Anxiety

It's what I'm feeling right now as I try to write this eNote, and it's the dawning panic you experience in traffic as you sit 20 minutes away from the meeting that begins in 10 minutes.  It is the flutter in the stomach and the buzz in the head-anxiety.

But anxiety isn't just the gnawing in our innards, according to Christian thinker Soren Kierkegaard.  It is something more profound, something basic to the human condition.

Anxiety, Kierkegaard argued, is the fire in our soul that drives our lives.  It isn't just the clock ticking toward a deadline; it is the clock that ticks toward death.  It is the heart of human existence, the sense of mortality that drives us to act, to do something-anything while there's still time.  It is the dis-ease that propels us beyond ourselves.

As such, it can be bad or good.  Anxiety sparks the word spoken in anger and the shot fired in rage, but it is also turns the poet toward the page and the composer to the keyboard.  It drives us.  It drives us to scream at the dog or to woo the beloved, to buy the midlife convertible or build the architectural wonder.  Certainly, anxiety can lead us away from God, Kierkegaard tells us, but it can also lead us to take the leap of faith that is trust in God's grace and love.  Then, putting our faith in God's grace and love, we seek to act in a way that is in tune with the God we trust.

Perhaps then the goal and effect of faith is to find one's anxious energy transformed into actions loving and good.  Or maybe our faith brings us to a stillness of spirit no anxiety can destroy-the peace that passes understanding-that inward life of prayerful communion with God.  For Jesus, I suppose, it was both.  So wondrously did he move and live in the love of God that prayer, purpose, and action blended beautifully into a way of life.  In the end, he could speak of lilies of the field and birds of the air and a life of peace in the grace of God.  In the end, he could even call us to the same.

From anxiety to action to peace-if that is faith, then surely it is a leap and journey worth taking.