Is there an inherent contradiction in what Jesus is calling us to? After closer scrutiny, I do not think so. I think Jesus is simultaneously calling us to live without fear, but to be nonetheless vigilant in our daily living, there are differences between fear and vigilance. Let us look at fear first in some of its variations. Situations, people, possibilities in life are constantly presenting themselves to us for our appraisal. It is our appraisal, our response to, or our judgment of things that frequently triggers fear. If I judge some one, some thing, some future possibility as somehow dangerous or hurtful to me, I can become fearful. Fear, in and of itself, is not a totally negative phenomenon. Fear serves as an alarm to us that, indeed, we may be threatened and therefore we ought to do something to protect ourselves. What is good about fear is that we usually know its target: we can name who or what we’re afraid of.

Fear becomes problematic when it becomes diffuse, or we no longer are in touch with what is causing us psychological disease and unrest. When we move into a situation like that we’re clearly in a mode of anxiety. Anxiety is often experienced as free-floating fear, apprehension, dread, or constriction of both our emotions and our physiology. When either fear or anxiety is provoked, our physiological response is one of alarm - to take flight or to fight. It’s the physiological wear-down and damage that’s connected especially to anxiety that, in the long run, can be so destructive to our overall health.

Key to understanding the dynamics of anxiety is that so much of it is stirred or fired up in us pre-consciously or unconsciously. You and I, everyone, we construct a cohesive, integrated approach to life when we are very, very young. Some might call it our vision, our outlook, our lifestyle. It’s the lens through which we approach everything. It is our process of judging or appraising. The vision or the lifestyle involves our outlook on ourselves, our self-concept; our outlook on people; our world view; our ethical imperatives; and the ideals that we’re striving for. There are some of us that have a vision, or lens, that is seriously contaminated by anxiety, or what I referred to before: diffuse fear. Unconsciously, preconsciously, we tend to judge or appraise in an anxious way, resulting in a chronic state of apprehension or fight or flight.

A rather pervasive state of anxiety is commonly called stress. Stress is a lifestyle of anxiety that, over time, has begun to have damaging effects on our body and on our spirit. Any creature under stress seeks first, physiologically, to return to a base line of peace, equilibrium, or homeostasis. But humans under stress are like a machine stuck in high gear; we don’t get back to a quiet state that renews us. And the result is a situation of feeling often like we are running on emotional, spiritual, physical fumes of energy.

Anxiety and stress often lead into two other problems. One is called "acting out disorders." Acting out disorders are ways of trying to bury the anxiety or bury the stress and its cause. Anxiety goes underground if you will, and emerges in a new package or a new disguise. The most prevalent form of acting out behavior in our culture is substance abuse - for example alcohol or drug abuse. The reason that substance abuse is so popular in our culture is because of the immediate effect that it has on reducing anxiety and stress. But that kind of stress reduction is quite temporary. As we know now, such acting out responses to stress eventually create a whole new set of problems and eventually multiply the stress. Besides substance abuse, people act out through heightened sexual activity, eating, gambling, work. In essence, in the acting out disorders we do something too much, with even more dire consequences than the anxiety or stress that we may have been feeling before.

Another problem related to stress and anxiety is depression. Though depression abounds in a myriad of forms, there is a low-grade, insidious, often unrecognized depression that’s related to anxiety and stress. It is a kind of wear-down, burn-out syndrome that results from just too much stress in our lives.

Anxiety, stress, depression - James and Evelyn Whitehead are two pastoral writers and lecturers that speak of "the negative emotions." Well, emotions are neither good nor bad; but what some of them can do to us if not managed well is negative. In that sense we can speak of unmanaged anxiety, stress, and depression as truly negative emotions. 

One of the reasons that it’s so hard to change a pattern of the negative emotions in our lives is that their roots, their causes, lie in early learning. That is, attitudes and convictions that we developed in the early years of childhood. We live out of lessons that we learned long before we went to school. It’s tremendously difficult to replicate the kind of learning that could de-bunk or change life-long convictions and attitudes. But it has been my experience that some positive experience of "counseling as re-education," joined to positive religious-spiritual experiences can provide a new kind of learning that tempers the old learning.

I told someone recently, people with anxiety or stress problems hopefully reach a point of bottoming out where someone teaches them to "turn it over," turn self, others, life, problems over to a Higher Power, a Supreme Being of unconditional love. When people reach this point, and finally meet this divine Someone who is Healer, Shepherd, Mentor, Companion - the edge of the negative emotions begins to be blunted. Then, if we want to stay in conscious contact with and awareness of this source of comfort, I know of no other way than to develop lives of prayer and meditation. Prayer can take a lot of different forms:

There’s rote, memorized prayer that is especially helpful if we are tired or we don’t have a lot of words. 

There’s personal, conversational prayer, wherein we simply talk to God about ourselves, or others, or life.

There’s meditative prayer, in which we take a word, or line from Scripture, or an image, and repeat the word, or the words, or the image over and over again, timed with our breathing.

Praying while exercising, which constantly unites body and spirit, is another way.

Silence: just being quiet in the presence of God. That’s another way.

Praying the Scriptures: prayerfully seeking the voice of God in the Old Testament, the New Testament stories, the writings of Paul, or using as our own the prayers of the Psalms.

There are so many other kinds of prayer. "Why pray?" some ask. "You don’t always get what you want when you pray." Well, that’s not the promise of prayer. Jesus teaches us why to pray in Luke 11: "Ask, seek, knock ... God always gives the Spirit to those who pray." That’s the promise of prayer - to tap into that divine Spirit of Love and Care who is God: to live and abide in that peace and love, and to extend peace and love to whomever and wherever we go. I believe that prayer and spirituality, practiced with discipline, provide us with new convictions, new attitudes, new values that begin to challenge, critique, and eventually replace the anxious, stressful, depressive ones that cause us so much discomfort.

Do not be afraid, little flock ... But be on guard. A recurring theme in the preaching of Jesus is to let go of fear and learning to trust in God’s providential love. "... But be on guard ...". Another recurring theme is vigilance. Vigilance doesn’t involve dysfunctional fear, anxiety, stress, and depression. The vigilance that Jesus calls us to is, in fact, a way of not allowing the negative emotions to get to us or swallow us up. An animal is vigilant in protection of self, or food, or territory. Vigilance is a protective posture. To be vigilant is to be protective. Jesus especially wants us to be vigilant or protective regarding our souls, our spirits, and the quality and integrity of our lives. In this kind of vigilance, we are aware of the toxicity of the negative emotions and we try to avoid situations that set us up for them. 

In a similar way, vigilant people are aware of the insidious power of sin and evil within and around us. Aware of sin and evil, vigilant people also try to avoid those situations which could contaminate the spirit with values or attitudes that are not "of God." And I believe vigilant people are also conscious of the importance of relationships, and they do their best to prevent emotional erosion. Vigilant people pro-actively practice attitudes and behaviors that contribute to true love, friendship, commitment, and home or family life.

To be vigilant, then, is to be alert, aware, protective, and proactive about those realities that really matter in life. To borrow from the eleventh chapter of the letter to the Hebrews, vigilant people who also are managing the negative emotions well, possess a "... confident assurance concerning what we hope for, and conviction about things we do not see ..." Vigilant but peaceful people are people of faith like Abraham and Sarah, referred to in Hebrews 11, going forth, not knowing exactly where we’re going - watchful, protective about the things that really matter, but always trusting in God, and ultimately searching for a heavenly home.

We need in today’s world a lot less fear, and a lot more healthy vigilance.

Floyd Brown: Thank you very much for just a wonderful sermon, the talk that you delivered. It was enlightening to me; I think we talked about that briefly before we started the program today, the marriage of your ministry and psychotherapy. Is it unusual - the fit, I’m trying to think about. How did you come to decide to do both of them?

Patrick Brennan: Well, I think early on, growing up Catholic, I had a high sensitivity to spirituality, and to the notions of metanoia or conversion. And then in college and also in graduate school, I began to read psychology, and I began to hear very similar messages coming from the
psychological literature: Insight therapy calling people to change their minds, and behaviorists calling people to change their lives.

It just seemed, a lot of what’s in psychology seemed to be sort of a contemporary articulation of the Old and New Testament call to conversion.

Brown: Conversion, yes. It just flows. It seems so natural, in hearing you talk about it. You’ve also worked very hard on evangelization in the church. Tell us a little bit about your work. What motivates you to do this?

Brennan: Well, for some 15 years I worked in evangelical renewal, and being a pastor now, I really enjoy the privilege of being able to put into practice an awful lot of the ideals that I taught and I aspired. I think what got me into evangelization work was my concern that sometimes the mainline churches were preaching the church, or the institution too much, to a fault, and not preaching Jesus and the Kingdom of God, and the message we just referred to, conversion.

We live in a very, a highly psychologized age, and an age where people are very sensitized to relationships, and I just think that Jesus has so much to offer - some of the struggles that we go through intrapsychically, and relationally.

So a lot of my evangelization work was an attempt to get parishes to sort of tweak themselves, and massage what they were doing, to see if they couldn’t offer a living spirituality to people.

Brown: How does this work with the young people of the church? I’m always concerned about that. Is your church growing?

Brennan: Our church is growing. We have a bit of an evangelical spin to what we do. We have wonderful music at our church, we try to do good liturgy. We offer a variety of services, we have a counseling center. We have hundreds of people in small groups, small Christian communities. We’ve just started a family life department. Our church is growing.

And I don’t mean this in any arrogance, this was a wonderful church before I ever arrived there, but I think we’re growing because we’re willing to be innovative and do what many call "enculturation", or preach to the culture. Where in this case are these 30-ish, 40-ish type, middle-class, upper middle-class folks at? And how can we translate the Gospel for them instead of just pounding away an old medieval message that doesn’t work anymore.

I don’t think people want to hear about the organization or the institution anymore. People are hungry, and there’s a lot of research out on this now, regarding young adults.

Brown: Now you’re dealing in psychotherapy; you’re dealing in the church; you’re dealing in a ministry of people. So many people are being shaped today by television and the media and the news that we have. We find that drugs and dope and alcohol, which are mind-changing things that they have involved - it’s just proliferating today. It would seem to me that with this kind of proliferation, there are people seeking for mind-changing things. Do you find this relevant?

Brennan: Sure. I think at the core of many psychological and addictive and violence oriented problems is the hole in the soul. People are looking for something to fill that hole. They’re looking for spirituality. They’re looking for meaning. They go off, sort of misdirected into these other channels, these other areas. Relative to TV and media, we can’t turn - I guess we can turn the dial off, but I think we have to teach young people a little bit more how to be critical about what they’re watching and what they’re listening to. To discern what the values are in some of the stuff that they’re paying attention to.

Brown: Should the churches be getting a better message out through the media? Should we be more evident today?

Brennan: I think so. I don’t think many mainline churches know how to minister through the media.

Brown: Something that we should think about. Father Brennan, you’re marvelous to talk to, and you provide a marvelous service to the community in what you do. Thank you very much. We look forward to you coming back soon.