I’m reading some Reinhold Niebuhr right now and ran across some references to Soren Kierkegaard’s views on Anxiety which blew me away. Kierkegaard famously wrote, ““Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom.” It’s a stunning statement.
Kierkegaard believed anxiety to be the existential dread every human being feels when face to face with their own finitude, especially in regard to their own moral inadequacy. Anxiety is innate for Kierkegaard, a primordial reality of personhood preceding human sinfulness and even human creativity. Anxiety is actually part of the force which elicits sinful behavior in the human person. What Niebuhr did with that is worked it into a fundamental paradox of what it means to be a person. That humans remain ultimately free as moral agents despite the fact that we experience an innate anxiety which will someday bear the fruit of sin is a fundamental paradox of human personhood. We are still free moral agents, but sin is inevitable – at least in part – because we are aware of our own finite nature and ability.
So I’m just thinking about this pastorally – because anxiety is a big word. I have several friends who are struggling with it right now. Anxiety has them by the scruff of the neck and they cannot escape the sensation that they do not choose their own path, they can barely raise their heads. I’m brokenhearted at the pain anxiety causes, and yet I’m reminded that anxiety is common to every human being who has ever attempted to face their own finitude – who has had the courage to come to terms with the fact that we will experience pain, suffering, and evil in this life – and there is absolutely nothing we can do about it. Anxiety is a common struggle for those who were hurt when they were children, who have struggled through addiction, who have lost people who meant the world to them, or who have faced the darkness in one way or another.
So today I’m praying for the courage and imagination to find hopeful things to say when faced with anxiety. To be a hopeful person in the face of my own anxiety and that of my friends would be a terribly godly way to live.
I’m reminded that as Christians, we don’t hope that things will get better – we hope in Jesus, the one in whom things have already been fully reconciled to God. That we could be so captivated is the joy of the Christian faith. I have to believe it is possible that we can somehow be so caught up in the daily rhythm and motion of hoping in Jesus that we begin to see the kingdom is coming, that this body is mortal but this body is not the source of my hope, that hope is eternal and it is hope which truly has me by the scruff of the neck.
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