It's the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)

This has been an anxious week. Being a Six, I don't really need a good reason to feel anxious, just being alive is often all I really need. Some may call this existential dread, angst or some other high-minded label. Really I was just edgy, and for good reason.

The economy is in the tank. Do I need to recount all the bad things that happened this week? Passage of a $787 billion stimulus bill ostensibly designed to help the economy caused the stock market to plumb new lows (gallows humor: the stock market has dropped so much that my 401k is now a 201k). Jobless claims through the roof -- 5MM people out of work. Home foreclosures up 80%+. And so on.

At our church and at other institutions here in Greensboro, people stream in every day for help with food, rent, utilities...the basic necessities. This week there was a confab of local churches and charitable organizations trying to coordinate their response to the local humanitarian crisis. A few years ago this type of meeting might have brought a couple of dozen representatives. At this week's meeting more than 100 came. And it's much worse elsewhere than here.

So far my business has help up OK, but we are actively in business development mode. Clients are still spending, but also acting squirrelly and overly deliberate. We need work. We have a pending proposal out for a study that would be by far the largest single assignment our company has ever won in its five-year history, to be conducted in the U.S., Europe, and Asia. So far beaten the odds by becoming one of two finalists, the other being a far larger multi-national firm. We are the darkhorse. The decision is due next week.

It's tax time, and of course as a small business owner I always look forward to the quadruple witching hour in April -- taxes due to the U.S. Treasury and NC Department of Revenue for 2008 plus quarterly tax payments to both. The biggest checks I'll write all year.

Then yesterday came the announcement that the Oblates of St. Francis de Sales, the order of priests that has staffed my parish of St. Paul the Apostle, will be "turning over the parish to the care of the diocese" at the end of June. This has been the bogeyman of our parish probably since before the Paulists pulled out 15 or so years ago. Diocesan priests! Head for the hills! Who will be our new pastor? No clue. That one is in the hands of Bishop Jugis and his staff -- and God.

And yet against all odds, the trajectory of my mood has been upward. One of the most important tasks of my own spiritual journey has been to learn to master my own anxiety. For anxiety is my perpetual companion, in good times and bad. My nature I think is to see it and experience anxiety more clearly and intensely than others do, but I think we all have it, and we all react to it, knowingly or unknowingly.

And let's be clear -- I am powerless against anxiety. You are too. I have been fortunate in my life to have had teachers to show me this aspect of my essential nature, and to work with it. One such teacher and friend is Marilyn who first taught to name my fear, my anxiety, and in so doing to reduce its power over me.

Another is Fr. Jim O'Neil, former pastor of St. Paul's and an Oblate priest. At a Finance Council meeting some years ago he read the following from a little yellow book as our opening prayer:

Do not look forward to the mishaps of this life with anxiety, but await them with perfect confidence so that when they do occur, God, to whom you belong, will deliver you from them. He has kept you up to the present; remain securely in the hand of his providence, and he will help you in all situations. When you cannot walk, he will carry you. Do not think about what will happen tomorrow, for the same eternal father who takes care of you today will look out for you tomorrow and always. Either he will keep you from evil or he will give you invincible courage to endure it.

If ever there was a prayer for times like these, that's it. He was quoting St. Francis de Sales from a little pamphlet called "Golden Counsels of Saint Francis de Sales", and my copy is dog-eared and almost crumbling from use as it lays in front of me now. It was that last line -- "Either he will keep you from evil or he will give you invincible courage to endure it" -- that rang my bell that night and began to help me see how our just and loving God stands by us, loves us and carries us through all the trials of this life.

In Jesus Christ his son we have an ally who has conquered not only anxiety but death itself. He did this not by being all-powerful and all-Divine but by being powerless and human. Jesus knew and experienced anxiety and every other human emotion exactly as we do. Can you not feel his anxiety at Gethsemane?

He was in such agony and he prayed so fervently that his sweat became like drops of blood falling on the ground.

He knows what it's like. He really does. And that is what gets me through weeks like this one.

"Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat (or drink), or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing?

Look at the birds in the sky; they do not sow or reap, they gather nothing into barns, yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are not you more important than they?

Can any of you by worrying add a single moment to your life-span?

Why are you anxious about clothes? Learn from the way the wild flowers grow. They do not work or spin. But I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was clothed like one of them. If God so clothes the grass of the field, which grows today and is thrown into the oven tomorrow, will he not much more provide for you, O you of little faith?

So do not worry and say, 'What are we to eat?' or 'What are we to drink?' or 'What are we to wear?' All these things the pagans seek. Your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. But seek first the kingdom (of God) and his righteousness, and all these things will be given you besides."