter says to him, “Oh Daddy, he's not just a doctor, he's a specialist.” I wrote back, “Apparently, the apple didn't fall far from the tree.”

Anxiety! We have advanced degrees in anxiety, some earned in the past few months. Most people that live in and around our neighborhoods are overachievers, driven A-types. I cite but one real-life example, Michele Coye-Eulau, from an obituary written in the year following September 11th in the New York Times. One thing for sure, we lost a lot of talented people. “Michele, it's 11 o'clock! Dennis Eulau would shout. “Could you come to bed!”

After all, her day had started at 5 a.m. with the Norditrack workout, then the frenzy to roust, dress and feed their three little guys- ages 2,5, and 7- and get herself to work, two days a week in the city and one at home, as a systems analyst at Marsh & McClenan. On City days, she arrived early so she could jam in a lot and leave on the dot.

Mrs. Coyle-Eulau, 38, would go home to Garden City, N.Y., dine on cereal, then supervise the boys' homework and bedtime rituals. Then she would plan weekends. A skier and snorkeler, she was the one who pushed everyone out the door for activities.

She was a to-the-max mom. A coach from an opposing soccer team asked her to tone down the cheering. Before school started, she would seek out teachers, demanding, ‘what can you do for my boys?'

Here is what the boys did for her: last Mother's day, they cooked pancakes with red and blue food coloring. She even ate them.

What took her so long to get in bed? Packing lunches, making grocery lists, arranging play dates. “I never understood” her husband said. “Now I do.”[1]

How many people do you know like that? Driven, organized, able to achieve so much at work, at home, even at play. I was talking to a corporate executive who was telling me how much he hated public speaking. He had these dreams that he would show up to speak and he would be in the wrong place, and that the speech he had prepared was on a totally wrong subject and there was nothing he could do with the speech to even salvage a tiny bit of it. He would wake up in a cold sweat and couldn't go back to sleep. He asked me if I ever had dreams like that. I could tell he was really trying to be open and vulnerable for a moment. “No- never had one” I said. I love to goof on A-type personalities.

He had dreaded public speaking since childhood and found himself increasingly having to do it the more Senior he became in the firm, causing him more anxiety each year. So I asked him the obvious question. “You have an M.B.A. You can do lots of things. Why do you track yourself into a situation that makes you so uncomfortable?” This is what he said, “because I am going to be the master of myself if it kills me.”

How many people do I know that have to keep challenging themselves to attain the next level, the next level, the next level. They put themselves, consciously and unconsciously, into positions of great pressure in order to develop excellence in themselves. Not surprisingly, their first instinct is to put their children into pressure situations to develop excellence in their character. So managing anxiety- in ourselves, in conditions we create for our co-workers and employees, in our families- managing anxiety becomes a front burner issue.

Anger, sleeplessness, control issues about health and safety, having trouble being an emotional support for your kids and your spouse (they let you down not fulfilling your expectations), when anxiety becomes intense periodically having trouble feeling anything- you have this deadness, periodically having trouble really enjoying life (le joie d'vivre)- these are just a few of the symptoms of the anxiety we create for ourselves.

I read an interview a couple years ago. It was Craig MacCaw or Michael Dell or one of most successful entrepreneurs in the country. He had just started a new internet venture. The interviewer said, “A lot of people would say to you, you already have attained an enormous success, you have a lot of money, why don't you just quit and live a life of the rich and famous.” He said, “it's not about the money. It's never been about the money.” I'm sure he doesn't mind spending the money, but I'm sure he is telling the truth. Other things actually motivate him to get up and get going. His real motivation is an internal challenge. In a real sense, He can't not do it. And there is this enormous pressure around him as a result.

This pressure increases the more that people depend on us, the greater our scope of responsibility. Some of us never feel so needed, we never feel so vital or alive- or more stressed- than when we are in this position.

At root, there is a spiritual dimension to anxiety that Jesus references without telling us how to resolve it exactly. Ultimately, our anxiety lifts up for us the fleeting character of our life, the life we love so very deeply- all the things that we hope to achieve, all the vital life that is still out there. In our anxious moments, we can't control things, we are vulnerable and afraid, our fears get the best of us, we are off balance, we are about to go under, we are about to lose. What is happening at the deepest level is that we are connecting emotionally with the spiritual precariousness of life. This is the deeper level that presenting problems point us towards. We are not always conscious of it. What happens often is that we are more emotional about our presenting anxieties than we should be. We can't think and live on this deeper level. We shield ourselves from it. But at an unconscious level, we are in touch emotionally and spiritually with this deeper level.

Of course, anxiety not always just a personal thing and it is not always born out of the drive of success. Sometimes it defines an era as the “The Age of Anxiety” suggested by W.H. Auden. Right now, we are all anticipating what it will be like to live in a battlefield. I was glad to recently hear an elderly woman interviewed on the radio, reminding us that Londoners had to live with Buzz bombs falling on their city for over a year. Arbitrary violence could be heard every night flying overhead in the sky. And somehow they figured out a way to live in relative normalcy. It is possible. Not easy but possible.

But the social consequences of dealing with a prolonged anxious trauma are unquestionably dangerous. In Erich Maria Remarque's classic novel about World War I, he summarizes the anxiety of his generation that survived trench warfare. Dug in so close, for such a prolonged time. And the method of war, masses running in the face of gunfire, weekly/daily encountering certain death. That became the defining experience for the whole generation in Europe. Facing death, the arbitrariness of death, some surviving, some not. The experience of so many became defining for the entire generation

When the war was over, their innocence gone, their survivor guilt mounting, the experience of the arbitrariness of death settled over the generation in ways that made it difficult or impossible for them to reintegrate into normal bourgeois society. It was the era of the roaring twenties, a wild party time, but in Europe it had quite a dark underside. The play Cabaret hints at the darkness but the play is really too tame and cleaned up. There was more abandon, and the actual decadence that went on was understated.

When you read the journals and diaries from that era, lots and lots of people had a hard time readjusting to normal family life. They may have settled down on the surface but they were internally conflicted. As Paul Tillich said, who lived in Berlin in the 20's, everyone had a lover because existentially everything was about being in the moment. After facing the arbitrariness of death in battle, people lived out their passion and romance like soldiers home on leave for perhaps the last time- over and over again.

Normal marriage, normal love with their spouses faltered on a wide social scale. Marriage was still a social obligation, but for a large percentage of the population, their hearts were not in it. Likewise, people worked but their hearts were not in their careers. They lived for night life, trying to squeeze out an essential joy in the fleeting darkness. They were desperate to live it up. As a generation, they were not interested in developing stable careers, which was largely impossible anyway because the war had shattered the economy. They wanted adventure like Lawrence of Arabia, something exotic and mysterious, something filled with intrigue and betrayal, something far, far away. These issues- sexual integration, intimacy and love, alcohol, fantasy, and escape- haunted that generation until their old age.

There are very real problems that come from prolonged trauma and anxiety. All of these symptoms, some of them understandable, but all of them corrosive and ultimately self-destructive responses to anxiety. They are social examples of what happens to us when the storm around us becomes defining for us, when it takes us over and shapes us spiritually. Our text this morning says that the disciples were just freaking out in the middle of a storm. They woke Jesus up in a panic and begged him what to do. Jesus comes outside and says “Peace” and everything calms down. Then he says to the disciples, “Why are you afraid? Have you no faith?”

He doesn't really tell them what to do to resolve their anxiety. But his answer suggests that, in some way, they already possess the spiritual resources to meet the challenges that unnerve them to the core of their being. It is not too different from the wonderful end of the Wizard of Oz. The lion has come on this long journey to find some courage. And the Wizard gives him the most humane and touching blessing. He says, ‘Where I come from there are men who don't have any more courage than you have. But there's one thing they have that you don't have, a medal. I hereby bestow upon you the Medal of Courage.' ‘Have faith', says Jesus. What does that mean?

It means that there is a depth dimension to our lives that you can live out of, if you will. Christians describe coming to this depth dimension as surrendering to God, following in the example of Jesus who once prayed, “not my will, but Thine”. When Jesus found his life particularly challenging- when he was facing unjust torture and death, he intentionally turned his will over to God. First, he prayed, “Let this Cup Pass from Me”. I think we all do that. But when he realized that it was not a possibility, he prayed, “Not my will but Thine.” He drew upon God's energy. Particularly regarding ultimate issues like our own mortality, it is opening ourselves to our dependence on God, an admission that we are not, ultimately, in control of all of our destiny. It is emotionally and spiritually accepting that fact and trusting in the Ultimate Goodness of God, come what may. Christians throughout history have repeatedly reported this experience as one of laying down a great burden and finding a peace. St. Augustine, after many long, arduous years of anxiety, questioning, and doubts had some kind of life-changing encounter. About it, he said in The Confessions, his own spiritual diary, simply ‘my life was restless until it was at rest in Thee.' He found a peace, not of his own making, but the peace of trusting in God and finding the acceptance and support of God. It is not something that you concoct. It just happens that your trust is met by a powerful affirmation that God is not only for you but with you. Our trust, ultimately, is in the goodness of God.

And from that basic shift in perspective flows many other things. Because, on one level, we are still actors, shapers of our own destiny. So we keep creating and participating in our own anxiety. But living out of our depth perspective, we are also conduits of divine energy- conduits that radiate God's love, compassion, forgiveness, caring, peace. And this perspective, this posture- being a conduit is healing. It displaces anxiety. And it points us to what is real, what keeps us human, what gives us fundamental joy in living, what creates the real community of support around us. It is what gives us courage in the midst of uncertainty, hope in the midst of despairing circumstances. The great theologian, Paul Tillich, at the end of his life, was asked by someone at the end of a lecture, what it was that God wanted for us. He said, ‘be strong'. What he meant by that is that it is finally being filled with the Spirit of God that gives us, in his words, ‘the courage to be.'

And it gives us a change of perspective too. We become increasingly aware of what we can control and what we cannot control. With maturity, not that I personally am able to do this, we become able to let go of worries and concerns about things that we cannot control or we ought not control. Reinhold Niebuhr touched upon this in a prayer that he wrote that was subsequently picked up by Alcoholics Anonymous and made famous the world over as a result. May his prayer be ours this day: “God, grant us the grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, the courage to change the things which should be changed, and the wisdom to know the difference.” Amen.

[1] New York Times, Wednesday, October 24, 2001, p. B11.