Anxiety
June 30, 2017
Study of a Sparrow, Giovanni Di Udine
ANXIETY is not a virtue. Worry is not wholesome. Anxiety and worry are crushers of souls.
Sometimes people ask, “What can I do? What can I do about the state of the world?”
Here’s what you can do. Banish anxiety from your life. You don’t need a doctor to do it. You don’t need counseling. You don’t need a prescription. You need a spirit of trusting, childlike surrender to God’s will. You need to give up the stubborn pretension that you are in charge.
To focus soberly on the tasks before us is necessary. But the picking at scabs, the roaming in the fog, the confinement in the cage of worry is positively harmful.
Are you worried about the state of the world?
Are you worried about poverty or illness?
Are you worried about finding a spouse?
Are you worried that you will be stuck in a job you hate forever?
Are you worried about the future of your children?
Are you worried about old age and death?
Anxiety is excessive focus on the past or future, which become fields of speculation and imagination. Meanwhile the present is before us. We have much work to do, we have many steps to take.
The anxiety-afflicted need to spend some time meditating upon God’s love. Pray for the grace to understand it.
Be not therefore solicitous for tomorrow; for the morrow will be solicitous for itself. Sufficient for the day is the evil thereof.
Think of the sparrow. He is frail, humble and small. And yet he survives this chaotic world.
Behold the birds of the air, for they neither sow, nor do they reap, nor gather into barns: and your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are not you of much more value than they? And which of you by taking thought, can add to his stature by one cubit? And for raiment why are you solicitous? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they labour not, neither do they spin. But I say to you, that not even Solomon in all his glory was arrayed as one of these. And if the grass of the field, which is today, and tomorrow is cast into the oven, God doth so clothe: how much more you, O ye of little faith? [Matt: 6:26-30]
Worry and anxiety are spiritual diseases. Anxiety is alienation from truth and beauty. It’s downright rude. As if He didn’t know what was best.
Cure thyself.
Cure thyself, O ye of little faith.
You will be no help to anyone if you allow yourself to suffer from these inner thorns.
These things I have spoken unto you, that in me you might have peace. In the world you shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world. — John 16:33
