Dealing with Anxiety

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Doyle Walker

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Hello and welcome to our episode for today. I hope everyone is doing well. Staying in doors during this time of a sort of a shared national sacrifice. As we are deliberately working to stay away from each other with the threat of the pandemic we are currently experiencing . For some people this can bring on loneliness and isolation. As we attempt to distance and self isolate to defeat this virus that has emerged upon the world. So I want to take some extra time and visit a topic that is again somewhat personal for me. You see several years ago. I had pretty significant battle with anxiety. It was a time in my life where I was probably the most confused I have ever been. Because if you know anything about anxiety. It can come from any number of places and situations and leave you feeling helpless to overcome it. There were literally time when in the middle of the night I would sit straight up in bed in cold sweat and my heart racing. For no apparent reason. But I later learned that like so many things in life. That 1) that behaviors are learned. And 2) there are reason for those behaviors. And they all come back to how we view the world. So with the current climate in our society I though it a good time to talk about how we should approach the topic and how we should think about the feeling that we sometimes have that leave us fearful about any number of things. But I want to tell you form the outset that the only way to deal with your anxiety is to look deeply inward first. This is the only way to get to the solution. Which stands outside of you. So today we are going to need to think about things that make us uncomfortable. We like for things to be simple. But tackling the big issues in life rarely are anything but simple. We are coming up on Easter. For many of us this will be the first time we have NOT been in church on an Easter Sunday in decades. But I want to share two instances in jesus’ life where he was filled with anxiety and use them to show the solution. The things I am going to share with you today come from a really good resource.

Moltmann, Jürgen. (2007). Experiences of God. (M. Kohl, Trans.) (pp. 37–54). Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press.

Anxiety

A year or two ago, in 1978, there were two major analyses of the situation in West Germany, one made in the United States and the other in England. Both these analyses came to the same conclusion. They decided that the most striking German characteristic was no longer frantic industriousness, or the self-complacent ‘German economic miracle’, or even the much admired stability of the German mark. The main characteristic was anxiety. It was not anxiety about any particular thing. It was a general malaise, a loss of confidence—an undefined attitude to life which continually expects the worst. To find anxiety of this kind as the chief characteristic of an economically stable country is a remarkable phenomenon. But is certainly not a phenomenon that is peculiar to Germany alone. Today all the wealthy countries of the world are dominated by anxiety. There is a general loss of bearings and a widespread feeling of demoralization.

There are certainly reasons enough for our anxiety.

Which country can overcome the energy crisis?

What about the dangers of nuclear energy?

What work is going to be left for men and women, and who will be able to find a job, in our computerized age?

How can we solve the hunger and over-population of the Third World? We have done nothing decisive about it at all in the last twenty years. Isn’t our anxiety about these impoverished people prompted by guilt?

Yet, frightening though these questions are, our anxiety has a much deeper origin. We are anxious about the future, but it is our very anxiety that is robbing us of the confidence we need to master its problems. Anxiety blurs vision and judgment. We are paralysed by our anxiety and, like a rabbit paralysed by a snake, our very fear is our doom. In anxiety our minds and hearts already experience what we are afraid of. And this means that anxiety is seldom a helpful guide for our decisions and actions.

Psychologically, however, there is something even more dangerous than anxiety about the future, and that is anxiety about anxiety, the fear of fear. We are very well aware that anxiety makes us impotent; so we are afraid of fear even before we feel it. Because we are afraid of our fear, we react to the threatening situations we meet hysterically and aggressively. If we are afraid of fear we repress our feelings. This fear of fear is the really infantile and dangerous thing about anxiety. It makes us afraid of ourselves, not just of the future. It makes us feel that we do not know ourselves and cannot trust ourselves.

If we are to survive in an age of anxiety, we have to face the experience of anxiety with the courage of hope, but also with patience. We cannot remove all the objective reasons for our anxiety. But we can overcome our fear of fear by beginning to search our own hearts and by learning to know ourselves in the experience of anxiety and under its pressures. No one is ever totally free of anxiety. To be so would mean being a superman—but also completely inhuman. But we can learn to live with anxiety, to accept it, and to be free under its pressures. Of course we must do our utmost to eliminate the situations and conditions that make us anxious, but we cannot do away with anxiety itself. We have to accept it as a subjective experience, endure it, and transform it.

But can the destructive force of anxiety be transformed into a positive and vital power? I believe that the Christian faith shows us that even this is possible.

Anxiety and Hope

One of Grimm’s Fairy Tales is ‘the story of the boy who went out to learn how to be afraid’. He went through the most dangerous adventures, totally unimpressed, finding nothing frightening about them. He knew neither fear nor dread. Then one night, in order to cure him, his loving wife tipped a bucket of cold water, full of prickly little fish, over him as he slept. He was seized by a nameless horror and panic in which he seemed like a stranger to himself.

Two modern thinkers, a theologian and a philosopher, have picked up this story and have drawn very different conclusions from it.

In The Concept of Dread Sören Kierkegaard used the story as a starting-point for what he wanted to say:

One of Grimm’s Fairy Tales is a story about a lad who went out to seek adventure in order to learn how to shiver with fear. We will let the adventurer go his ways without concerning ourselves further about whether he met horror as he went or not. What I should like to say here is that this is an adventure which everyone has to face: the adventure of learning how to be afraid, so as not to be lost, either through not having learnt how to fear, or through being completely engulfed by anxiety. The person who has learnt how to be afraid in the right way has learnt the most important thing of all.

Ernst Bloch began his Prinzip Hoffnung (‘the principle of hope’) with what is apparently the contrary view:

Once upon a time a man went out in order to learn how to be afraid. That was easier to do in times past, when fear was always close at hand. The art of being afraid was something people were terribly proficient in. But now, except where there are real reasons for fear, a more appropriate feeling is expected of us.

The important thing now is to learn how to hope. The labour of hope never gives anything up. Hope is in love with success, not with failure. Hope is above fear. It is not passive like fear; even less is it locked away into pure Nothingness. The emotion of hope goes out from itself. It expands men and women, instead of limiting them and hedging them in …

Learning to be afraid and learning to hope are contrasted with one another here. But are they really contrasts?

Of course the person who is forced into a tight corner becomes afraid, while hope opens up vision and outlook. Anxiety—anxietas—chokes us. Hope—spes—lets us breathe. Anxiety weakens us and makes us small and mean. But the person who is strengthened by hope can raise his head and learn to walk upright. We are afraid of imprisonment and death. But hope longs for life and liberty. So would it not be better to learn how to hope with Ernst Bloch, rather than to learn how to be afraid with Kierkegaard? At first glance everyone would immediately agree that hope is above fear. Hope can lead to anxiety. Anxiety cannot lead to hope. But by seizing on fear and hope as simple alternatives, have we really grasped the deeper significance of these two attitudes?

What anxiety and hope actually have in common is a sense of what is possible. In anxiety we anticipate possible danger. In hope we anticipate possible deliverance. Of course it is true that in his anxiety a person always envisages the worst, and his terrified imaginings increase his anxiety. But without the feeling of fear and anxiety he would not notice the danger at all. Without anxiety we would be blind, ruthless and careless. In anxiety and hope we go beyond existing reality and anticipate the future, so as to make a correct decision about the present. How could we hope for life, liberty and happiness, and snatch hopefully at the chances of these things which the future offers, if we did not simultaneously fear death, oppression and misfortune? ‘The future’ is as ambiguous as potentiality itself. For the world process has not yet been finally decided. Consequently the future means both opportunity and danger. It fills us with enthusiasm and threatens us at the same time. And if this is so, how can we learn to hope without also learning to be afraid? Even if ‘hope is above fear’ as Bloch says, anxiety is still the inescapable and self-evident sister of hope. We cannot learn to hope if we suppress our anxiety and shut our eyes to danger. On the other hand, we must also ask ourselves whether anyone has ever learnt how to be anxious unless he has first gone out of himself in hope and lived in hope. Can anyone know what anxiety is if he does not venture to hope for anything? If a person has to learn how to be afraid, as Kierkegaard says, he needs an even greater hope, if he is not to be numbed by anxiety or totally engulfed by it. When we look towards the open future, obscure and undetermined as it is, it is hope which gives us courage; yet it is anxiety that makes us circumspect and cautious—which gives us foresight. So how can hope become wise without anxiety? Courage without caution is rash. But caution without courage makes people hesitant and leaden-footed. In this respect ‘the concept of dread’ and ‘the principle of hope’ are not opposites after all; they are complementary and mutually dependent.

Kierkegaard and Bloch agree about one thing: that anxiety and hope can both be learnt. This common assertion is an astonishing one, for we are inclined to ask in our fatalistic way: how can we do anything about our anxieties? And surely hope is a pure gift of grace—and a rare gift at that? If, in spite of what we have always supposed, anxiety and hope are learnable, then someone must show us how we can—and must—learn them both. The story of the boy who went out to learn how to be afraid is an exodus story. It is the story of someone who leaves his home and everything that life has meant for him up to now in order to find freedom. Without an exodus of this kind out of what has been until now, into an unknown, adventurous future, there is no way of learning how to hope or how to fear. Every adventure is a journey of hope, and yet something of a nightmare at the same time. In this sense the whole of life is an adventure, a risk, continual hope and continual anxiety. The exodus out of existing reality into the potentialities of the future is the road to freedom. It is on this road that we ‘learn’ how to be anxious and how to hope. Anxiety and hope seem to me to be the two sides of the experience of freedom. Anyone who wants to experience freedom must be prepared for anxiety and yet for hope as well—be prepared to hope, and just because of that be prepared to be anxious too.

The Anxiety of Christ

All human anxiety and fear is fundamentally—which means from birth onwards—fear of separation. Fear makes us lonely. Fear isolates us. Fear strikes us dumb. Does fear and anxiety also isolate us from the foundation of our being, from the meaning of life, from God? Normally the gods know no anxiety, for they exist, independent of any changing destiny, in some world beyond life and death, in eternal bliss. If this is what divine eternity is like, however, then anxiety also isolates men and women from their gods, making their lives godless and meaningless. But then is not a person who is capable of anxiety and hope, because he is also capable of love, greater than all the gods who know neither anxiety nor hope because they cannot love?

If we believe in Christ, fear does not isolate us from God. On the contrary, it leads us deeper into fellowship with him. Christian faith in God is essentially fellowship with Christ, and fellowship with Christ is essentially fellowship with the Christ who was tempted and assailed, who suffered and was forsaken. In our anxiety we participate in Christ’s anxiety; for in his suffering Christ went through the very fears and anxieties which men and women encounter too.

In Christian devotion the crucified Jesus has always brought consolation in anxiety and fear. And this is certainly not because Christ, as God’s Son, was by nature a Christ who was able to live free of anxiety and suffering. He is our consolation just because of his ‘agony and bloody sweat’—just because he shrank from every lash and felt the prick of every thorn.

All we have to say as Christians about ‘religiously integrated anxiety’ and the way to overcome anxiety is to be found in this verse. We have to be ‘released’ from anxiety. We cannot ‘get the better of it’ by ourselves. And we are released from it, not through the divine omnipotence of a heavenly Christ, but through Christ’s earthly and most profoundly human suffering and fear. ‘Only the suffering God can help us’, wrote Dietrich Bonhoeffer from his prison cell; and Kierkegaard too goes on, after the passage we have quoted, to talk of Christ ‘who was in dread even unto death’. But this means that we are released from our anxieties through Christ’s. We are released from our suffering through his. Our wounds, paradoxically, are healed by other wounds, as Isaiah 53 promises of the Servant of God.

Let us consider two biblical passages, which can help us to grasp the mystery of anxiety and fear in Christian faith. Let us think first about Christ’s anxiety in Gethsemane, and then about his agony on Golgotha. Then we shall go on to consider the truth of the suffering God, who can console men and women in their anxiety and fear.

Gethsemane

Christ’s passion does not just begin when he is taken prisoner and tortured by the Roman soldiers. It begins at the moment when he resolves to go to Jerusalem with his disciples. His passion for the messianic future, which he had brought to living expression in the gospel for the poor, in the healing of the sick and the forgiveness of sins, was bound to come up against its most determined enemies in Jerusalem; for its strongest opponents were the priests of Jesus’ own people and the Roman forces of occupation. So the threat that ‘the Son of man must suffer many things, and be rejected’ (Mark 8:31) hung heavy over the road to Jerusalem.

When he entered into the holy city the people recognized him and cried, ‘Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! Blessed is the kingdom of our father David that is coming!’ (Mark 11:9f.). They saw in Jesus the messianic kingdom and greeted his appearance with this expectation. This makes the reaction of the Jewish authorities and the occupying forces all the more understandable: the man from Nazareth is dangerous. He must disappear, quickly and without more ado. Up to now there has been nothing unusual about the story. Everyone is prepared to accept suffering for some great passion—even to sacrifice his life for it if need be. But in Christ’s case a different kind of suffering was involved as well.

The night before he was arrested he went into the garden of Gethsemane, taking three of his disciples with him, and ‘began to be greatly distressed and troubled’, writes Mark. ‘He began to be sorrowful and troubled’, records Matthew. ‘My soul is very sorrowful, even to death’, he says, and begs his friends to stay awake with him. Earlier, too he had often withdrawn at nights, in order to be united in the innermost prayer of his heart with the God to whom he always gave the exclusive name of ‘my Father’. But in Gethsemane for the first time he does not want to be alone with God. He is afraid of him. That is why he looks to his friends to protect him. Then comes the prayer which in its original version sounds like a demand: ‘Father, all things are possible to thee; remove this cup from me’ (Mark 14:35)—spare me this suffering. Matthew and Luke soften the Gethsemane prayer into something more modest: ‘If it be possible’ or ‘if Thou art willing’ ‘let this cup pass from me’.

What suffering is meant by ‘the cup’? God does not hear his Son’s prayer. He rejects it. Elsewhere the gospel tells us: ‘I and the Father are one.’ But here the Father withdraws from the Son, leaving him alone. It is the cup of separation. That is why, exhausted by grief, the disciples fall into a deep sleep. It is only in the ‘nevertheless’ which is in such total contradiction to what he desires that Christ holds fast to the fellowship with the God who as Father withdraws from him: ‘Nevertheless not as I will, but as Thou wilt.’ Christ had to learn obedience through the prayer which God rejected.

Christ’s real passion begins with this unanswered prayer. This is the beginning of his fear and suffering as he endured the experience of being forsaken by God. Of course it was also quite simply fear of a slow and horrible death. It would be ridiculous to say that, as the Son of God, he would have been unable to experience the fear of death because his soul lived in unbroken enjoyment of divine power and bliss; and that it was only in the body that he suffered (though this is what Augustine maintained). But it would also be foolish to see him as a morbidly sensitive person who was overcome by self-pity at the prospect of the torments of death awaiting him, as in Jesus Christ, Superstar. In the fear that laid hold of him and lacerated his soul, what he suffered from was God. Abandonment by God is the ‘cup’ which does not pass from him. The appalling silence of the Father in response to the Son’s prayer in Gethsemane is more than the silence of death. Martin Buber called it ‘the eclipse of God’. It is echoed in ‘the dark night of the soul’ of the mystics. The Father withdraws and God is silent. This is the experience of hell and judgment.

Luther reinterpreted the traditional doctrine of Christ’s ‘descent into hell’, relating it to his agony from Gethsemane to Golgotha. The nadir of Christ’s humiliation was this experience of being forsaken by God. ‘Not only in the eyes of the world and his disciples, nay, even in his own eyes did Christ see himself as lost, as forsaken by God, felt in his conscience that he was cursed by God—suffered the torment of the damned who feel God’s eternal wrath, shrink back from it and flee.’ This was how he interpreted the passion of the assailed and tempted Christ, the Christ who was assailed and tempted by God. Consequently, for Luther Christ was far from the superstar, the most perfect man; he was the most tempted, and therefore the most miserable of all. Moreover he was not only assailed by fear and suffering in his human nature, as scholastic tradition maintained. He was assailed in his very essence, in his relationship to the Father—in his divine Sonship.10 In his Bible Luther headed this chapter ‘The struggle in Gethsemane’. It was Christ’s struggle with God. This is where the abyss of his anxiety is to be found. He overcomes this agony by surrendering himself to his abandonment by God. That is where we find his victory.\

Golgotha

The other story is to be found at the end of Christ’s passion. Again it is a prayer or, to be more precise, the despairing cry of accusation with which Christ dies: ‘My God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ (Mark 15:34). He hung on the cross for three hours, waiting to die, his limbs and muscles apparently locked in tetanus. Then he died with a cry welling up from a sense of the most profound rejection by the God whose Son he knew himself to be, and whose messianic kingdom had been his whole passion.

This must surely be the historical kernel of the Golgotha story; for the idea that the Saviour’s last words to God his Father could possibly have been this outburst of abandonment could never have taken root in the Christian faith if they had never been spoken, or if this abandonment had never been perceptible from Christ’s death cry.

Yet we ourselves cannot get used to the fact that this cry of the forsaken Christ stands at the centre of the Christian faith. The history of tradition shows that the horror and dismay emanating from this cry was later softened down, and Christ’s utterance was replaced by more pious parting words—for example Luke’s ‘Into thy hands I commend my spirit’. Nor is the cry made more acceptable to us because it is the opening of Psalm 22, and according to Jewish custom the beginning stands for the whole psalm. For one thing the psalm ends with a glorious prayer of thanksgiving for deliverance from death—and there was no deliverance on Golgotha. For another, after a short time the crucified Jesus was probably incapable of speech. Early manuscripts of Mark’s gospel express the cry of abandonment even more drastically: ‘Why hast thou given me up to shame?’ and ‘Why hast thou cursed me?’ Even the Epistle to the Hebrews, which was written much later, holds fast to this remembrance of the assailed and forsaken Christ when it says that ‘far from God’ (perhaps rather ‘without God’) ‘he tasted death for us all’ (Heb. 2:9). It is surely not by chance, either, that this cry is the only time Christ does not call God familiarly ‘my Father’ but addresses him out of the infinite remoteness of separation as ‘my God’.

What he was afraid of, what he struggled with in Gethsemane, and what he implored the Father to save him from, happened on the cross. The Father forsook him, delivering him up to the fear of hell. The one who knew himself to be the Son is forsaken, rejected and cursed. And God is silent. With profound insight, Paul interpreted this as meaning that from Gethsemane to Golgotha Christ suffered God’s judgment, in which everyone is alone and against which no man can stand: ‘For our sake he made him to be sin’ (2 Cor. 5:21) and ‘He became a curse for us’ (Gal. 3:13).

‘Release us from our anguish’

If Christ’s pain and suffering come from his experience of God at Gethsemane and Golgotha, how can they ‘release’ the believer from his distress, as Paul Gerhardt says in his hymn? The two different ideas can be traced in the history of faith; and again we find them especially in the young Luther: the idea of the Christ who suffers with us, and the idea of the Christ who suffers for us. Christ our brother in anxiety and fear, and Christ our representative in our time of need.

(a) The first of these ideas says: whatever pain, weakness and loneliness people experience in the fear and anxiety of separation, culminates in the experience of being forsaken by God. It is this that lies behind the anxiety which goes beyond anything definable and finite and which therefore threatens our own identity so hellishly. What Christ experienced in his fear in Gethsemane is the crystallization of this measureless anxiety, which—consciously or unconsciously—lies heavy on the hearts of us all. He is the most assailed of all, for he suffered anxiety in its godless depths and did not flee from it. He suffered the fear of being forsaken by God which all the rest of us can feel but which we do not really have to endure. Anyone who has this sense of being forsaken by God in his fear experiences ‘godly grief’ (2 Cor. 7:10), the divine sorrow. He participates in Christ’s anxiety because Christ has borne—and borne alone—the very same anxiety he feels. In his anxiety he conforms to the forsaken Christ. In the image of the crucified Jesus our indefinable anxiety takes on a form with which we can identify ourselves because in that image we discover our own total misery. It is a part of ourselves, our own identity, our own grief. This is the conformity christology which determined the Luther renaissance of the 20s. It is the christology of the ‘Christ with us’, of Christ our brother, who is our companion on the path through fear, temptation, imprisonment, exile and abandonment by God himself. Through the writings of Jochem Klepper and Heinrich Vogel, this christology saved the souls and lives of many men and women in the fears and anxieties of the Second World War and the post-war period. But it had found its best expression a long time before, in Paul Gerhardt’s great Easter hymn, Auf, auf, mein Herz whose identification between the believer and Christ was, for English readers, later echoed so closely by Charles Wesley:

Made like Him, like Him we rise;

Ours the cross, the grave, the skies.

The other idea, which is inextricably linked with the first, is Christ’s vicarious suffering of fear and pain. He suffered for us ‘and for many’; he stands in our place. Wherever, after Easter, Paul and the Epistle to the Hebrews talk about the suffering of Christ, they never forget to add the interpretative words ‘for us’. Christ’s sufferings have meaning for our sufferings today. But the words also bring out the uniqueness and unrepeatability of Christ’s suffering and pain. Easter happened only once. The believer is not merely brought into solidarity with Christ’s fate. He also, and even more, enters into a relationship of gratitude, liberated from fear. For the knowledge that another has gone through everything that threatens me and which I was afraid of, is for me a liberation. It liberates me from my fear of fear. The knowledge that the suffering Christ takes my place and surrenders himself for my sake to the abyss of anxiety where he is abandoned by God, frees me from my own anxiety; for it gives me an indestructible identity in my fellowship with him. The knowledge that Christ stands in my place ‘releases’ me from anxiety, so that I can leave it behind me and its threatening power collapses. But this knowledge also frees me to look at my fear squarely, and to cease being afraid of it. That is why gratitude for the fear Christ suffered is a theme of all the passion hymns:

Were the whole realm of nature mine,

That were an offering far too small.

Christ suffers with us and Christ suffers for us. The two images of Christ belong together. Without the brother in our anxiety there is no fellowship with Christ. Without the Christ who substitutes for us in our anxiety, we cannot be freed from that anxiety.

The Pain of God

I said earlier that for Luther, Christ was not only tortured by fear and pain in his human nature, but suffered as Son of God—that is to say in his relationship to the Father. This points to a truth which, when we perceive it, is terrifying and yet consoling. It is the truth of the suffering God who encompasses human suffering and so abolishes the anxiety tormenting men and women.

If we follow the testimony of the first Christian witnesses, the depth of the agony of fear which Christ experienced on the cross is far and away surpassed by the sense of expansion in his resurrection. The experience of suffering over his abandonment by God on Golgotha is far surpassed by his resurrection into the joy of God’s coming glory. This means that we must not isolate the cross, let alone make it something absolute in itself. We must not linger in Gethsemane and beneath the cross endlessly repeating what it teaches us of pain and fear. Without the resurrection, the cross really is quite simply a tragedy and nothing more than that. In Latin America the Indians follow the ‘stations of the cross’ without the feast of Easter liberation; so these processions really do lead to masochism—to self-laceration in a quite literal sense—to a cruel lust for pain, and an intensification of fear.

But according to the faith of the first Christians, Christ’s resurrection far surpasses his passion. The cross and the resurrection do not simply balance one another out. ‘How much more’, Paul often says, when he is talking about grace, or freedom, or the resurrection. So in the end we must after all agree with Ernst Bloch: for the Christian faith too, hope is above fear. The promise we hear in the history of Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection is utterly remote from the death wish. It is the call that beckons us to freedom. ‘He allured you out of distress into a broad place where there was no cramping’ (Job 36:16). But what kind of freedom does this mean? Suppressed anxiety is not sufficient to produce freedom. But anxiety that is given permanent significance does not lead to freedom either. It is only faith that can ‘raise anxiety up’—take away what is weakening about it and preserve its cautious foresight. For Christians this becomes evident in the figure of Christ, who was raised to glory from the shameful death on the cross. This path from the cross to the resurrection is Christ’s passover, the new exodus into eternal liberty. The anxiety that has been ‘raised’ and the experience of anxiety which still exists might be called ‘blessed anxiety’ because it is an anxiety that has been liberated.

If, finally, we sum up the experience of faith in anxiety and fear, this is what we may say:

Our numerous fears and anxieties continually crystallize into a general anxiety about life. It is this heightened and diffused anxiety which spreads, takes on independent existence and robs men and women of their self-confidence and their very identity. It can be described as the fear of fear. It wins the upper hand and drives us into a corner if we fail to identify it for what it is, or if we try to ignore it. Then we feel that our situation is hopeless. We no longer know who we really are.

Christian faith identifies this anxiety with abandonment by God. It is a separation phobia, a dread of separation from the foundation of existence, the meaning of life, what is worthy of trust. To identify anxiety and give it a name is not enough to free us from it, or to let us conquer it.

We have to be ‘released’ from anxiety. That is the experience of faith in anxiety. When we remember Christ’s fear and anxiety, what he has already done with us and for us is repeated: he has endured the fear of being forsaken by God—the fear of separation; and he has opened up a way through this experience for those who trust and follow him. In fellowship with him we discover that we are released from anxiety as we endure it. By recognizing our anxiety in his, and by seeing it as abolished in his, we experience that ‘blessed’ anxiety which kindles an unconquerable hope. To be ‘released’ from fear means standing up to fear, resisting it. It means walking freely through the midst of fear, sustained by hope, because nothing ‘in the whole creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord’.[1]

[1] Moltmann, J. (2007). Experiences of God. (M. Kohl, Trans.) (pp. 37–54). Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press.

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