Worries and stuff -- 10 February 2012

What can we say about worries? The question matters because Jesus tells us not to do it. Worry, that is. Let not your hearts be troubled, he says.

Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear... And he goes on, sentence after sentence, filling every pew sitter in every age with guilt and failure (if indeed they are listening). Why do you worry about clothing...? And then all the stuff about the lilies of the field and Solomon in his glory -- and I think, it’s all very well for him -- he didn’t get frog-marched down to Auckland for a fitting of a new suit... Jesus says it’s only the gentiles who worry about such things. How could they be so shallow?

Well, the issue is a little worse than that. We can think of reasons for worry which make food, drink and clothes recede into triviality. People we know suddenly get frightening diagnoses. We know people around here increasingly worried about paying their bills. There are worries about sons and daughters and grandchildren. People have worries about their memories and regrets. And some are caught in a net of anxiety they simply can’t shake off.

Another anxiety generator in the church is just this... The confident and dogmatic believer who has got all questions answered and all mysteries laid plain, who is telling us what to do in order to be saved and safe like him or her. It is all, he says, so simple. Well no, you see, it is not. Reality is confusing, complex and worrying. The rain is falling on good and bad alike.

Jesus is not telling us to walk away from reality. Losing touch with reality is not a healthy sign anyway. Health means a healthy awareness of reality, not dimmed or distorted by drugs or by alcohol or by mental illness, or by dogmatic religion. Contemplative prayer, then, is a decision about where we are going to place our attention. We choose to set our anxieties to one side, along with all other preoccupations, filed under “Distractions”, because for the moment we are attending to the mantra. Of course this is not easy. It requires discipline and time. The worries and whatever else we have on our minds will still be there later, no doubt. Perhaps then they may have become subtly changed -- who knows? But we have been free to place our attention elsewhere, towards love and stillness, the silence which God’s word in our hearts requires.