The Worries of the Day

Scripture: Matthew 6:25-34

We worry.

If we peruse the writings of many of history's great thinkers we find that they tell us not to do so. Epictetus, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, the Buddha, Santideva, Confucius, Rumi--all say don't worry. Even the Vikings--a crew not fabled for their nuanced sensitivities--declared in an Old Norse poem: "Foolish is he who frets at night / And lies awake to worry."

We hear the same message in the words of more contemporary moral teachers, like Gandhi and the Dalai Lama: Don't. Worry.

And we get it. At a purely rational level we understand that worry is unproductive. As sages have observed for a few thousand years, if a problem is fixable then there is no need to worry; if a problem is not fixable then there is no point in worrying. The logic of this argument is unassailable.

Some of us manage to live with these realities in mind. My father was like that. He had a rough life: raised in poverty; sent off to fight on two continents in World War II; a man who met with success and then lost everything; convicted of a crime and imprisoned; bedeviled by ulcers and arthritis and heart problems; death an imminent and spectral presence throughout most of his later years. But every night he slept like a baby.

This drove my mother nuts. She struggled mightily with insomnia, prodded awake by a seemingly endless inventory of anxieties. One morning I heard her say to my father, almost in anger, certainly in resentment: "How is it that every night you fall asleep so easily and rest so peacefully?" He looked up from his breakfast and said: "Well, when I start to worry I ask myself: 'Am I going to do anything about that right now, tonight?' The answer is always 'no.' And then I doze off." With that, he shrugged and returned to his corn flakes.

As I say: the logical of it is unassailable. 

But many of us worry anyway.

The problem is that many of us do not find it as easy to "cease and desist" from worrying as the advice implies we should. "Don't worry" means "stop doing that thing," the sort of direct and simple command we might give to a toddler who is building a tower from his mashed potatoes at dinner. For many of us the directive meets with the same success as the injunction issued toward the child: little or none.

The advice seems inadequate and incomplete. It oversimplifies the problem. For many of us, anxiety is not so easily extinguished.

So we may bristle a bit when we come to the end of Chapter 6 of Matthew's gospel and find these words: "Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life ... [C]an any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life?"

We say to ourselves: "And here it is again, some profoundly wise voice telling me not to worry. Right. I'm on that."

We might find a little more help at the very end of the chapter, where Jesus declares: "So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today's trouble is sufficient for today." Corrie ten Boom may have been getting at the same idea when she said: "Worry does not empty tomorrow of its sorrow, it empties today of its strength."

I'll confess to a deep personal fondness for this verse. I'm particularly keen on the poetry of the King James version of it: "Take therefore no thought for the morrow; for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof." Sufficient, indeed; sometimes more than sufficient; sometimes a day can seriously overachieve in the evil department.

Still, this advice, too, may feel inadequate and incomplete. We may think that saying "don't spend today worrying about tomorrow" doesn't solve the problem. It just temporally relocates it.

Perhaps, from a mental health perspective, this has something to recommend it. It is, after all, the sort of thinking that helped my father go to sleep every night: "Well, if I'm not going to do anything about it now, then why worry about it now?"

But I remain concerned. It feels to me like a bit of a shell game, as though we're saying to ourselves: "Hey, if I keep moving the anxiety around then I'll lose track of where it is." And, while postponement is sometimes wise and useful, I am unpersuaded that it brings to the challenge the sort of moral force we need if we want to do combat with so robust an opponent as worry.

That's why I believe that the key passage toward the end of the sixth chapter of Matthew is this: "But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness." If you do that, the gospel says, then all the things that are worrying you will be addressed.

The genius of this passage is that it does not tell us to stop the energy flow that drives our anxiety. Rather, it tells us to direct that energy toward something else. I'm sure you can see why this distinction makes a huge difference. If you can't, then imagine standing at the bottom of a rushing river; now ask yourself whether you have a better chance of stopping it altogether or of making it go in a new direction.

Also, I think the word "first" is doing some real work here. Before you get about the business of worrying, the passage says, send your energy in this different direction. Before you feed your anxieties, the passage says, feed your sense of the sacred. What is the easiest way to stop worrying? Don't start. What is the easiest way to keep from starting? By occupying your whole spirit with something else. What activity could possibly require the commitment of all your energy? The work of God. The work of God into which each of us is called. The work of faith and hope and love.

It is perhaps in the same spirit that Confucius declared that "the man of benevolence never worries." Why would this be true? Because benevolence, properly done, wholly occupies us; it takes us out of ourselves; it focuses us on something else, on somewhere else, on someone else. So occupied, we have little time or opportunity to indulge in pointless worry.

I do not mean--and I think this passage does not mean--to substitute one piece of overly simplistic advice for another. Trying to stay ahead of our worries requires vigilance; repurposing their energy if they show up anyway demands focus and discipline; we will struggle to do these things; we will not always succeed. But we may find that these strategies make a life of diminished worry possible where others fail us.

After all, there is One through whom everything is possible. And, in the holy endeavor described in this verse, He is before us, and behind us, and beside us.

He whispers into our ears: "Do this."

He does not even bother to add: "And do not worry."

Amen.