Day: September 12, 2021

“Be not anxious”

“Take no thought,” the King James Version following Tyndale puts it. Other translations have the disconcerting phrase “be not careful.” “Be not anxious” is a more modern rendering and reflects the contemporary therapeutic culture in its various nostrums. But are we really to be without thought and without care? Is anxiety simply about our emotional and psychological state of being? No. I think the readings for today speak very directly to the question about how we think about nature and thus ourselves. They counter some of our modern obsessions and preoccupations; in short, our worries are the things in which we over-invest ourselves, thinking about things in the wrong way. Hence Jesus bids us three times to be not anxious as part of another way of thinking about ourselves and the world. It is about seeing the world in God and God in the world.

There are no end of worries and concerns, fears and anxieties that beset our troubled world: concerns about the environment and climate, about the economy and jobs, about adequate housing and food security, let alone the myriad of disturbing preoccupations with respect to identity politics that more and more are about a sense of alienation from the body and nature. For all of these worries and anxieties belong to a common problem: the sense of our disconnect from creation and nature and thus from one another and ourselves, even our bodies. The last two hundred and fifty years or so bear witness to what some have called “the great acceleration” referring to the forms of our technocratic mastery over nature and over ourselves that has altered the very world in which we find ourselves in destructive ways, a world which we sense is increasingly unlivable and threatening. This is to state the obvious.

Yet what is required has very much to do with our thinking, about how we think about nature or creationChanges. If we assume, as many have, that nature is just dead stuff there for us to manipulate and use however we wish, we can only discover that this is ruinous and destructive of the natural world and ourselves.  There are, it seems to me, three conflicting modern approaches to the natural world which in their separation from one another contribute to our contemporary dis-ease. One approach is this idea of our complete mastery or dominance of nature that ultimately fails to respect the natural order. It arises out of a sense of our separation from nature that leads to an instrumental manipulation of nature, the consequences of which are now more fully before us. It is, however, an overstatement about ourselves as distinct and separate from the natural world in its externality.

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