Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. --Philippians 4:6 NRSV
Acquaintances of mine from seminary days, Jason and Dena Hobbs, have recently released a book, When Anxiety Strikes: Help and Hope for Managing Your Storm. (It’s a good year for this book!) Jason is a mental health counselor and Dena is a minister who suffers from anxiety. They share their experiences in the book and offer eight weeks of daily exercises and reflections on scripture to help people with anxiety. Each exercise contains moments for stretching, breathing as well as engaging the mind. What interested me most was their emphasis upon anxiety as a mind-body-spirit experience.
When I talked with Dena and Jason about the book, they explained how our “lower brain” located in the back of our heads, the part of the brain necessary for survival which generates the “fight or flight” instinct, can get stuck. We remain locked in this mode of being and our bodies continue to respond accordingly, everything from a raised pulse to secretion of adrenaline. Even when our circumstances stop being a threat, our brains may remain active as if the threat remains. In order to re-engage our frontal cortex, the reasoning part of our brain located in the front of our heads, we sometimes need ways to un-stick our brains. Exercise, stretching, deep breathing and similar activities enable our brains to move from high alert back to something resembling a more realistic picture of our reality.
We carry our stress and anxiety in our bodies. They affect our posture, our mobility and even our health. When a masseuse, or yoga instructor speaks of us carrying stress and worry in our back, especially our lower backs, they acknowledge this truth. When we are anxious, even sleep is not an escape, which is why sometimes one can wake up exhausted after a night of fitful sleep. Anxiety affects our whole person including the spiritual parts of who we are.
Millennia before humanity had the technology to scan the brain, practitioners of various religious traditions knew the truth of the mind-body connection. Prayer, meditation and even worship involved more than passively receiving information. Along with the benefits of science and reason, the Enlightenment and its emphasis upon the individual’s mind and intellectual ideas neglected the connection between our bodies, minds and souls. Movement, singing, kneeling, breathing and even dancing have been a part of worship for as long as humanity has existed, because our physical and spiritual selves are intertwined.
When Dena shared her experience of dealing with anxiety as a mental health issue, she also shared her pain of being told by well-meaning Christians who quoted the Apostle Paul from the fourth chapter of Philippians. He exhorts his readers, “Do not be anxious about anything. . . “ Dena asked incredulously, “Did they think I hadn’t already been praying hard or asking God for help? Let me assure you I prayed with all my might.” Her experience is a reminder of the harm Christians cause when they dismiss others’ pain with simplistic solutions to complex problems. Simply being present with someone hurting helps far more than trying to fix them.
A careful reader of Paul will notice that he doesn’t shy away from describing his pain. Indeed, his letter to the Philippian church is one of his so called “prison letters” because Paul wrote them in chains possibly awaiting execution. He was no stranger to stress and anxiety and didn’t make his admonition to not worry from a place of ease. As Frederick Buechner writes:
{Paul}does not deny that the worst things will happen finally to all of us, as indeed he must have had a strong suspicion they were soon to happen to him. He does not try to minimize them. He does not try to explain them away as God's will or God's judgment or God's method of testing our spiritual fiber. He simply tells the Philippians that in spite of them — even in the thick of them — they are to keep in constant touch with the One who unimaginably transcends the worst things as he also unimaginably transcends the best.
Philippians mentions Paul is in chains, but it doesn’t mention whether or not Paul breathed deeply, stretched, or sang while he wore them. I think it is reasonable to suppose, however, that Paul wasn’t interested in throwing out pithy sayings which ignored the causes of our suffering. Instead, I think Paul called us to encounter the God who created all of us: mind, body and soul. When Paul said, “Rejoice in the Lord always,” I believe he meant it as more than just positive thinking but also making our whole selves a part of our spiritual practices. I imagine him under house arrest annoying and maybe even inspiring his jailers with his kneeling, dancing and singing. Just as anxiety and stress can affect our bodies, so also can joy.
Grace and Peace,
Chase
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