Prayer and Anxiety Ralph L. Underwood
Introduction Both anxiety and prayer raise many questions with no ready or easy answers. When does anxiety begin to erode faith? When does anxiety cause one to question the value of prayer? When might anxiety help one to reconsider in a potentially constructive way one’s understanding of God and of prayer? What is prayer? In this essay, I shall endeavor to make one suggestion for consideration and contemplation concerning the relationships of anxiety and prayer. Luther called prayer the first exercise of faith. When it comes to anxiety, why turn to prayer? What purposes does prayer serve in relation to human anxieties? It has been said that anxiety is not the greatest of God’s gifts. Can anxiety be a gift just as pain can be a gift? If so, the point of prayer is not always to reduce or eliminate anxiety. Just as there can be stress that is constructive and stress that is destructive, so there is more than one kind of anxiety to consider in relation to prayer. Let me suggest that a major purpose of prayer is to keep anxiety in balance so that our anxieties can be positioned to help serve God’s calling. In Christ, God bids us offer our anxieties in prayer in the faith and hope that we can be of service to the God of love and enjoy God forever.
Uncertainty The classic definition of anxiety is that anxiety is the fear of the unknown. One can fear a specific object or kind of object when it is known, for example, like fear of spiders. Sometimes one cannot identify specifically the cause or reasons for feeling
Ralph Underwood is Professor Emeritus of Pastoral Care at Austin Seminary, having served on the faculty from 1971-2001. He is the author of Pastoral Care and the Means of Grace (Fortress Press, 1993) and Empathy and Confrontation in Pastoral Care (Wipf and Stock, 2002).
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