There’s a phenomenon I have long been familiar with known as
the anxiety closet. In it we keep all
our fears, concerns, worries, and anxieties, real and imagined. The size of the
closet varies from person to person and I think it changes during life
depending on one’s inclination and how much regular spiritual housekeeping one
does. Mine seems to be shrinking a bit
as I get older, having realized (actually, having had it pointed out to me by
others) how much of my anxiety is over things that never happen. Even so, it’s still a pretty good walk-in
size, the shelves, unlike those of my real closet, neatly arranged so that I
can access any particular anxiety whenever the time is right.
Most of the time, I manage to keep the door locked and the
fears hidden away, except in the small hours of the morning. Vigils comes just when my anxiety closet,
should I awake by accident, pops open and randomly spills its contents onto the
floor of my heart. I think that’s one
reason why Vigil—once I haul myself out of bed—may be my favorite office of the
day.
For the last few days, I have been preternaturally calm
about my husband’s impending surgery, very much unlike me, who is never one to
let the opportunity for a good panic go under-utilized. It’s not that I haven’t been concerned,
afraid, even, of what the surgeons will find and what it will mean. I know that my life has already changed just
by the fact of the surgery; I am simply waiting to find out more. But the familiar
black void in the pit of my stomach that is the usual manifestation of my fears
has been—blessedly—absent.
I was beginning to wonder whether I just wasn’t feeling
anything at all until I realized that this is what peace must be like: a conscious
awareness of the (possible) impending
awfulness without being possessed by it.
It reminded me of my childhood fears of storms. Thunder and lightning, particularly without
rain, the terrible dry storms that can afflict North Florida, terrified
me. No amount of soothing words from my
parents could dissuade me that something dreadful was going to happen when all
those pyrotechnics and all that noise was around. The only thing that helped was to climb into
my daddy’s lap and put my head against his chest and let him hold me. I was still afraid, but I wasn’t scared any
more.
I think that’s what Vigil does for me. In the middle of the night, when my anxiety
closet opens up, those prayers pull me into my Father’s lap and let me rest my
head against His chest. Psalm 27: The
Lord is my light and my salvation, in whom should I fear?
That’s no psalm for wimps or for those who think that the
world of faith is a guaranteed paradise in the here and now. The Psalmist recognizes that this world can
be a very ugly place indeed, but he ends on one of the most hopeful notes in
the Bible: I believe that I shall see the
goodness of the Lord in the land of the living. In other words, God and His power and love manifest
in the here and now, in spite of how things seem.
We were dismissed with the vine and branches discourse. Scientist that I am, I could not help wandering
off into a very different and quite
material field. The point of the
scripture is, at least in part, that without Christ we can do nothing (and
indeed, the homily of St. Augustine that was read drove that point home very
well). Without the vine and without the
roots, the branches—that would be us—die.
It crossed my mind that that image goes much farther than
simply defining our relationship with Christ.
Vines, after all, are planted in the dirt, not in the air. Vines are connected to the earth, to
creation, in the most intimate of ways.
And the roots of the vine take some of the most unpleasant bits of
creation—the decaying detritus of lost life—and by passing it through the roots,
send out nourishment to the branches.
Without the soil, without the grit, without the….well, the manure, the
branches will not receive life from the vine.
It’s just the way the world has been set up, hydroponics not
withstanding.
That goodness of the
Lord in the land of the living the psalmist sings of? It’s at least in part the transformation of
our selves by the things that happen to us, not in a reactive, dysfunctional
way, but into life for ourselves and for each other because of our connectedness
to Christ.
Bad things to happen to good people, but in Christ, even the
worst of times can bring great good.
That’s the message of the cross.
Christ’s first words to His Apostles after the resurrection were not Do not be afraid but Peace be with you. Peace even in the face of what is a legitimate
cause of great concern, like being persecuted by the Jews or the Romans or the
uncertainty of what the surgeons will find when they operate on the love of my
life. Without Him we can do nothing
and with Him, nothing can really, when all is settled, undo us.
At the risk of mixing metaphors in the worst possible way and with apologies to Mrs. Chapman who tried to teach me English,
it turns out my anxiety closet is not so much filled with fears to destroy me
as plant food to feed me as long as I set my roots deep into them and trust the
Christ the Vine to turn them from something noxious to something fruitful.
Fears, like dirt, are part of life, part of the way creation just is.
We cannot avoid those forces, natural and man-made-that
surround us and threaten us, any more than the psalmist or the Apostles could. Nor should we wish to, for to do so is to
fail to live life in this world. We
cannot change the order of creation, but we can let creation, through Christ, change
us. Even in the middle of the night.
No comments:
Post a Comment