"On Sanctuaries and Oceans with No Edges"

By Allan Hugh Cole Jr.

When it comes to teaching and preaching, David Johnson can appropriately be called a virtuoso. His virtuosity derives from having enviable talent, yes, but also from his perceptive eye, generous heart, and his appreciation for a good story. Whether he’s drawing from his vast repository of historical knowledge or from his lived experience, and regardless of whether the occasion is teaching, preaching, or conversation over tea, David makes us feel a part of the stories he tells and as though the lessons they convey are meant just for us.

I learned from Hans Frei, David’s teacher at Yale, that Christians make sense of life by hearing and telling stories, by locating their personal stories within the more encompassing story of the gospel, such that it becomes the “container” for these other stories being crafted. I honor David on the occasion of his retirement and express my deep gratitude for what he has taught me by sharing stories about anxiety, community, and occasions for experiencing the divine.

Personal stories pervaded by anxiety or related conditions such as depression abound. According to an analysis done by the Kaiser Family Foundation, four in ten U.S. adults reported symptoms of anxiety or depressive disorder, with adults in the 18-24 age group reporting the most symptoms at 56.2% and adults aged 25-49 reporting symptoms at 48.9%.

Anxiety has been a part of our collective stories for a long time. Jesus knew this and insisted that living anxiously runs counter to what God wants for us. As a result, Jesus exhorts his followers: “Do not be anxious about your life,” and asks, “Which of you by being anxious can add one cubit to his span of life?” He urges: “Do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself.” And recognizing that fear often couples with anxiety, he adds: “Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.” Jesus did not want us to have stories pervaded by anxiety.

From where does our anxiety come? Paul Tillich believed anxiety follows from an awareness of our limitations, from a “self-awareness of the finite self as finite, of the possibility of nonexistence,” or “threat of non-being.” Human beings tend to transform what Tillich termed existential anxiety into fear. We find something identifiable and concrete to fear so we can rally resources like self-affirmation and courage to conquer that fear. Courage defends against despair by “taking anxiety into itself” says Tillich, so that when we are anxious, we must cultivate “the courage to be.” Tillich refers to God as the Ground of Being, as humans’ principal resource for ameliorating existential anxiety. It is authentic relationships with God and other people that foster courage.

Let me tell you how I know this is true.

It’s a Sunday morning in August, nearly a year since I received a diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease at the age of forty-eight. Still living in the Parkinson’s closet, I push through most days feeling anxious and alone.

I sit silently in the sanctuary. My wife, Tracey, our daughters, Meredith and Holly, and I gravitated here a few months ago. This small community of people from nearly every continent offers open hearts and shares open minds. We are drawn to this church’s racial and ethnic diversity and its commitments to social, economic, and environmental justice. We are drawn to its conscience. These folks extend hospitality to the poor, homeless, pilgrim, and stranger.

I think about how I got here.

Since childhood, I mostly found comfort in my faith and in church, learning stories about Jesus treating people with compassion and healing them. I spent time with people aiming to follow Jesus’s example and to latch on to hope. Sanctuaries housed mystery and intrigue. They made me tingle and feel warm. I loved their smells and their people. There, I experienced what the psychologist Erik H. Erikson called a sense of at-home-ness in the world.

It was the beginning of my belief I could find what I needed in this space, where my personal stories intersected with others’ stories within the container of the gospel.

The congregation gathered around me on this day comes with authenticity and vulnerability, with compassion and generosity. They are those who live anxiously, hurt, and hope. Collectively, they come to learn about and live out the values of Jesus of

Nazareth, he who said, “Blessed are the peacemakers” (Matt. 5:9); “Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none; and whoever has food must do likewise” (Luke 3:11); and “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Matt. 22:39). Light shines through the mosaic of stained glass surrounding the triangular chancel. Mosaics are made of something that’s been broken, yet remains beautiful, even useful. This particular mosaic’s colors pop out as if hoping to land in worshipers’ laps. A woman in her late twenties plays “Morning Has Broken” beautifully on her violin.

My mind drifts to the past year: a faint tremor in my left index finger, an initial misdiagnosis, multiple exams, a brain scan, sleepless nights, anxiety, loneliness, and tears. Staring at the stained glass, I consider my mosaic of beliefs: about justice and mercy; fairness and equity; pain and comfort; meaning and purpose; despair and hope.

I also consider if I sense a presence of the divine, whether in churches or in my life.

Wondering what life might require someday, I look to my right, where Holly, Meredith, and Tracey sit, and I fight back tears as my daughters draw in their sketchbooks. A guitarist plays another musical piece while a trio sings.

Most people here today are members who attend weekly. Many are facing the tensions of living a burdened and faithful life.

There’s Caleb, a sweet, bright twelve-year-old boy with autism. He works valiantly each day to go to school, interact peaceably with others, and be a typical kid. Once, he invited Tracey over for dinner and the rest of us got to join her. His remarkable parents seated beside him, Sarah and Sam, advocate for Caleb, model pure vulnerability coupled with exquisite courage and grace, and never cease cheering him on.

There’s Ruth, an older woman with a gentle disposition and astute mind who is confined to a wheelchair, and for whom living alone gets more challenging. She sits next to Nancy, who faithfully and tenderly cares for her friend, and whose political positions impress me.

Julio and Astrid are there as well. They will marry in a little over a year, and I think of Julio’s longtime separation from his family who cannot get back into the U.S. from their native Mexico, in spite of having lived here for many years.

Then, I see Leslie, who lives courageously, with dignity, and at enviable peace with breast cancer that has metastasized. Her contagious, resolute smile simultaneously heartens and convicts me. Months later, she’ll be in hospice care.

I also see Jose, a kind and brawny man in his late thirties, surrounded by his lovely parents as well as by his siblings, nieces, and nephews. All of them, along with the larger church community, have prayed for Jose while he sought sobriety and spent nearly a decade in prison. He’s recently been released and hopes to get his life back on track.

I then flashback to Kate, a middle-aged woman who lives on the streets. She wandered into the church a couple of weeks earlier and we met in front of the coffee urn. Her clean coffee cup stood in stark contrast to her dirty fingernails and the dinge of homelessness. She heard voices and seemed scared and suspicious. Like many of us, she was there looking for connection, significance, and hope.

Thinking about anxiety conjures up an image New York Times columnist David Brooks has used, namely, one of an ocean with no edge. Brooks writes,

We are all fragile when we don’t know what our purpose is, when we haven’t thrown ourselves with abandon into a social role, when we haven’t committed ourselves to certain people, when we feel like a swimmer in an ocean with no edge … People are really tough only after they have taken a leap of faith for some truth or mission or love. Once they’ve done that they can withstand a lot.

Life is not easy. We get sick, lose those we love, struggle for meaning, seek peace, and clamor for justice. These days, we also worry about pandemics and crushing needs on a global scale. Individually and collectively, we experience both adversity and anxiety.

Surrounded by all of this, we desire a place in communities that value us, reassure us, companion us, and urge us on, perhaps as we also long for clues of a divine presence in our lives. Jesus taught it has always been so.

I’ve spent much of my life looking for answers to big life questions. For decades I searched mostly in books, whether when reading them or writing them, and by sorting through the ideas and insights of the sages. I still do all of this. Now, however, I’m more apt to look for answers, or at least possibilities, in people and relationships, in shared stories of struggle as well as joy, in stories of those who stand in solidarity against any form of injustice and dedicate themselves to creating new mosaics that add beauty and purpose to our lives. I hone in on human mosaicsin-process, broken and beautiful people, and on where I see efforts within a community to love, to be loved, and, as the Bible says, “to share one another’s burdens” (Gal. 6:2).

Here is where I find an edge in an ocean of anxiety, where I drop an anchor, where every so often I glimpse the divine. Here is where my story makes sense.

NOTES

1. Kaiser Family Foundation analysis of the 2019 National Health Interview Survey. https://www. kff.org/coronavirus-covid-19/issue-brief/the-implications-of-covid-19-for-mental-health-and-substance-use/

2. See Matt. 6:19-21, 25-34; Luke 12:22-34, Holy Bible, Revised Standard Version.

3. Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, Vol. 1, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), 192.

4. Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952), 2-4, 66.

5. I was diagnosed in the fall of 2016.

6. David Brooks, “Making Modern Toughness,” New York Times, August 30, 2016.

Allan Cole is Deputy to the President for Societal Challenges and Opportunities at The University of Texas at Austin, where he also serves as the Bert Kruger Smith Centennial Professor in Social Work in The Steve Hicks School of Social Work. The author of Counseling Persons with Parkinson’s Disease (Oxford University Press) and In the Care of Plenty: Poems (Resource Publications), you can follow him on Twitter @PDWise.