Amy apologized graciously to a volunteer for arriving late at a church event that offered help with groceries.  Like a rescued drowning victim gasping on land, within two minutes she spurted out an ocean of anxieties:  Recently moved here from the frenetic city, disconnected from her daughter whom she’d raised alone, feeling isolated and lonely.

Though worried about coming alone to this event, she didn’t want to become locked in her apartment afraid to go out. She appreciated the grocery help, but more urgent was her need to move out of the anxiety that imprinted her soul and threatened to imprison her. The volunteer understood immediately, recognizing the atmosphere of anxiety that seems to permeate everything.

In an age of anxiety, what does faith have to say?

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Decades ago, a classical scholar named E.R. Dodds examined religious experience in ancient times, under the arresting title:  Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety. We don’t have centuries of perspective to assess our current situation. Still, the title seems an adoptable as a description, perhaps amended to: Atheistic and Theistic Spiritual Experience in an Age of Anxiety.  

It’s almost comforting to realize we’re not the first to experience such a time. It’s real, can be studied and has meaning. Professor Dodds reminds us there’s something common to us all as, in our disparate ways of being in the external world, we wrestle with the inner world.

That inner world always has, and always will, include anxiety.  Those with a clinical diagnosis know how excruciating and pervasive it can be. Out of control, it’s a sharp-toothed rodent ceaselessly gnawing from inside. Sufferers might try to diminish it through cognitive-behavioral tricks, activity or various mood-changers. It’s not likely improved by increased interaction with technology.  

Some say anxiety is even more powerful than fear. Fear is a response to danger or threat of harm. Anxiety is stirred up by the threat of non-being. Whatever evokes the fear of being annihilated as a person — that”who I am” could cease to exist — causes anxiety. It makes us want to seize control. It’s universal, yet highly personal.  

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What makes you anxious? It’s another way of asking: What makes you tremble to your core because you as a person might not survive?  

Present to us all is this underlying anxiety: At any moment, I could cease to be — or cease to be me. For some, it’s an inescapable agony.  Jesus, we suppose, wasn’t speaking clinically when He told Martha she was “anxious” (Luke 10:41), but He surely saw how anxiety kept her from living fully. He identifies what’s making everything unbearable for her. He isn’t scolding her for doing something wrong but offering the antidote to her affliction: His real Presence.

What’s the antidote to our deep-set anxiety that we’re nothing at all? Only this, our need of Christ without whom we’re indeed nothing.  So, anxiety has a purpose. It helps us remember and seek the real presence that God continually, gratuitously, personally bestows on us by being personally present at the very core of where we are anxious.  We feel anxiety when we doubt that presence.

How do we “have no anxiety at all”? By coming to God with our cares, asking, praying (Philippians 4:6).  By the Real Presence that’s everywhere.  St. Paul says our anxiety can bring us together, urging us to care for (“be anxious for”) one another (1 Corinthians 12:25). 

How can our anxiety direct us to Christ and one another?

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We have “Real Presence”:  Eucharist, adoration, churches open for silent prayer, real places to welcome real people. Anxiety in its many forms needs to be identified and treated in all ways we can. At the heart of an age of anxiety, our faith directs us to the fundamental antidote. We all can be carers for the Body of Christ in which we all participate. We can invite each other, even as we’re worrying and being anxious about many things, to choose the one thing. 

It’s hard to be free of the obsessive need to inflate our egos, avoid our anxiety and use God as an excuse for escaping reality, leading, inevitably, to greater anxiety.  The church volunteer that day gave Amy not only grocery help, but also real presence. She wasn’t met with an agenda to “save” her, but with a genuine welcome. The volunteer, who had a habit of regularly spending time with Christ in adoration, was a real presence to her. She said she wanted to come back.