Worry and Wonder

by Kayla McClurg

I’m not sure when the full and complete responsibility for the world’s welfare transferred from God to me – it happened so gradually. I just thought my growing heaviness of spirit was the natural progress of things – that I, like any caring and conscientious adult, had to take on more and more responsibility for myself and others and become more and more helpful to God. You know, God’s hands and feet in the world. I don’t recall signing on for anything more than this, but awhile back I began to notice a creeping anxiety winding its way through my life. Somewhere, somehow, I seemed to have moved from being God’s increasingly responsible helper to being, well, God.

These things have a way of sneaking up on you. And before you know it, you’re in charge of everything.

When I was about 7 or 8 years old, my mom was washing and curling my hair on a Saturday night, a common ritual before Sunday morning church. Without an identifiable reason, I felt a wave of something like sadness wash over me, and I sighed the sigh of a weary traveler. When she asked me what was wrong, I said I didn’t know, that I just felt sad. She recounted all the fun things that had happened that day, which I agreed were not reasons for sadness, but I knew, without being able to understand it, that a wedge had come between me and my former life. I had begun to make transactions with worry.

I’ve heard that worrying means a person is a functional atheist. I’d prefer to think that worrying just means a person is human … and terribly afraid of that ragged, vulnerable state. Johannes Metz, the German theologian and author of the powerful little booklet Poverty of Spirit, writes about our “innate poverty as human beings.” He points out that Jesus himself lived in continual dependence on Someone else, so poor that he “had to go begging for his very personality from the transcendent utterance of the Father.”

Sometimes this awareness of my innate poverty, and the frailty of us all, rakes through my gut like fingers on bare wood and I cry out at the physical pain of our having divorced ourselves from Love.

When I lived in New York, I helped drive children from inner-city neighborhoods to visit their mothers in one of the state prisons that had a beautiful, supportive Children’s Center on site. It was a life-giving place within a harsh environment, and yet it was painful to see the children’s eyes when they took in the electrified barbed wire twining around the yard and the armed guards and to hear them yell out, with the joy of at last being home, “Mommy’s house!” Anxiety for their future, for our future, grips me in its clammy paws. If I’m God, I’m doing a mighty sorry job of it!

Does this mean that God is doing a sorry job of it, too? I mean, knowing us so well, was it wise, really, to entrust so much hope in the ongoing reconciliation of the world to us? Does God really believe that in the hands of the small and weak, small and weak things can be healed? Are we made of the right stuff to be a helpful partner to Jesus in this holy work?

Johannes Metz continues: “In the final analysis man has one of two choices: to obediently accept his innate poverty or to become the slave of anxiety.”

Anxiety imprisons me in the trap of taking myself too seriously, seeing only through the lens of my own beggarly existence. Worry blocks me from noticing God’s special fondness for mystery and the weaving of wonder in and through the pain, in slow languid strokes. They threaten to isolate me from my only hope of healing – which is to let in close the very parts of us, the most fragile and hurting parts, that I most fear.

Sometimes when I pray I picture myself alongside the ocean or under a yawning bright night sky, and my sense of separate self eases. I “expand” into my littleness, “diminish” into my wholeness and, for a few moments at least, lay down my need to be God. Wonder replaces worry. For a time, I relax into who I am, in my innate poverty, and I can sense some relief from anxiety’s scraping. I might even open the door, and let her in, and risk hearing what she has to say. In these moments my hopeless grasping eases, and I know that, yes, I may have been flung into some wilderness places … I may be carrying more than my weary self can comfortably bear … and yet I also can rest in the wonder of just being me, one of God’s little specks of hope.

Kayla McClurg is on the pastoral and administrative staff of The Church of the Saviour of Washington DC and facilitates inward/outward, an ongoing online conversation sponsored by Church of the Saviour. (www.inwardoutward.org).