Anxiety and Trust

Anxiety stalks me with foreboding about impending trouble or looming crisis.

I feel its icy grip when a worry I’ve had since childhood surfaces: I’ve been left alone. I’m on my own.

I hear its sneering criticisms: You’re not enough and never will be. You can’t do enough. You can’t provide enough.

I sense its looming shadow when my oncologist orders more tests, as he did recently, to be sure “we’re not missing something.”

Love heals anxiety and casts out fear. Trusting is how we welcome love, and it is the soul of hope. Erik Erikson and others have taught us that developing trust is the first developmental task: it’s life’s first invitation and it is of first importance. We ask, before we know we’re asking: “Is my world a dependable and reliable place? Is there enough of what I need? Will there be?  Am I held, loved, and cherished? Is it a good and glad thing that I take up space on the earth?”

Though I believe that my family meant for the answers to those questions to be “yes,” for reasons both clear and unclear to me, I emerged from my early years with a pervasive lack of trust. It’s as if I were born with a “busted truster.” I built thick walls around my heart, shrank my world, shunned adventure, and played it safe. That fortress has been hard to dismantle; in fact, I had to learn that the dismantling was not mine to do: It was and is the work of Love.

My work is trust, and my nearly constant prayer is: “I trust; heal my lack of trust” (Mark 9:24). Trust is in contrast to control. For me, learning to trust is similar to recovering from an addiction which calls for a surrender of the illusion of control. The first five words of the “12 Steps” used in recovery groups are: “We admitted we were powerless.” And, the “Serenity Prayer” (echoing a prayer by Reinhold Niebuhr) says: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” To surrender the illusion of control is also to relinquish the lie of independence. We depend on God and others for help, healing, and hope.

Trust does not yield certainty—confidence, yes, but not certainty. Trust entails risk. As Blaise Pascal famously claimed, it involves a wager. Several years ago, as I was wrestling with the reality of a terminal diagnosis, I was in a darkened church on a Maundy Thursday evening, praying and listening. I reasoned that I will either die into nothingness and, because I won’t be aware of it, all will be well. Or I will die into the arms of God, and all will be well. I wagered on the arms and love of God. Since then, my confidence—not certainty—has grown that my destiny is to fall into the Love from which nothing can separate us.

I also wager trust as I make decisions about how to live. Soren Kierkegaard wrote: “I don’t know if Christianity is true, but I will order my life as if it were, stake my life thereon—then if it proves not to be true, eh bien, I don’t regret my choice, for it is the only matter I am concerned about” (The Diary of Soren Kierkegaard, 125). Love’s clearest name to me is Jesus. I’ve not found anyone or anything more radiant, beautiful, or compelling than Jesus. It is by being astonished by him, following him, and learning from him, he heals my faltering trust.