To understand the impact of ‘persistent worrying’ here is an illustration. Take a pen in hand and hold it with two fingers. Would it be difficult? Not yet? Keep holding it for five minutes. What happens? The pen is becoming heavier, cumbersome, and the centre of your attention. Keep holding it for ten minutes. What is it like? It is unbearable and heavy. You just want to get rid of it. Yes, it is easy to get rid of the pen. But we find it so difficult to get rid of our worries. They hurt, we still hold on to them.
In the gospel text of today, as we continue to listen to his Sermon on the Mount, Jesus tells us: do not worry. Be free!
What is worry? It is the mental process of rumination about a negative experience. It is a repeated thinking about the negative experience focussing on impossibilities and their consequences. An online dictionary defines it as “to torment oneself with or suffer from disturbing thoughts.” While the influence of some personality types cannot be ruled out in habitual worrying, it could also be an outcome of a certain style of functioning in daily life. My intuition is that people who tend to focus on urgent and unimportant tasks might build a habit of worrying too much (fretting), and end up with anxiety and stress. It could also be a result of the lack of some skills in time-management and planning. On the other hand, people who tend to be less worried might be focusing on important and non-urgent tasks. The question is, how do I make out on a daily basis what is more important than another. To me this seems simple: if I have the purpose and mission of my life clearly sorted out, then what contributes to my purpose in life is important, and everything else is only at the periphery!
This simple insight from popular psychology is not isolated from what, I think, Jesus is saying in the gospel of today. Jesus calls us to prioritize: “No one can be the slave of two masters” (Mt 6:24). Jesus invites us to sort out our value system: “Set your hearts on his kingdom first” (Mt 6:33); “That is why I am telling you not to worry about your life and what you are to eat, nor about your body and what you are to wear. Surely life is more than food, and the body more than clothing” (Mt 6:25). We can render what contemporary psychology is saying in terms of the teachings of Jesus as follows: if I want to enjoy wellbeing, then, the purpose in my life needs to be determined by the values of the Kingdom! But before we go any further, a caveat is in place.
What Jesus is not saying? He is not encouraging lethargy (or sloth). In the Christian tradition, sloth (in Latinacedia) was classified as one of the ‘deadly sins’. Sloth includes emotional or spiritual apathy, being physically and emotionally inactive, not using the gifts God has given, and at a deeper level not co-operating with the grace of God. Elsewhere in the Gospel of Matthew, in the parable of talents (Mt 25:14-29), Jesus condemns lethargy and sloth. As someone once told me, as Jesus quotes the example of ‘ the birds of the air’ and ‘ the flowers of the field’, it is insightful to look at that analogy a little more deeply: the birds of the air do not just sit idle and wait for the Creator to bring them food. They work – fly around and scavenge – to get access to the food that the Creator provides for them. And the flowers of the field, as per their nature, continue with the metabolic activities of absorption, transpiration and photosynthesis. They continue to grow.
The bookmark of Teresa of Avila summarises it all: “Let nothing disturb you, let nothing frighten you, all things pass away: God never changes. Patience obtains all things. He who has God finds he lacks nothing; God alone suffices.”
For a longer sermon on the same readings: CLICK HERE