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Protect Us from All Anxiety

Save your sanity by fostering a trust in God’s goodness

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A woman called me one afternoon in a panic. “Father,” she exclaimed, “I am worried that my teenage son is doing drugs.” She told me that, every day when she came home from work, she saw her son exiting the woods behind their house. “He goes in there with a backpack, and when he comes out, he says nothing and is withdrawn. I have even asked him why he goes alone to the woods. He will not answer.” I offered to talk with him, but she had a better plan; she said that she was going to follow him.

On a particular day, she stayed home from work and waited for him to get home from school. Sure enough, he got his bag and began to walk into the woods. However, his mother came running out of the house after him and tackled him. “OK!” she exclaimed, “let’s see what’s in this bag, and why you are so sneaky, mister!” When she opened the bag, she found only a Bible and rosary beads. He confessed that he had been going to pray in solitude. “I feel like such a fool,” she told me. “I really hope that he forgives me and does not quit on faith.”

I would bet that none of us has ever tackled a member of our flock, but we, too, may have jumped to conclusions and acted on them. I knew a pastor who never took a day off because he was afraid that his staff was plotting to get him. All the poor man got for his worries was an ulcer and a ton of unused Hilton credit card points. Certainly, it is good to be informed, but it can border on paranoia to assume the worst in every situation.

St. Thomas More warned against allowing our thoughts, desires and emotions to get the better of us, writing, “In time of silence take good heed that [your] minds be occupied with good thoughts, for unoccupied they will never be.” This certainly does not imply a laissez-faire attitude, where we no longer have concern about anything. After all, we want to emulate St. John Neumann and not Mad magazine’s Alfred E. Neuman. However, we must always trust in the goodness of God and believe that most people really do desire to love and serve God. This has to be our starting point. Otherwise we run the risk of driving ourselves, and others, crazy.

A Need to See God’s Providence in All Things

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus reminds us of a similar need to see God’s providence in all things. “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat [or drink], or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing? If God so clothes the grass of the field, which grows today and is thrown into the oven tomorrow, will he not much more provide for you, O you of little faith?” (Mt 6:25, 30).

In our humanity, we often worry about so many things that we either live in the past or fear the future. Our true call is to be a beacon of light and hope, which gets ever more dimmed if we stubbornly hold our often-poor opinions. I witnessed this during the election season when two neighbor parishioners from opposing parties refused to see any good in the other. They each portrayed the other as a caricature filled with flaws and faults, and they only bonded again during the Christmas toy drive for kids. Thank God they did, or otherwise they may have pelted each other with Legos and plush animals!

Blessed Clelia Merloni instructs about the need to persevere in spite of our own self-inflicted struggles. “Be mindful,” she writes, “that the sky will not always be peaceful in your soul; you will often find yourself enveloped in the fog of discouragement, battered by the storm of trial. Remember, then, to keep your hand firmly on the plow … to keep your resolution to pray, to battle, to win, more alive than ever.” This should give us confidence that God will give us the grace to see him in all things — even when we challenge those who oppose our ideals, worry about our staff, or attempt to tackle those closest to us.

FATHER MICHAEL ACKERMAN is the pastor at Resurrection Parish, Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, and chaplain at Seton LaSalle Catholic High School in Pittsburgh.

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