ANXIETY

INTRODUCTION

The title of my homily is, “Anxiety.”

The word “anxiety” or “anxious” appears 5 times in today’s second reading, so I began thinking about anxiety – and did some research on it for this homily.

Anxiety.

Since it seems to me to be a psychiatric term in English, I looked up the Greek text from which we get our New Testament to see what word they are translating with the words “anxiety” and “anxious”. All 5 times the Greek word is “MERIMNA” or “AMERIMNA” It’s Greek root verb is, “MERIZO” – which means to be pulled or drawn in different directions and as a result of these pulls, these cares, these distractions, a person can feel anxious, tense, nervous, confused, apprehensive, sweaty – or even have heart palpitations.

Ever feel that way? We’ve seen movies where someone is tied arms and legs to two or four horses and the horses are driven in different directions – and we’re sitting there, going, “Uoooooh that hurts.”

FEARS AND ANXIETIES

Do you ever feel anxious? About what? Do you have any fears? What are they?

I’ve always heard that the difference between fears and anxieties are the known and the unknown. If we know what we’re scared of, that’s a fear. If we don’t know what we are scared of or antsy about, that’s an anxiety. I assume that not everyone agrees with this distinction, but it works for some people.

We can know our fears – but when it comes to anxieties – it helps to try to go back in our life to find possible sources of our antysiness. It could be an aunt – who baby sat us when we were a little kid and kept on telling us we were going to go to hell if we didn’t eat our broccoli or spinach – if we didn’t go potty right or we didn’t shut up in the afternoon when she wanted to watch the soaps – or we were going to go to hell if we didn’t fold our hands just right when she forced us to say the rosary with her. But that could seem unfair – picking on an aunt – or anyone – and fairness and unfairness can often be a source of anxiety.

We’ve also heard people use big words for fears or phobias: claustrophobia – fear of enclosed places; acrophobia or altophobia – fear of high places; arachnophobia – fear of spiders; but do we know that doraphobia is fear of fur and eisoptrophobia is fear of mirrors? And we might remember the cartoon when Charlie Brown hearing about all these phobias says, “I have pantophobia.” And when asked what that means, he says, “Fear of everything.”

MOVIE: HIGH ANXIETY

Remember the Mel Brooks movie, “High Anxiety.” It’s a spoof on all this to make us laugh. Mel Brooks, Cloris Leachman, Harvey Korman and Madeline Kahn go through a whole series of scenes – some of them take off’s on Alfred Hitchcock movies – that also deal with anxieties. Alfred Hitchcock said he liked to have his movies take place where people think they are in a very safe place – and then birds – thieves – killers appear.

Anxiety is not a laughing matter. People out of work – not knowing what to do next – or wondering and worrying about the economy can be the stuff of real anxiety. Sometimes anxiety gets us moving. Sometimes it gets people into not only economic depression – but also emotional depression. Uh oh’s can be the real deal. Uh oh!

Yet, sometimes laughter is just what we need. While reading about the movie “High Anxiety” which goes back to 1977, I laughed when someone said that for the scene that mimicked Alfred Hitchcock’s movie, The Birds, the plan was to use fake bird droppings made from mayonnaise and chopped spinach. They were dropped from a helicopter – but real birds got scared because of the real helicopter – and people down below didn’t know what they were being hit with. Was it really mayo and spinach?

Is there a word, “birddropophobia”?

And surprise last night while watching soccer on TV with Father George, at a break, we noticed on the menu that the movie, “High Anxiety” was on at 10:30. Surprise. I put it on. It was quite corny – and goofy spoof's – but it had a few laughs. George went to bed.

PUSH AND PULL

We’ve all seen on doors the words, “Push” or “Pull”.

We all have our pulls – as well as our pushes.

What’s pulling us in different directions? What’s pushing us?

Sometimes we feel like a door with two signs on it: push and pull. We have many doors we go through in life – some with signs we don’t like: boss, principal, undertaker, angry brother or sister – or nursing home where dad or mom is.

Push. Pull. Uh oh! Oh no! Anxiety is knocking on our door. Different doors can be the source of different anxieties.

TODAY’S SECOND READING

St. Paul says the single person has different anxieties than the married person. Some of you might remember the movie, My Cousin Vinnie. There’s Mona Lisa Vito - single – still wondering if Vinnie will marry her. Many say the most memorable scene in the movie, My Cousin Vinnie, takes place on a porch out in the woods. There’s Mona Lisa, Marisa Tomei, wearing perhaps the greatest one piece outfit of any movie of all time kicking her foot on the wooden deck outside the house and whining, “My biological clock is ticking … ticking… ticking.”

Anxiety – not being married – not having kids – being married – having kids – worried about mortgages – and bills and keeping one’s job – and where our kids are and it’s after 10 PM or this and that – can pull a person apart.

TODAY’S GOSPEL

In today’s gospel Jesus enters the synagogue in Capernaum and meets a crazy man – a man with an unclean spirit. The man yells out, “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are – the Holy One of God.”

What a great scene! The crazy guy knows who Jesus is – the rest of the crowd don’t.

I wonder if it’s Mark’s sense of humor appearing here.

What a great scene! Jesus yells back and says to the unclean spirit, “Quiet! Come out of him!” The unclean spirit convulses him and with a loud cry came out of the man.”

Amazing. Isn’t it a strange scene? Isn’t this scene much more powerful than the pea soup scene in the movie, The Exorcist. Isn’t it much more immediate?

Mark in today’s gospel says the crowd was amazed. It would be better if they had anxiety. It would be better, if they too knew who Jesus was – the Holy One of God.

JESUS IS IN THIS PLACE – RIGHT HERE, RIGHT NOW, FOR US

Hopefully, we hearing this story, seeing this movie here in Mark, we can feel Jesus standing here – in this place, right here, right now, for us. Hopefully, we feel some anxiety. Better, hopefully we have some Jesusphobia – that he might come over to us and say, “Quiet! Bad spirits come out of this person.”

Don’t we all have evil spirits within us – that rattle our cage at times: meanness, jealousy, envy, snarkiness, nastiness, laziness, anger, impatience, inability to control life – especially people?

Wouldn’t it be great that we too – like this crazy man – knew that Jesus is the Holy One of God – that he can come up to us and heal us of our evil spirits.

Any of you who have taken Bible Courses or Workshops on Prayer – or know the Jesuit exercises from retreats or this or that, know that the secret of prayer and reading the Bible is to place oneself in the scene. See it. Hear it. Be the different characters in the story. Use their lines. Make them our prayers.

I’m assuming that today’s first reading from Deuteronomy was chosen to say that Jesus is the new Moses – a prophet – here in our assembly – here in this synagogue – here on this Sabbath – and hopefully we know who Jesus is – “the Holy One of God” – that we let him heal us – and we walk out of church today better than when we walked into this church today.

CONCLUSION

There is a German proverb, “Fear makes the wolf bigger than he is.”

Anais Nin, wrote in her diary, “Anxiety is love’s greatest killer.” [The Diary of Anais Nin, Vol. V, 1974]

Hopefully, by coming here to church, we can become free from sin and feel and find the peace, love and healing power of Jesus Christ.

Hopefully, by coming here to church, we can stand here this moment – crazy, anxious, nervous, with our fears and anxieties – and we hear Jesus say to our evil spirits, instincts, moods, “Quiet. Come out of her. Quiet. Come out of him.”

In every Mass, right after the Our Father, there is a short prayer that the priest says. Right in the middle of it, there is the word “anxiety”. I often wondered who pushed to put it there. Maybe it was someone who liked today’s second reading. Maybe it was someone who had a lot of anxieties to deal with. Listen to it carefully this morning:

“Deliver us, Lord, from every evil,
and grant us peace in our day.
In your mercy keep us free from sin
and protect us from all anxiety
as we wait in joyful hope
for the coming of our Savior, Jesus Christ.”

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*Picture ? -Not sure where I found this. Sorry. I like to give sources.+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

P.S. Received the following in an e-mail. It gives a different slant or glance on how to deal with anxiety - so I plugged it in. Don't know the author or source. Sorry.

A lecturer, when explaining stress management to an audience, raised a glass of water and asked, “How heavy is this glass of water?” Answers called out ranged from 20g to 500g. The lecturer replied: “The absolute weight doesn't matter. It depends on how long you try to hold it.”

“If I hold it for a minute, that's not a problem. If I hold it for an hour, I'll have an ache in my right arm. If I hold it for a day, you'll have to call an ambulance. In each case, it's the same weight, but the longer I hold it, the heavier it becomes.”

He continued, “And that's the way it is with stress management. If we carry our burdens all the time, sooner or later, as the burden becomes increasingly heavy, we won't be able to carry on. As with the glass of water, you have to put it down for a while and rest before holding it again. When we're refreshed, we can carry on with the burden.”

“So, before you return home tonight, put the burden of work down. Don't carry it home. You can pick it up tomorrow. Whatever burdens you're carrying now, let them down for a moment if you can. Relax; pick them up later after you've rested. Life is short. Enjoy it!

And then he shared some ways of dealing with the burdens of life:

* Accept that some days you're the pigeon, and some days you're the statue.

* Always keep your words soft and sweet, just in case you have to eat them.

* Always read stuff that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.

* Drive carefully. It's not only cars that can be recalled by their maker.

* If you can't be kind, at least have the decency to be vague.

* If you lend someone $20 and never see that person again, it was probably worth it.

* It may be that your sole purpose in life is simply to serve as a warning to others -- (that one killed me!!!)

* Never buy a car you can't push.

* Never put both feet in your mouth at the same time, because then you won't have a leg to stand on.

* Nobody cares if you can't dance well. Just get up and dance.

* Since it's the early worm that gets eaten by the bird, sleep late.

* The second mouse gets the cheese.

* When everything's coming your way, you're in the wrong lane.

* Birthdays are good for you. The more you have, the longer you live.

* You may be only one person in the world, but you may also be the world to one person.

* Some mistakes are too much fun to only make once.

* We could learn a lot from crayons. Some are sharp, some are dull; some are plain, some are pretty. Some have weird names. They all are different colors, but they all have to live in the same box.

* A truly happy person is one who can enjoy the scenery on a detour.