27^th Sunday of Ordinary Time

Dismiss all anxiety from your minds. Present your need to God in every form of prayer and in petitions full of gratitude. Then God's own peace, which is beyond all understanding, will stand guard of your hearts and minds in Jesus Christ. Phil. 4: 6ff.

Tell me we don't live in an age of anxiety! How many people today are taking powerful pills to calm their anxieties? The drug companies can tell you, because they're making billions supposedly treating people's anxieties, and so are the psychiatrists. People worry about all kinds of things, their health, their money and its future buying power, that is, their pensions, the threat from terrorists, the random violence of criminals, the breakdown of families, and I'm sure you can name all kinds of other things that cause anxiety in today's world. Of course people have always worried about such things, but today these anxieties seem to be a way of life, and the people getting rich off this have to be torn, genuinely wanting to help people, but at the same time not wanting to lose their own income!

While most people would agree that there are all kinds of external causes of anxiety, few people today seem to ask whether there is perhaps some internal factor involved in the growth of anxiety in our time, that is, whether people are more susceptible to anxiety today because of what they have become, more than what is happening in the external world. The reason this question is not asked all that often is that in the end it has something to do with what we call religion, the therapy of the soul, something with which psychiatrists can only deal in a superficial way. Most often doctors deal with the symptoms more than the cause, except when the cause really is a deep psychological disorder. But unless we want to say that most people are psychologically sick today, we will need another kind of doctor and another kind of analysis to help us understand the deep-seated causes of anxiety in men and women today.

Certainly no sane approach to religion wants to deny that there can be psychological causes of deep anxiety, nor that religion somehow replaces medicine in treating those cases. But the real question is whether many of the psychological roots are not themselves being caused by something even deeper in man's soul than medicine really cannot treat. That something deeper is really what Paul is talking about in today's second reading from his letter to the Philippians. Paul knew nothing about psychotherapy, but a great deal about the human soul, and therefore a great deal about much of what we call human anxiety, if we leave aside the strictly psychotic episodes of this disease.

It's really strange when we think about it in modern terms that Paul should simply command us not to be anxious, telling us that we should simply dismiss all anxiety from our minds. If we're talking about a strictly psychologically rooted phenomenon of anxiety, such a command makes little sense. After all, people suffering from a deeply psychological cause of anxiety are as little able to control this by their own free will, as say an alcoholic is able to control his drinking simply by willing it. But of course most people are not psychologically ill, in the medical sense at least, and Paul is really not speaking to them, but precisely to his fellow Christians, men and women like us, who while not being psychologically ill, in the technical, medical sense, nonetheless often find ourselves anxious, sometimes even over little things, and sometimes very anxious indeed. Paul is saying to most Christians (given that most people are not psychologically ill), that anxiety is a symptom of a spiritual failure, a lack of faith, a lack of trust, a lack of prayer, a lack of consistency in our Christian life between our faith and our approach to daily life.

And Saint Paul's advice is rather simple. For people suffering from anxiety, he suggests that they are not praying enough, which also indicates that they are not trusting enough in God's Providence. Men become anxious when they look to themselves exclusively, rather than to God, as the primary source of peace and stability in human life. This usually happens because of another problem, which is that we tend to place our material needs above all others, and we also tend to see ourselves as the primary source of our material security in this world. When people think of their spiritual needs, they naturally turn to God, but very often when people think of the material needs, they turn to God only as a last ditch effort, when things seem really impossible. Now it's not particularly surprising that unbelievers would think of themselves and other human beings as the primary source or cause of their material well-being. But it is surprising that Christians should think this way, at least for the most part, and tend to use God simply as a backup when human beings don't come through. Christians, after all, believe in a Provident God, which means that God is concerned not only about our spiritual well-being, but our human well-being, which includes both our material and spiritual well-being. In addition, this belief in divine providence means that we believe that God is not just concerned in some vague sense, but is in fact the primary source of both our material and spiritual well-being, and that we are simply their secondary source. Such a belief, supposing it has become deeply rooted in the human soul, will naturally lead us to prayer as fundamentally the key to our well-being, both material and spiritual. Thus Christians of deep faith not only work hard to secure their well-being, but also and primarily turn to prayer and ask God for their daily bread, with the deep inner assurance that God is working at all times and in mysterious ways to assure our complete well-being.

Such prayer and petition, and the faith they manifest, are thus the keys to dismissing all anxiety from lives. They are at once the sign and fruit of a deep faith that God is our father, and thus is the primary provider of the needs of the human family. The spiritual logic of all this is as follows. Since we know that God has the power to accomplish all things, and since we believe that he is a loving Father who has charged himself with the responsibility for his creation, and above all for our well-being as his children, then we also must trust that God will provide all that we need in this world to become all that He wants us to be in the next. Of course, this may mean that certain of our prayers for material goods will not be answered, at least in the way we may think they should be. Nonetheless, that will not disturb our peace, given that we know that God's fatherhood, God's Providence, and God's love for us always works to our best interests. To believe anything else would mean that we really do not believe in the God of Abraham, who is also the Father of Jesus Christ and through Christ our Father as well.

Finally, St. Paul, in addition to prayer and petition, gives us some further, practical spiritual advice about how to put our minds to rest. He simply says that we should keep our minds directed to what really matters in this life, understood in terms of its final destination. Certainly we need to think about material things, including our material needs, not only because we are part of the material creation, bodily beings, but also because we have a significant role to play, as God's subordinate partners, in the working out of divine providence in this world. However, within this plan of providence, man is not to live for bread alone, to quote Jesus, as if man were simply his body, but above all for the bread that comes from Heaven, every word, the Word, that comes from the mouth of God. In short, man's material well-being is subordinate to his spiritual well-being, and thus at times man's material well-being has to yield to his spiritual well-being. One of those "times," or better, "places," concerns man's own way of thinking. Because our destiny, even in the flesh, is ultimately spiritual in nature, that is, union with God who is Spirit, our thinking has to be primarily directed to, fixed upon that end.

So Paul says that our minds and thoughts should be "wholly directed to all that is true, all that deserves respect, all that is honest, pure, admirable, decent, virtuous, and worthy of all praise." But notice that Paul says "wholly directed," and thus since we must think of material things at times, even these things have to be thought of according to those standards he just mentioned. We can't help but think about material things since we need them in this world, but we should think about them truthfully, honestly, purely, admirably, decently, virtuously, and in such a way as to give praise to God. If we think about material things in this way, and we pray for them in this way, according to these standards, we will never make these things our end in life, and thus will come to know the peace of God in our lives. It's because we think of material things in other ways, in contrary ways to the above, that we make ourselves their sole provider, since God could have nothing to do with their provision in ways that would hurt us. And thus we become anxious, not only because we have made ourselves the sole provider of our material well-being, but because we are seeking these things in ways which are self-destructive and superficial, and effectively our ultimate end.

Following Paul's advice, then, is simply following the command of Jesus: "Seek first the kingdom of God, and all these things will be given to you besides." These things Jesus speaks of are all the good things which God alone knows are good for us. After all, He is a Father, and no good father ever gives his child what the father knows will harm him, even when it may appear good in itself or good to the child. That's our simple but deep faith, and that's the key to a life in which anxiety has no place in our hearts.