"Prayer and Anxiety"

By Ralph L. Underwood

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.

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 afraid. Unknowns are so pervasive that they mark daily life and stretch beyond personal lifespan. What a new day may bring is unknowable. How much suffering will one have to endure in a lifetime? When will death decide to make its descent? We worry even though Jesus asked, “And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life?” (Luke 12.25)1

Still, not all unknowns provoke alarming distress. One of the reasons many of us love sports events is the fact that moments and outcomes of these events are unpredictable. Reducing uncertainties overly much yields boredom. Ever loyal, anxiety follows risk-taking relentlessly! And with equal doggedness, anxiety keeps company with creativity!

The sources of unknowable possibilities seem to have multiplied these days: the COVID-19 pandemic, increasingly intense and extreme weather events, the widening gap between the rich and the poor, as well as political dysfunction and malfeasance that threaten democracy. These developments produce new terms, such as eco-anxiety.

Such unknowns surround and fuel personal anxieties that come with illness, care of family and significant others, financial insecurity, and a host of similar concerns. Often enough our worries and anxieties have to do with what we cannot control, but invade our hoped-for peace regardless. Each stage of one’s life-long development entails a transitional time of anxiety. While we well might like for our daily schedules or long-range plans to be written in ink, they are better laid out in chalk.

When people become overconfident they become unteachable. A measure of anxiety opens us to the quest for more knowledge and insight—and to listening to God. How often do crises create the conditions that enable us to be more teachable?

Paul Tillich held that there is such a thing as existential anxiety and that this is normal and universal for humans, for we are aware of our mortality. He tried to convince leading psychotherapists of his day, with whom he was in constant dialogue, of the reality of existential anxiety and that it is dynamically different from neurotic anxiety. On the whole, these therapists remained unconvinced. But numerous scriptures speak of such anxiety. Take Psalm 90, for example. With poetic power, verses 1–11 prayerfully contrast the reality of God and human mortals, and tellingly this leads to a prayerful petition (verses 12–17). Prayerfulness and prayers may not be the only response to existential anxiety, but often they are the first.

All these anxieties often engender uncertainty about God, or at least our mental images of God and understandings of God. This may threaten commitment to Christian faith or it may occasion growth in faith and wonder at the mystery of God. Likewise, such anxieties disrupt our own self-images and understandings, yet may open the way for new and promising self-understandings.

Often prayer is born in pathos. In a sense we pray before we are aware of the need to pray, before conscious awareness calls out words of prayer. “Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very

Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words” (Romans 8.26). It could be said that real prayer begins when the words won’t come, when longing is lifted up in appeal and perhaps hope. Anxieties often compel us to pray. Hence the saying “Pray as you can … and as you must.” Psalm 94.19 confesses, “When the cares of my heart are many, your consolations cheer my soul.” Praying renews primary relation with God despite persistent anxieties.

How often do we identify ourselves with the problems we have? A person might think, “Who am I? I am one who tends to get depressed.” Another thinks, “I am one who gets anxiety attacks.” This kind of self-identification is what I call a profane identity, wherein we identify ourselves with the problems we face. Prayer helps release us from such an identity to become aware of sacred identity, the level of self-awareness that God gives. Praying can help restore or renew a sense of purpose and of sacred calling.

Being attentive paves the way for prayer and may be a form of prayer. Can we be carefully attentive to our anxieties and just as attentive to the remembered and promised presence of God? Perhaps Proverbs 16.20 envisions both: “Those who are attentive to a matter will prosper, and happy are those who trust in the LORD.” When the Virgin Mary “pondered” the heavenly message, was this not an example of being attentive in the midst of anxiety? Was this a basic form of praying? How essential such moments and times are to life: “Keep our heart with all vigilance, for from it flow the springs of life” (Proverbs 4.23). Journaling is an effective way of pondering and being attentive, and I highly recommend this practice.

While at times prayer is a defense against personal and community anxiety, prayer can be a creative response to the various sources of our anxiety. To quote what has been attributed to Roy Fairchild, to pray is “to bring all we know of ourselves to all of God that we know.” Similarly, C. S. Lewis wrote, “May it be the real I who speaks, May it be the real Thou that I speak to.”2 Listening for God’s presence or a word from God is a form of prayer:

Let me hear what God the Lord will speak,

For he will speak peace to his people,

To his saints, to those who turn to him in their hearts. (Psalm 85.8) John Calvin wrote, “… it is by prayer that we call him to reveal himself as wholly present to us.”3 Listening prayer has the power to dethrone false idols. As an individual or a worshiping community looks deep within and looks beyond in prayer, images of self, of community, and of God can be transformed. Frequently prayer is born in stillness, in silence, yet has the power to move us from problem-centered thinking to person-centered relating with God and others. In prayerfulness and prayer we seek God, we seek communion with the sacred. God remains a mystery, unknowable, yet God reveals Godself in the Christ and through the Spirit who leads us into prayer.

Psalm 105 opens with ten imperative verbs, seven that have to do with praise and three that relate to petition. This is not meant to be a formula for how much prayer should be praise and how much should be petition, but it stands as a reminder of how essential and vital praise is in both personal prayer and corporate worship. I treasure hymns of praise and doxologies in public worship. Praying evokes adoration of the Holy One. In prayer we pay homage. We bless the Lord and ask for God’s blessing and inner strength.

Praying has a bodily dimension, and not only in terms of kneeling, standing, or raising hands. Daily life provides abundant opportunities for virtually everyone to discover or create rituals of praise. Brother Lawrence was known for constant prayer and praise while working in the kitchen.4 Most of us are able to walk, and I suggest that walking, daily when possible, is a good time for praise. Praise to God helps me to walk troubles away and shed excessive anxieties. Gratitude grows with every step. My esteemed colleague David Johnson cannot walk. His love of tea may provide another example of a daily ritual that, in my way of thinking, opens the path of praise. Such daily rituals have distinct power to help manage anxieties and realize their potential for creativity.

Bonhoeffer declares that we must learn to pray from Christ and not use “the false and confused speech of our hearts.”5 Certainly we do well to learn to pray from Christ; the Lord’s Prayer tutors the imagination and guides reflection. Yet I hesitate to censor prayers. The Psalms do not. When anxieties and confusions are lifted to God in prayer, can they be transformed? Petitions have a way of not ending where they began. Prayer is not confined to petitions. Even in petitionary prayer we come to listen to God. Furthermore, as Luther recognized, in prayer and worship we become priests to one another. How often we pray more readily for others than for ourselves! Lifting up to God our own anxieties and concerns, as well as those of others, can ease the weight that presses on us. In petitions we look to the sacred mystery for inner strength, belonging, and wisdom.

Prayerfulness and prayer as being attentive, as listening, as praise, and as petition are vital both personally and communally. Praying in corporate worship connects our isolated selves with one another and with the God of Jesus the Christ. Today that worship may be in person or online, but the connection and the oneness are there.

Nagging and, yes, alarming levels of anxiety have a way of weighing in on our daily lives, and there are no easy answers to all the questions that living in these days provokes. At the same time, the gift and challenge of prayerfulness and prayers beckon: “Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God” (Philippians 4:6); “Cast all your anxiety on him, because he cares for you” (1 Peter 5:7). Prayerfulness and prayer educt us from troubles of the times and induct us into the world of sacred wonder.

In chess, the pawn functions as a weak figure in the board’s actions—until a pawn reaches the end board. Then by exchange it is transformed into a chosen, more powerful actor. Might this observation suggest an analogy for the interaction of anxiety and prayer? Paradoxically, might anxiety, not the greatest of God’s gifts, bathed in prayerfulness and prayer, reach a destination that enables a transformation to become a powerful gift in God’s ongoing providence and care?

NOTES

1. Citations of scripture are from the NRSV translation.

2. Lewis, C.S. Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer (Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1964), 82.

3. Calvin, John. Institutes of the Christian Religion, John T. McNeill, editor (Westminster Press, 1960, III, 20, vol. II), 851.

4. Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection (ICS Publications. 1994).

5. Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Psalms: The Prayer Book of the Bible (Augsburg Publishing House, 1970), 11.

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).