December 1998 Issue

In the 35th chapter of Isaiah, the Old Testament lesson for today, the imagery is that of a miraculous heaven on earth: "The eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped; then shall the lame man leap like a hart, and the tongue of the dumb sing for joy." Not only so, but even the desert will blossom like a rose: "For waters shall break forth in the wilderness, and streams in the desert; the burning sand shall become a pool, and the thirsty ground, springs of water." And what shall we make of that?

Those images, whether of ultimate destruction or of ultimate promise, are so far, far out that it's all but impossible to see what they can possibly mean for ordinary people struggling along in ordinary lives—people like you and me. They're about as incongruous and inconsequential as the occasional signs along the highway announcing, "Jesus is coming soon" or asking, "Are you ready for eternity?"

But the Isaiah passage with its desert blooming like a rose is at least addressed directly to people with an ordinary, common, everyday problem: "Say to those of a fearful heart, Be strong, fear not." And that's about just where we are, isn't it so?—those of a fearful heart. From the youngster's fear of grades to the old man's fear of death, and all way-stations in between, that's just about where we are much of the time: Anxious about a crackup on the highway, or about illness, or about teenage children and drugs, or unemployment, or getting old—the list is endless. To a greater or less degree, we are all "of a fearful heart."

And that's perfectly natural. Because anxiety is part and parcel of being human. Here we are, set in a dangerous world with nothing much in the way of teeth or claws to define ourselves or to secure food and shelter except for our wits and a remarkable thumb, with no ultimate control over life or death or what will happen to us in the future despite all of our insurance policies and nest eggs and pension plans. We are understandably anxious.

Moreover, just because we are human beings and not animals, we can step outside of ourselves and see ourselves in this dangerous situation and raise anxious questions: What in the world am I doing here? What's it all about? What's going to happen to my children? Or to me as I grow old? And what about death? And all of this is neither good nor bad; it's just the fact that we are creatures in a world where we know we are creatures not really in control of the situation. And so we are anxious.

Sometimes this anxiety gets focussed on some specific threat and then it becomes fear. But fear, as you well know, can be good. Fear of a crackup on the highway makes us cautious and keeps us alive. Fear of disease results in research and the discovery of wonder drugs and the marvels of modern surgery.

Moreover it is fear that often keeps the world from coming apart at the seams and blowing itself to smithereens. Fear of a world-wide nuclear holocaust has kept us from World War III—quite literally the war to end all wars—despite our staggering along on the brink of it most of the time. Fear of another Attica tragedy is pushing us along toward prison reform and calling into question the whole penal system.

Actually, when you come right down to it, there are worse things than fear. As Rollo May puts it, "There is still hope for a tuberculosis patient so long as he has a fever; but in the final stages of the disease, when the body has `given up' as it were, the fever leaves and soon the patient dies. Just so, the only thing which would signify the loss of hope for getting through our present difficulties as individuals and as a nation, would be resigning into apathy, and a failure to feel and face our anxiety constructively."¹ So Bertrand Russell has said, "...those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision."² So there are worse things than fear and anxiety.

But having said so much, the fact remains that we do live in an "age of anxiety" which goes far beyond any positive things which can be said for it. Rather, it gnaws at our guts and it's hard to find any specific cause for it. Like boredom, it's just there.³

Rollo May likens it to crossing a street or highway. You "see a car speeding toward you, your heart beats faster, you focus your eyes on the distance between the car and you...and you hurry across. You felt fear, and it energized you to rush to safety. But if, when you start to hurry across the road, you are surprised by cars coming down the far lane from the opposite direction, you suddenly are caught in the middle of the road not knowing which way to turn...you feel panicky and your vision may suddenly be blurred...In fear we know what threatens us...In anxiety, however, we are threatened without knowing what steps to take to meet the danger. Anxiety is the feeling of being "caught," "overwhelmed."⁴

Those to whom this Isaiah passage with the desert blooming like a rose was first addressed, to "those of a fearful heart," were "caught," "overwhelmed." There seemed to be no way out. Maybe the establishment had failed them years ago when Babylon had carried them off into exile, but it didn't help much now to assess the blame. They were apparently powerless to do anything about their situation. They were simply "caught" in a situation which offered no hope, no future.

And that's our situation, too, in so many ways, isn't it? Retired pensioners or the unemployed, all caught in an economic squeeze that involves inflation, and inflation, we are told, is involved in the international monetary tangle and we are "overwhelmed," "caught" in a complex of factors so far beyond our control, our destiny might as well be written in the old and implacable stars.

The Blacks, of course, have known what it is to be caught in a system of which you and I are a part, that stretches from lack of equal opportunity for jobs or education to a prison system where more often than not they are in black prisons run by whites. "Caught."

Or take any of our other big problems—the population explosion, the world situation of war and peace, the problem of crime and violence on the streets—they're all the same in that they are big, complex and terrifying. And you and I—ordinary peole living our ordinary lives—feel caught, overwhelmed, powerless to do anything about it. And anxiety feeds on the sense of powerlessness.

Occasionally, of course, we are able to joke about it. A New Yorker cartoon pictured a middle-aged man and his wife watching television. And she says, "What's so funny about Ed Sullivan getting cancelled? We're pretty close to getting canceled ourselves!"⁵

Maybe it's a good thing we can laugh at it occasionally. But it's really no joking matter, is it? Because it has deep religious implications. So one man writes, "A generation ago, it was popular in some circles to explain religion away as due to fear. Even today the theory is not entirely dead, because it has the easy kind of simplicity that spares one the inconvenience of further thinking. But for most discerning people...it has become ludicrous to hold that contemporary religious belief springs mainly from fear...The exact reverse is more nearly true. (Now listen!) Our age, having dispensed almost entirely with fear of God, now finds itself paralyzed with dread when it contemplates man and his powers; and what makes this dread so acute is precisely the loss of faith—the sense that modern civilization has gone empty at the core."⁶

So as we return to those very strange images in Isaiah, that very strange country where God is actually Lord, the first strange fact we have to face in that strange country is that there is an end.⁷ There are boundaries, limits. And this comes hard for Americans for whom there has always been an open frontier, an "out there" to which we could flee to escape the pressures and problems. That's no longer so. To be sure, people who flee the hopeless mess in the cities to the suburbs quickly find out that many suburbs quickly succumb to the rot of cities. We can embrace a neo-isolationism with respect to the problems of the third world "out there," but then we are thrown back upon the problems here at home. America is waking up to the fact that there are limits and boundaries. There is no place to flee to. And this may open us to these strange visions of the end.

But on the other hand, if God sets an end to history, your personal history and mine as well as the history of the country and of the world, it is his history, and history has not been torn nor will it be dropped from his hands. The vision of the desert blossoming like a rose is his will for us and for our world. And, perhaps the butterflies in our stomachs begin to subside a little.

That does not mean that he will detour around us and fix up our problems and our world without disturbing us. He won't. He still calls for obedient faith, and that means that his problems are our problems. And he expects us to work them out—not alone—but with him. It's the willingness to accept the strange fact that God is God and that if we want security in this world, it's going to be on his terms not ours. That doesn't mean that all we worry about has no value. It does. We can obviously be anxious about what's going to happen to us. But it's a matter of priorities.

For if our anxieties are ultimately centered about ourselves, about our peace of mind, God doesn't have very much to offer. "He that would save his life will lose it." In a sense, God wants us to share his anxieties for us and for our world.

And, to be frank, I can't see any other valid way to handle our own anxieties.

Jesus had some anxieties about himself, too, about what was going to happen to him. He knows what it's like to be me in this regard also. But those anxieties were caught up in his anxiety, his concern, for others. He wept over Jerusalem. He prayed for his disciples. In the agony in the garden the sweat like great drops of blood fell to the ground as he faced responsibility for the vast evil in the world.

Is that hopelessly beyond us? Actually not. There are ordinary people, "caught" in this same frightening world, who do not escape anxiety for themselves, heaven knows, but who handle it by giving themselves to the needs of others. Whether it's young people in the Peace Corps, or Vista, or engaging in political action to effect change in the Pentagon or the Ghettoes. And they're not all young, either. They give evidence, old and young, that this age of anxiety need not end simply in wringing our hands, griping, or staring bleakly out the window or at the boob tube.

Because the answer to anxiety, the nameless dread variety, is not courage but love! For perfect love casts out fear. It's the love of God for you, for me, translated into love for the neighbor in need. Because we know that the whole wide world is in his hands. That's what these very strange visions of the end of history have to say to us ordinary people living ordinary lives. God is all in all. He has the last word, not the terrifying problems and perplexities which cause us to be fearful and anxious. So—"Say to them of a fearful heart, Be strong. Fear not..."

Edmund Steimle

The Protestant Hour—Lutheran Series

1. Rollo May, Man's Search for Himself (New York: W. W. Norton, 1953), p. 44.

2. Ibid., p. 34.

3. Helmut Thielicke, The Silence of God (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1965), p. 4.

4. Op. cit. pp. 38-39.

5. The New Yorker, September 18, 1971.

6. David E. Roberts, The Grandeur and Misery of Man (New York: Oxford Univerity Press, 1955), p. 118.

7. Joseph Sittler, The Ecology of Faith (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press, 1961), pp. 23-25.