Anxiety and fear have the same . . . root [in our state of being], but they are not the same in actuality. This is common knowledge, but it has been emphasized and overemphasized to such a degree that a reaction against it may occur and wipe out not only the exaggerations but also the truth of the distinction. Fear, as opposed to anxiety has a definite object . . . , which can be faced, analyzed, attacked, endured. One can act upon it, and in acting upon it participate in it – even if in the form of struggle. In this way one can take it into one's self-affirmation. Courage can meet every object of fear, because it is an object and makes participation possible. Courage can take the fear produced by a definite object into itself, because this object, however frightening it may be, has a side with which it participates in us and we in it. One could say that as long as there is an object of fear love in the sense of participation can conquer fear.

But this is not so with anxiety, because anxiety has no object, or rather, in a paradoxical phrase, its object is the negation of every object. Therefore participation, struggle, and love with respect to it are impossible. [A person] who is in anxiety is, insofar as it is mere anxiety, delivered to it without help.

Reading 2: Matthew 6:34

Therefore, do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Let the day's own trouble be sufficient for the day.

Sermon: Things That Go Bump in the Night

When I was a small boy growing up in England, we lived in a house that was the converted servant's quarters and stables of an old Victorian mansion. The house was simply huge: seven bedrooms, long hallways, and 18 foot ceilings in the livingroom. Of course this was marvelous as a young child because there was plenty of room in which to run around.

But the very large upstairs was a space my family hardly ever used, as we had ample room on the first floor alone. Occasionally, my brothers and I would play in the four upstairs bedrooms . . . but there was something vaguely spooky about that large, empty space. I remember being alone in the upstairs play room one day while my mother was working in the second floor laundry room next door. And I can still remember playing along happily and suddenly realizing that my mother had gone downstairs . . . then getting up and racing downstairs to play where it was safe. There was something about that upstairs space which was deeply unsettling for me.

I would never go upstairs at night; maybe with my brothers . . . and a flashlight . . . and a bat . . . and the dog . . . briefly.

It is from that same period of my childhood in England that I recall the old Cornish prayer:

"From ghoulies and ghosties

and long-leggity beasties

and things that go bump in the night,

good Lord, deliver us."

Things that go bump in the night. What might they be?

I suspect that, in many ways, we are much closer to our childhoods than we realize. I am often reminded of that in a variety of ways, but none more clearly than through the comic strips I enjoy. A couple of my favorite comic strips have brought childhood it into stark relief for me through the years. The first is a strip that no longer runs called Bloom County – how many of you remember that? How many of you remember Binkley's "closet of anxieties?" How many of you have "closets of anxieties?" I think a lot of us do as adults.

The other cartoon that I'm very fond of is Calvin and Hobbes. Those of you who are familiar with this strip know that Calvin has a monster under the bed.

I share this with you because I see in the contrasting features of these two strips a clear illustration of the point that Paul Tillich made in the reading. Tillich is talking about the clear difference between anxiety and fear. You see Calvin has a monster to be afraid of . . . something definite with which he can struggle. But Binkley just has a whole closet of anxieties on which he tries to keep the door closed. I think that, from time to time, there is a little bit of Binkley in each of us as the adult anxieties of modern life erupt from the containing closets we construct. So I want to talk about both these responses this morning. How do we cope with the worries of life that creep into our minds and steal our peace? And could it be that fear is truly our friend?

I think Tillich made very clear that anxiety and fear are not the same thing though one is born of another. Specific fears frequently arise from a general anxiety. Yet fear is something we can objectify, that we can manage, that we can confront (however imperfectly) with courage. But a general sense of anxiety (without any definite focus) can be debilitating . . . can be paralyzing.

From when comes this anxiety? Well let me suggest that, generally speaking, our anxiety is caused by two things: a subconscious connection with the past and an imaginative connection to the future.

I believe that we are the some total of all our past experiences: good and bad. Past pain, past trauma, and past loss, however fully processed, never truly go away, but rather are brought into the present through our subconscious. Very often, incidents in the present serve as "triggers" which activate deep anxieties within us which are rooted in painful past experience. In this way, our past can produce a very anxious response to the present.

The other principal source of anxiety is our own imagination. Given a little stimulus, we can spend a lot of time thinking about what might happen. How many of you have ever gotten a troubling phone call late in the evening. Perhaps you went to bed, tried to sleep, couldn't. As you lay there sleepless, thinking about the news you received and imagining possible ramifications, vast chasms of catastrophe opened up for you and swallowed you right up. Sound familiar? It's not really the news itself that makes us anxious, it's what our minds do with it. It's the panorama of possibilities that our mind paints for us, which then takes on a life of its own.

Now there are ample genuine opportunities, causes for anxieties in our lives: our work (whether its our boss, our subordinate, or our coworkers), it can be our marriage or our children (children at home, children leaving home, children coming home). It can be our parents aging, and their general health. It can be our own aging and our own health; troubling changes at church; general developments in the larger community – the list goes on and on. And each of these things, because we care about them, has the power to create anxiety in our lives. And when a few of these relationships begin to cause anxiety simultaneously, the general state of anxiety we feel about our lives can be overwhelming.

I know a colleague, who, a couple of years ago was having some difficulty in the church. He was also having some financial problems and had embarked on a new and uncertain personal relationship. Strangely enough, he found it increasingly difficult to be a passenger in a car. Not only was he anxious and uncomfortable, but sometimes he became physically ill. To his credit, he was able to reflect on this phenomena and understand it as a response to the profound sense of vulnerability that he was feeling in his personal and professional life. So many aspects of his life seemed completely out of control that he was feeling overwhelmed. Rather than being able to tackle those as individual fears, the general state of anxiety created another fear completely unrelated to them.

Psychiatrist Gerald May, in his book Will & Spirit, says that the sources of our fear in life have four root causes: the feeling of vulnerability, the feeling of being out of control, and our very real fears of abandonment and loss of self. When anxieties pop up in our lives that surface these fears, we become deeply unsettled. Depending upon the individual, these fears can be rooted in the past, or created by an imaginative projection into the future.

Paul Tillich says there is an even more profound theological issue present here. Tillich asserts that, at a very deep level, there is an existential anxiety that we all feel, because buried in our subconscious is the awareness that we are fragile human beings; that our lives are tenuous; that, in the grand scheme of the universe, we are finite and have little power. Tillich would say that the very real fears that Gerald May observed: feelings of vulnerability, feeling of being out of control, and our very real fears of abandonment and loss of self, are simmering beneath the surface of our consciousness all the time. And if we spend time dwelling on this existential anxiety, it can shake our world, it can lead us to despair. That sense of anxiety can be paralyzing and utterly demoralizing.

So how, then, do we take all the anxieties of life, the small but real anxieties of everyday life, and the large existential anxieties, and turn those into something we can confront. How do we turn the closet of anxiety into a monster that we can face with courage and overcome. As Tillich, says, how can we find the courage to be, and to live fully, acknowledging the limitations of who we are and the reality of the world in which we live?

I would say two things. First of all: we need to be alert to the future, but alive in the present. For me, that is the essence of the passage from Matthew: "Do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Let the day's own trouble be sufficient for the day." For Christian scripture this is strikingly Buddhist in texture and substance, but that's another sermon. The more that we can be fully present in this day, and confront the challenges of this day, the more likely we are to discover that we are much better equipped to handle these challenges than we give ourselves credit for being. We are stronger...emotionally, mentally, and spiritually... than we imagine we are. We are able to bear greater burdens than we ever believed. But it's when we look out into the future and imagine this vast panorama of anxieties that we doubt ourselves, and we don't think there's any way we can stand up to it. Alert to the future but alive in the present. The challenge for us is to let the future be itself and to be ourselves in the present. And as those anxieties materialize in our everyday, they can be turned into objective fears, which we can then face with courage, face with love.

Secondly, in theological terms, the challenge is to make peace with our fragility as human beings. This is the struggle that Tillich addresses. How do we find peace in the recognition of our finite lives and our finite power in this life?

It never ceases to amaze me how life provides us, in a very timely fashion, with the lessons we most need. I was at church earlier this week, pressing to wrap up some projects in preparation for my trip here to New Jersey. I had finished one meeting, had four more scheduled, and two different contractors had crews finishing projects in the church that day. As I was descending the stairs from the sanctuary to the social hall, and thinking about three different things at once, I missed the final step, slipped, and sprained my ankle.

I remember that, as I heard my ankle pop, my imagination took off . . . I thought, "My ankle is broken and I'll need a cast, maybe pins. Or else a ligament is torn, and I'll need surgery . . . certainly physical therapy. This injury could be with me for months." In retrospect I realize that, 60 seconds after the accident and standing at the bottom of the stairs, my mind was already six months in the future and imagining the worst possible scenario.

Panicked and in pain, I managed to hobble up to my office and immediately called me wife, Terasa. I poured out my story in a rush and then heard myself say something that really surprised. I said to Terasa, "I'm probably alright; I think I'm just frightened." At that moment I was able to gather up all the imagination induced anxieties and turn them into a named fear in the present. And from that point forward Terasa was able to help me calm my fear and take some definite steps, right then and there, to address my immediate situation.

Now I'll tell you . . . this is memorable in part because there are many times when lesser situations have caused me greater anxiety and I have not handled them well. Sometimes the wave of anxiety has swept me up and carried me away, until I found myself alone and adrift in a sea of anxiety.

How we respond to our human condition reveals a great deal about our self- understanding. I believe that how we are in relation to life is ultimately more important than who we are and what we accomplish. Our human task is not to fight against our limitations and our mortality, but rather to embrace them as what makes us fully human and to live the fullest, most worthy lives possible in light of them.

I had a wonderful conversation the other day with a woman who is a member of one of our Connecticut congregations. We were talking about this morning's sermon. She said, "Help me to understand what you mean by anxieties.

I said, "Think about it this way: are you are mother?"

She said, "Yes."

I said, "What's it like to have your child leave home after all those years and to go off someplace beyond your sphere of protection? That's a source of anxiety. It's one thing to feel vulnerable ourselves, but it's another to realize that we are powerless to truly secure that which we treasure most."

She said, "Okay, I can understand that." But then she said, "You know I'm not afraid for my daughter. I've lost a sister, I've lost two brothers-in-law in terrible accidents, but I still think life is good."

I asked her to say more about that, and what she said was that basically she sees life as benevolent, and not malevolent. That whatever life is, is what it is. She doesn't have to be fearful, living in a state of anxiety wondering what will happen to her. That resonated with me. Because I believe that ultimately it's a matter of how we understand ourselves in relation to eternity, in relation to the "ground of all being," as Tillich would say. The challenge is to embrace the appropriateness of our own existence, and understand ourselves as belonging in the universe and eternity.

The challenge is to understand our fate, not as annihilation, but participation . . . not as disintegration, but assimilation. I believe that the essence of who we are is not really lost. All the matter that stands before you this morning will turn to dust, but the dust will stay in a different form. The fingerprints of our existence remain in the genes and ideas we leave behind, the lives we touch, the culture we shape, the things we preserve, the values we serve. And ultimately, we and all we see are manifestations of the "ground of all being," to which we truly belong. The challenge for us is to find the courage to face each day, and to use an acceptance and awareness of our own fragility to create value in our lives, to help us to embrace each other with value because we understand how precious this moment is and how deeply connected we are.

So ghoulies and ghosties and long-leggity-beasties, these are things we can name, fear and face with courage. Face with love. The things that go bump in the night could be anything, could be anywhere, could be terrifying. Let us be alert to the future, but alive in the present. Let us name our fears and name our strengths, then join the two in this day. May we live with courage, value who we are, value what we have, and live in faith this day and everyday.

© Rev. Dr. Justin Osterman