by Kim Thoday Albert Einstein once quipped: "I never worry about the future. It comes soon enough." Yet it would seem that anxiety is fundamental to being human. I suppose one needs to draw a distinction between worry and anxiety. Anxiety is a deeper emotion than worry. Anxiety, as Wilhelm Stekhel defined it, "is fear of one-self." That is, anxiety is that unfathomable feeling of foreboding within one-self. The theologian Paul Tillich, pressed this idea further. Tillich suggested that anxiety is part of the very fabric of one's conscious self. The root of anxiety is the human awareness of the inevitability of death, of non-being, the extinguishment of self. Tillich said that anxiety is a permanent horizon of existence. He elaborated, "It [the anxiety of non-being] stands behind the insecurity and homelessness of our social and individual existence. It stands behind the attacks on our power of being in body and soul by weakness, disease and accidents." The Christian faith is centrally about salvation from the ego of self and society possessed by the anxiety of conscious existence. The realities of sin and guilt spring from the attempts to escape the reality of anxiety. This escape of course takes a multitude of forms; human beings appear to be infinitely creative in diffusing responsibility for social being - as our litigious postmodern world bears out. The story portrayed in the Bible about human existence is that freedom from anxiety can only come once we take full responsibility for ourselves. And that requires the radical journey of knowing ourselves, that is, the fluid continuum of our capacities for good and evil. Rollo May said of this kind of freedom that it: " . requires the capacity to accept, bear and live constructively with anxiety. I refer of course to the normal anxiety all of us experience at every step in our psychological growth as well as in this upset contemporary world. To be free means to face and bear anxiety; to run away from anxiety means automatically to surrender one's freedom." This capacity really is the biblical idea of faith. In Tillich's language faith, the courage to be, is the very opposite of the Marxist critique of religion. In fact the biblical notion of faith is the critique of all materialist ideology that suppresses the fundamental human experience of anxiety and meaninglessness. Faith is the self-conscious act of empowerment in being grasped by the transcendent love of God. Faith is the recognition of the deep transcendent need and desire we have to be free from anxiety in all its forms. Faith is courageous because it is about an honest appraisal of ourselves and it recognises that without a transcendent power of love we cannot be free to truly be. It is this faith of divine courage spoken of so beautifully in the epistle to the Ephesian Christians: "that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have power to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God, (Ephesians 3:17-19, RSV). Blessings in Jesus' name KIM THODAY, HEWETT COMMUNITY CHURCH OF CHRIST, SOUTH AUSTRALIA
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