Journal of Religion and Health, Vol. 14, No. 4, 1975

Anxiety and the Church's Role G O R D O N E. J A C K S O N Anxiety, like time, is always with us and consequently so difficult to p u t our finger on. To a d a p t Augustine's aphorism on time: What, then, is anxiety? If no one asks of me, I know; ifI wish to explain to him who asks, I know not. We are all aware of anxiety as an affect in the presence of a threat. Freud has aptly described the affect or feeling as a "freely floating, general apprehensiveness." We are not so aware t h a t anxiety performs a function: to signal a situation of danger. Both the feeling state and the function run through three forms of anxiety, sometimes constructively, often destructively. In this paper I shall look at the three forms, trace their interrelationships, and pinpoint some things the church can do to help lessen the destructive side of anxiety.

Ontological anxiety To be anxious is normal. Anxiety is one way we are in the world. It is an e l e m e n t in h u m a n existence itself. We are not completely comfortable with the stuff of our lives: things, jobs, relationships. We know t h a t rust consumes, thieves break through and steal, the bell tolls. It m a y toll for a friend, a spouse, for me. I a m . . . ; tomorrow I may not be. The posture of the self is standing in the present m o m e n t but leaning into the future. Actually the self is never standing; it is always in the midst of the step into the next m o m e n t , so t h a t the self is on one foot, a b o u t to plant the next o n e . . , where? W h a t will the step lead to? Will there be something to step on? Until we have come down solidly on something, the possibility of coming down on nothing is the f r i g h t e n i n g - - t h a t is, anxiety-producing--possibility. H u m a n existence is projected from what-is into what-is-not. On the edge of what-is, pitched toward what-is-not, we are in dread. Life is lived in the pitched-forward posture, for we are always off balance, being thrown, propelled, pitched into the future. The m o v e m e n t of the self is from the familiar into the future and the unknown. B i r t h d a y s are the ticking off on the calendar of this movement. T h e reluctance to tell her age betrays the woman's anxiety about the toll of the years. T h e weak joke about "no more b i r t h d a y s at m y age" is denial, as though one were planting his feet against further advance. The search for the fountain of y o u t h is storied escapism from this relentless The Rev. Gordon E. Jackson, Ph.D., is Hugh Thompson Kerr Professor of Pastoral Care at the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. 231

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movement. What is uncomfortable, making us deny or escape, is anxiety. We dread the step even while it tempts us. We try to suppress this dread, and that is why, though anxiety is always present, it is mostly sleeping, as Heidegger has reminded us. Sheer busyness may be an attempt to keep anxiety drugged so that thought has little chance to dwell on slowing down, wearing out, dying. The social whirl in suburbia may hide the anxiety temporarily, for motion, even if in a circle, gives the illusion of living. The cosmetic business presupposes this anxiety as we defend against aging in favor of youthful immortality. The American effort to deny death in its funerals, while partly symptomatic of neurosis and cultural malaise, is a calculated way to deal with ontological anxiety. It is death that is the constant, dramatic threat to our being. It beckons out of the blackness and we inevitably, relentlessly move toward it anxiously. Death, like fate, underscores the fact of our finitude, a common theme of writers of every age but handled with unsurpassed pathos by the Greeks. Emptiness and meaninglessness combine as another form of ontological anxiety, as Paul Tillich has shown. ~ This fbrm presupposes some ultimate relationship to give fullness and meaning to life. God is at the other end of this ultimate relationship, which is ontological because man is related to God. This relationship profoundly constitutes mail's being. Man is anxious about the loss of this relationship, which is the loss of ultimacy. As Tillich has observed, man will throw away his selfhood in suicide rather than stand the despair of' emptiness and meaninglessness. As I use these terms, I make emptiness to be more primitive, more visceral, standing for the feeling that the bottom may drop, or has dropped, out of things. It must be the terror the infant feels when there is prolonged absence from the mother. I see meaninglessness to be more intellectual, more aimless, standing for the lack of cohesive meaning for life. In Freudian terms, emptiness would refer more to primary process, the heavily emotional; meaninglessness to secondary process, the realm of ego functioning. A child is more likely to suffer sheer emptiness, as when the three-year-old girl, her father dead, her mother at work, her adult babysitter preoccupied with housework, no children around, sobs out of her aloneness on the top step of the back porch. An adult is more likely to suffer meaninglessness as illness, catastrophe, or death threatens to overwhelm him without even the solace of an understandable logic. These are two sides of the same coin, however, because they are psychic experiences of a threat t hat involves the very roots of being, the spiritual dimension. In religious language, this form of anxiety is the sense of being cut off even from God. While our age may not be able to sort out this experience and designate it, there are abundant clues to this anxiety. At the very time when institutional religion is rejected by so many as irrelevant, fraudulent, or dull, there is a discernible religious motif running through the varied questings of youth, the hippie crowd, the drug experimenters, the art forms, e.g., J e s u s Christ Superstar, sensitivity groups, etc. The motif is the deep need to connect with what is "really real" and so to be saved. That the search ends in a cul de sac so often, or in half-way houses providing at best momentary relief, should not

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blind us to its desperate character b u t should alert us to the unrelieved pain of the anxiety of emptiness and meaninglessness. It is this ontological anxiety t h a t the self knows as fate and death, as emptiness and meaninglessness, t h a t is normal. This is the way we are in the world. Illustrations of ontological anxiety are never clear-cut, because they are admixtures of different dimensions of anxiety. However, the telephone call at 1:00 a.m., arousing one from a deep sleep, brings the " s t a r t , " the dreadful feeling t h a t something is wrong. One picks up the receiver in an awful instant of dread. What was a m o m e n t ago may not be. T h e t h r e a t of the nonbeing of a loved one was a t h r e a t to my own being in its interconnectedness with the loved one. T h e phone call provoked the feeling of anxiety out of an underlying state of anxiousness t h a t is always present in every person as part of his being. It is this underlying state of" anxiousness, mostly sleeping, which surfaces when provoked by threat, which is partly definitive of m a n as he is. Against this we set up defenses to which we shall return shortly. Ontological anxiety can be creative as well as destructive. Heidegger has shown t h a t our experience of dread can turn us back toward lived-life with new perspective. 2 T h e dread-experience can be a transcending experience, for it can give us the profound vantage point to look back from and to gain clarity a b o u t our possessions, our relationships, our valuations. T h e m a n y reports of life in the concentration camps of G e r m a n y during World War II, where raw ontological anxiety was experienced, are t e s t i m o n y to this perspective. A wan smile or the steadying finger of an older inmate on the arm of a youngster b e c a m e saving and long-remembered events. For one who has trotted to the r a t - a - t a t - t a t of business and who has been snatched back from the jaws of death, family relationships may suddenly take on deeper meaning. We m a y even give up our compulsion to possess things and enjoy some elemental simplicities, like the chirping of a bird, more wholeheartedly. Our vision of what is i m p o r t a n t m a y become more refined. On the other hand, we may try to set up defenses against this anxiety, some of which are everyday occurrences. Avoiding going under a ladder, knocking on wood, turning one's back on a black cat a b o u t to cross one's p a t h are superstitious but harmless defenses against vague fate. Some are quite destructive. We m a y grasp an offspring and clutch him compulsively out of our dread, as when a mother, distraught over the sudden d e a t h of her husband, says to her child, "You are all I have left." How great the toll of h u m a n life to build the pyramids of Egypt, mute testimony to the anxiety about death. Ontological anxiety can both free us and enslave us. We shall return to this point after looking at other dimensions of anxiety. Guilty anxiety

T h e anxiety of guilt is profbundly, though not exclusively, a theological concept. The ultimate analysis of this anxiety "before G o d " is given by revelation. Since I have leaned on Tillich to some extent in elaborating ontological anxiety, I need to

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dissociate m y s e l f from h i m w h e n he m a k e s guilt a n d c o n d e m n a t i o n a t h i r d a s p e c t of t h a t anxiety.* Nevertheless, there is a p r o f o u n d r e l a t i o n s h i p a m o n g finitude, e s t r a n g e m e n t , guilt, a n d ontological anxiety. It is as finite, c o n t i n g e n t p e r s o n s t h a t we know the t h r e a t of ontological anxiety. W h a t we do with t h a t t h r e a t involves us in e s t r a n g e m e n t a n d guilt. W h e n we t u r n our b a c k s on G o d to find surcease f r o m the p a i n of ontological a n x i e t y in the securities of t i m e a n d space, e.g., business, h u m a n relations, good causes, we estrange ourselves f r o m G o d in favor of idolatrous c o m m i t m e n t s . T h e t h r e a t t h a t we are n o t really in control, t h a t s o m e t h i n g m i g h t h a p p e n to us, is so great t h a t we grasp c o m p u l s i v e l y for w h a t will s t e a d y us. O u t of things a n d relationships, good in themselves, we m a k e idols to s u p p o r t us. For e x a m p l e , w i t h one person it was his very responsible position to w h i c h he gave h i m s e l f u n s t i n t i n g l y t h a t b e c a m e his idol. As he b e g a n to a n a l y z e w h a t he was doing, he c a m e to see t h a t the m a d d e n i n g whirl in w h i c h he was a willing p a r t i c i p a n t was for h i m a subtle denial of his h u m a n l i m i t a t i o n . Since the position was a c h u r c h position, it h a d t h e a u r a of the holy a b o u t it c o u p l e d with an ostensible faith c o m m i t m e n t , m a k i n g it all t h e more diabolically an idol. So close was this idol to the c e n t e r of his faith t h a t he n e e d e d a h a r d n u d g i n g to see it. E v e r y a t t e m p t to s h a p e a n y t h i n g i n t d w h a t it is n o t brings agony, w h e t h e r it is a spouse, an offspring, or a b a n k a c c o u n t being s h a p e d into the f o r m of a god. T h e i n v e s t m e n t of some t h i n g w i t h a s t a t u s n o t due it is false; n o t t h a t t h e t h i n g is false, b u t t h e u s e to w h i c h it is put. So t h e a n x i e t y m e a n t to be relieved, e.g., ontological anxiety, is e x c h a n g e d for a different anxiety, t h e a n x i e t y of' guilt. We t e n d to b e c o m e c h o k e d with cares a n d surfeited with t h i n g s a n y w a y ; so it is easy to t u r n to t h e m a n d a w a y f r o m living b y faith in God. C a u g h t in dread, f a c e d with i m p o t e n c e , we settle for finitude, b r e a k i n g the c o n t i n u i t y of t r u s t in God. T h i s is original sin, t h a t is, t h e original f o r m a n d i m p e t u s of sin. It is denial of G o d a n d a f f i r m a t i o n of things of sight a n d s o u n d in his place. It is f u n d a m e n t a l l y d o u b t t h a t God c a n a n d will care for us, c o u p l e d with t h e c o r r e s p o n d i n g urge to locate s o m e t h i n g or s o m e o n e who will care for us. We m a k e a h a b i t u a l response t h a t is idolatrous: we p u t c r e a t e d goods in t h e place of h i m who alone is w o r t h y of our u l t i m a t e c o m m i t m e n t . G u i l t y a n x i e t y is the theological n o t i o n t h a t we are responsible for this h a b i t u a l response. It is a n x i e t y u n d e r t h e w r a t h of G o d b e c a u s e we have refused to live in our creatureliness u n d e r the grace of God. * Tillich makes finitude in some sense evil, relating, as he does, finitude and estrangement. Man as finite being is estranged; to be estranged is to be guilty. (Systematic Theology, I, pp. 255 f.) The real difference for Tillich between essence and existence is the difference between the essential world as a mental picture but not actual, and the actual world, which is finite and estranged. But is this difference due to sin or to existence itselfv. If to sin, then the anxiety of guilt is a moral but not an ontological anxiety. If to existence, then the anxiety of guilt is ontological, making finitude in some sense evil, as Tillich holds. Then the biblical doctrine of creation is nothing more than a logical construct. Furthermore, it would seem that ontic nonbeing, the threat of death, is different from moral nonbeing, the threat of guilt. Tillich senses this when he speaks of the anxiety of guilt being immanent in the anxiety of death, of fate and death always awakening and increasing the consciousness of guilt. (The Courage to Be, op. cit., p. 53). But in the Christian doctrine of creation man is finite and good, with the meaning of death a part of his finitude. Death takes on moral significance as punishment, but guilt does not thereby take on ontological significance.

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Elsewhere I have written about the relation between individuation and guilt. 3 Suffice it to say here t h a t individuating responses are normal and a good part of the created order as God intended. T h e y are part of' the becoming of a self. Yet they lead to a sense of guilt, because individuation means m o v e m e n t away from control by others, whether m o t h e r for the child or God for the race in its childhood. Man is pitched or thrown toward the future and his individuating acts are part of his moving into the future. When the need to individuate, with its own uncertain step as it moves away from security, has back of it ontological anxiety, we have a powerful drive system operating to make us reach for security. T h e response of idolatry is a f u n d a m e n t a l and constantly recurring t e m p t a t i o n to which we habitually succumb. Standing alone before fate and death, emptiness and meaninglessness, we anxiously grasp for security among the stuff of life instead of trusting God. This is our habitual response. It needs to be m a d e clear t h a t this is not an isolated response now and then, but a habitual one. We reach out to steady ourselves in our dizziness, creating our own assurances, instead of existing in the fact of faith that God is our hope. As I do so, my cares b u m p into yours and hostility is fed. It seems to me t h a t the process I am describing is the prototype of all defensive maneuvering and t h a t sin as idolatry is the prototypal defense mechanism. If a defense mechanism, in psychological language, is the ego's response to danger, and anxiety is the sounding of the bell that danger is at hand, then the ego will use whatever means it can find to protect itself when it feels the pain of anxiety. Translating this into theological language, the self is threatened, anxiety is the pain of this threat, alerting the ego to act, and the ego responds sinfully, t h a t is, turns away from dependence on God to d e p e n d e n c e on stuff around it t h a t is less t h a n God. The self trusts things and others instead of God, who alone is worthy of u l t i m a t e c o m m i t m e n t and who alone can give the self its real peace. W h a t I am suggesting is t h a t the most basic defensive action we know is a theological happening: turning away from God to find security against ontological anxiety in the close at hand. We use other cover-ups to hide this one; for example, we make a lot of God-talk; or we make legitimate our idols by denying t h a t there is a God. We m a y deny any sense of guilty anxiety. While I d o u b t t h a t we can sort out a discrete feeling of guilty anxiety in the theological sense from ontological or developmental anxiety, doing so is not necessary. T h e ultimate analysis of guilt as guilt before God is not given empirically, b u t by revelation. Guilty anxiety is not ontological anxiety, which man feels in his finitude, or neurotic anxiety, which is a mark of his estrangement within h u m a n c o m m u n i t y , but is anxiety u n d e r the wrath of God because we have refused to live in our creatureliness under the grace of God. It is the grace t h a t judges our idolatry in order to re-relate us to him, our Peace. He keeps the heat on us so that we can be saved from substitutes. D e v e l o p m e n t a l anxiety

Even if one does not accept ontological or guilty anxiety, there is still the universal fact of anxiety to explain. Postnatal h u m a n development, c o n f r o n t e d

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by threatening situations at every turn, is development marked by anxiety. If anxiety is the reaction to danger, as Freud said, what are the danger situations? In psychoanalytic theory there are several. Birth is the first, as the infant separates from the warm security of the womb. This experience is the prototype of all separation-anxiety. Life is characterized by myriad experiences of loss, but they come hardest when the nascent ego is struggling for survival and is least equipped to handle shock. The very first year of life, following upon its rude and abrupt entry into the world through the trauma of birth, is a series of losses or threatened losses. We cannot know what a shock to baby it is that day when he glides his hands over the one surface of his body and his mother's and discovers the rent of subject--object. Mother is selbarate from him. Until that day she was continuous with him. Then comes the frightening discovery that he ends and she begins. The age-old philosophical doubt that there is a real object "out there" may well begin in that experience. Nor can we know the extent of the sense of loss th at comes with weaning. Again the surfaces of the two, baby and mother, seemed to be one. As with magic, baby needs were met almost as soon as they were felt. Along with the milk were the soft warmth, the familiar odors, the embracing caress of the mother as well as the gurgling sounds he would soon know as words. While these pleasant sensations are still there, they are not there so constantly. There are longer and longer durations of discomfort and pain. These early encounters of baby with mother have the primitive components of dialogue. And dialogue implies the very separation that the means of dialogue try to bridge. How does the infant, especially after five months, respond to word and gesture, reprimand and caress? How does his own teething process, with its discomfort as well as with the new ability to hurt, fit into this primitive dialogue? How does a sore mouth affect the way he "takes" mother? The mother contributes her feelings at the subverbal level. She loves and hates through her body. The baby has as yet no effective mechanism of intelligibility with which to understand these feelings. In her anxiety she nurtures his. When we add to all these traumatic realities any long separation from mother because of her illness, death, etc., the baby of one year has faced tremendous threats. On sound clinical evidence, Erik Erikson concludes that basic trust or basic mistrust is formed in the emerging organism during the first year. This formation becomes definitive of all future development. While schematically basic trust or mistrust form an either/or, actually I would not expect any infant to be so unscathed that his basic trust would not include some sense of "being left empty," "being left," "being no good," which are descriptive of mistrust and which furnish the basis for anxiety. A basic mistrust would not include that sense of well-being so nuclear to basic trust or it would not be basic mistrust. It is almost impossible to suppose that an infant can emerge from the first year of life without anxiety. I have lingered on this first year to force us back into the earliest stage of postnatal human development to show the earliest threats to the nascent ego, threats felt anxiously and impotently. Add to these the threat of the anal period: the loss of mother's love during toilet-training; the threat of the oedipal period: the loss of the penis (boy) or the loss of love (girl); the threat running through

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early childhood as the child moves through the primary individuating phase of his life risking No from significant others; dread of the superego, as the self feels the loss of approving love as well as threatening punishment; the threat of role diffusion of adolescence as he wonders if he is really man enough (or woman enough) for the world; the threat of job and economic insecurity of adulthood against which degrees in engineering and the sciences, for example, and professional status and achievement are no longer bulwarks of defense. The life of every person has sufficient threat to guarantee that the "panicky sense of vague catastrophe" that we call anxiety is part of human experience. 4 Small wonder we are in the world anxiously. Some interrelationships

I have tried to sort out three dimensions of anxiety: ontological, guilty, and developmental, tracing the first to our finitude, the second to our rejection of dependence upon God, the third to situations of danger in our developmental stages. These three dimensions interact with each other to constitute one of the ways we are in the world: anxiously. Ontological anxiety is basic to both guilty and developmental anxiety. As anxiety that is natural to human existence, ontological anxiety is not guilty anxiety. But since man in his natural anxiety is afraid to venture all on God, really fearing that he cannot trust God, he makes substitutes for God to steady himself in his anxiety. In this way ontological anxiety is a presupposition of sin, as Reinhold Niebuhr has said. Vaguely anxious lest we drop into a hole, we keep trying to fill up the hole, never quite realizing t hat there is no hole. God's steadfast love sees to that. Ontological anxiety is not developmental anxiety either. But it does seem to me quite reasonable to see in developmental anxiety the surfacing of the deeper anxiety. As Paul Tillich has said, " . . . in the anxiety about any special situation anxiety about the human situation as such is implied. ''5 This does not mean t hat the developmental understanding of anxiety wrought out so carefully in empirical studies is being denied. It does mean that such understanding is not the first or the last word in the analysis of anxiety. The oral stage, so early and so primitive, still does not mark the beginnings of anxiety. Whether it is the loss of the womb in the birth trauma, the anxiety of separation from the mother, the loss of a part of the self in castration, etc., there would seem to be interconnections with an underlying vague sense of impending fate, death, emptiness giving to these more observable threats a primordial discomfort. I am also affirming that guilty anxiety is more basic than developmental anxiety, including superego anxiety. Theology sees our existence in the presence of God. What we might term theological guilt derives from the h u m a n community's defiance of God, our turning away from God. Because we have done this "before God," we are sinful. This is the standing of human nature interpreted theologically. Giving developmental anxiety its full due, there is still a substratum of sinful

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or guilty anxiety. Assuming basic trust or mistrust to be established in the oral stage, there is a yet more basic mistrust that is sinful. This is the theological insight about the spiritual dimension of man. Developmental anxiety, if it has ontological and guilty precursors, is seen in greater depth than its psychological clinical data alone would provide. Yet in no way am I minimizing this form. (There is a facile and widespread tendency for church people in the name of religion to deny the findings of psychology or to minimize its therapeutic benefits largely out of a guilt-laden notion that such findings make faith look suspect.) Neurotic illness has been greatly clarified by studies in developmental anxiety. When developmental anxiety has taken a pathological turn, it is doubtful that other forms of anxiety can be dealt with until neurotic anxiety is cleared up. For example, a young man's anxiety over repressed hostility before authority figures may have to be dealt with before he can in any meaningful way face up to confronting God. A woman's feeling of being rejected, stemming from childhood when her father made it clear to her that he preferred boys, may have to be worked through before she can trust God, who is almost always portrayed in masculine terms. The healing of neurotic anxiety may open a person to deeper healing. But the healing of neurotic anxiety may also induce a false security by premature relief. The pastor must always have this second concern as part of his counseling ministry lest some measure of restored health mask a deeper illness. Empirical findings that expand our understanding of neurotic anxiety and clarify both the meaning and the way of healing are vitally necessary, for they often give us the first handle on anxiety. Ontological and guilty anxiety remain; yet they, too, because of clinical work, may be more open for the creativity that belongs to the former and the healing that is needed by the latter. The church and anxiety

In this final section we look at two ways the church can help with anxiety. We begin by noting the widespread dissatisfaction with worship, especially preaching on the part of both clergy and laity; in short, with the 11:00 o'clock Sunday morning. The preaching office has become sterile, with preachers cynical about its accomplishments and the laity unmoved. A brief analysis of the problem will not do it justice; but this is not the place for an extended analysis. I venture the opinion that the sickness of the preaching ministry is due in part to underestimating the depth of man's predicament. If man is not ontologically and guiltily anxious, but only developmentally so, then the new priesthood of psychiatry can do the sufficient job, along with the rest of the mental health team. But if man's anxiety is threefold, then preaching in its historical meaning of proclaiming God's gracious activity for the healing of man is an office of utmost importance. In essence, the theory of preaching is that the unseen God uses the very human words of the preacher to speak his Word to the gathered people. Preaching is a means of connecting God and man. But this presupposes that somehow the connection has been broken. Ontological anxiety, especially in the forms of death

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and meaninglessness, and the anxiety of guilt are clues of broken connections. Preaching is proclamation. Fundamentally, it is heralding the good news of what God has done and is doing to heal us. It is the story of his suffering love, the reiterated promise of his covenantal loyalty despite our disloyalties, the glad announcement that we are forgiven and that all we need to do is accept the forgiveness. Preaching reminds the people of the tasks God has set for them, not as a price for his goodness but as a response to the goodness that he shares with all people everywhere. Therefore, preaching speaks to the deepest levels of man's predicament: providential assurance in the face of death, divine intention working meaning out in the midst of ambiguity and meaninglessness, the grace of forgiveness overcoming guilt. There is a tendency in preaching to analyze problems, and if the solution is there at all, it is pale alongside of the analysis. In the typical 20-minute sermon, the first 17 minutes are a patchwork haranguing the congregation's sins, scolding it for failing to support the institutional church, and denouncing broadly the society's life style. In the last three minutes, long after the auditors have psychologically turned off their hearing aids, the preacher may try to bring healing by appeal to the love of God or the cross. It is my experience that most people intuitively know that something is wrong, and often have an intuitive knowledge of what it is. Perhaps the art of preaching consists in bringing the intuitions into the light of day and matching them with the doings of God with a clarity all can read. The problems of living, personal and social, need not be omitted from preaching. In fact, the prophets and the apostles are models against such an omission. But the people are better able to deal with personal animosity and social justice, for example, if their deepest anxieties find some answering assurance that "neither death, nor l i f e . . , nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers.., nor anything else in all-creation, will be able to separate [them] from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord" (Rom. 8:38, 39). If preaching is the communication of good news, perhaps the sermon should begin with the comforting news of absolution. What God has done, and is doing, is the context for helping the congregants to face themselves: their deepest anxieties over death, meaninglessness, and guilt. Perhaps the typical sermon needs reordering: beginning with the salvation God has wrought and gently exploring how that stupendous fact plays in on our destructive anxieties and fears. There is a model for this: transference as the basis for therapy through insight. Using to the fullest empirical findings and employing psychiatric insight with sophistication and wisdom, the church has for its primary target ontological and guilty anxiety. Psychiatry is not equipped, nor is it its p r i m a r y business, to be concerned with these more basic forms of anxiety. The church becomes the ally of psychiatry when it does its work well in terms of the anxieties it is especially prepared to deal with. This is preventive and supportive therapy at least. It becomes the enemy of psychiatry when it moves in with psychiatry to do its work, for thereby it is tempted to slide over the dimensions that are so havoc-producing in our time and that are helping to fill the psychiatrists' counseling rooms. Of course, preaching is only one means of helping man to

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connect with God. But it, along with the rest of worship, is a basic means when the preacher knows the plight of man, believes t h a t God wills to cure man, and does his homework to make the connection real. Preaching and hearing can then be a redemptive event. At the same time, when the church ignores developmental anxiety, when it has not informed itself about t h a t form of hurting and healing, it has also failed its mission. M a n is a whole, and he who is responding anxiously at whatever level must be dealt with. No doubt sometimes through pastoral counseling or referral developmental anxiety must be addressed first or the church's good news will never get beyond repressed sexual wishes or the t y r a n n y of an undigested father. Yet the church must be clear about which things are primary in its ministry. It must be especially clear because its ministry is to be the i n s t r u m e n t of grace for a peculiar healing. A second area of help is the church in its societal character. As a c o m m u n i t y , the church has a built-in means for helping with all three dimensions of anxiety. Yet there is dissatisfaction and cynicism about this, too. Perhaps the cynicism arises because the church promises to be a redemptive community, but there is so little empirical evidence t h a t its promise is ever fulfilled. One prominent psychiatrist has told me: If we psychiatrists had a group about us as you have the church about you we would long ago have found out how to use it therapeutically to help man with his anxieties. W h e t h e r or not he could make good his boast I do not know. But I suspect he has put his finger on our vulnerability. If any pain of man requires an accepting, supportive c o m m u n i t y it is anxiety. Every pastor knows how dark the night gets for his parishioner who is anxiously facing his own i m m i n e n t death. Another h u m a n being in a chair nearby during those long hours after midnight relieves the awful aloneness. T h e grieving black m a n who was ushered in ahead of a waiting M e t h o d i s t bishop to see the Reverend H a r r y Emerson Fosdick came out an hour later, his face less dejected, and said, " H e just put the stars back in my sky." His had been the anxiety of emptiness over his wife's death. In those churches where there are efforts at small group participation the announced agenda often seems less i m p o r t a n t t h a n a deeper agenda of felt need for acceptance and intimacy. In a group of 35 assembled to participate in a new form of worship with guitars, the new style hymns, subgroup discussions, etc., the deepest desire seemed to be to overcome the sense of emptiness and meaninglessness through a loving intimacy. T h e intimacy sought was to be warmed in a climate suitable for overcoming the anxiety of alienation. W h e t h e r it be the pain of anxiety of guilt before God or anxiety of neurotic g u i l t - - a n d I don't know how to separate out the feeling of e a c h - - i t is o n l y through another h u m a n being or a group that relief and eventual healing come. The psychiatric model is instructive. The young man, his guilt feelings neurotically fixated at age five, can only move emotionally around the circle of his fixation. The psychiatrist brings to the young m a n who has come to him his wisdom and his skill, but also himself. He says in essence to the young man: I believe in you. I shall stand by you to affirm you so t h a t you can begin to believe in yourself and affirm yourself. A relationship develops, technically called

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t r a n s f e r e n c e , t h r o u g h w h i c h t h e y o u n g m a n c a n r e g a i n s o m e h e a l t h . B u t n o t e : it is t h e a f f i r m i n g , a s s u r i n g r e l a t i o n s h i p t h a t is t h e m e a n s of a n y n e w life. T h e c h u r c h , a c o m m u n i t y of t h o s e w h o h a v e a l r e a d y r e c e i v e d h e a l i n g , is t h e f e l l o w s h i p t h a t h a s i m p l i c i t in i t s e l f t h e m e a n s for h e a l i n g . I t w o u l d s e e m i n c u m b e n t u p o n s u c h a c o m m u n i t y w i t h s u c h p o t e n t i a l for h e a l i n g to d e v e l o p t h a t p o t e n t i a l to t h e fullest. W i t h a n x i e t y u n i v e r s a l , t h e c h u r c h h a s u n i q u e p o s s i b i l i t i e s for h e l p i n g to r e l e a s e a n x i e t y ' s c r e a t i v i t y a n d to b r i n g s o m e r e l i e f to its p a i n . References

1. Tillich, P., The Courage to Be. New Haven, Yale Univ. Press, 1952, Ch. 2 passim. For another interpretation of anxiety as meaninglessness or ego disintegration, see Fingarette, H., The Self in Transformation. New York, Harper Torchbook, 1965, Ch. 2. 2. Heidegger, M., What Is Metaphysics? R. F. C. Hull and Alan Crick, trans. In Existence and Being. Chicago, Gateway, 1949, p. 335. 3. Jackson, G. E., The Place of Individuation in Guilt and Self Renewal, Humanitas, 1969, 5, 143 158. 4. Erikson, E. H., Childhood and Society. New York, Norton, 1950, p. 364. 5. Tillich, The Courage to Be, op. cit., p. 38.

Correction The Rev. David M. Moss, Ph.D., whose article "Parochial Ministry, the Episcopal Church, and Alcoholism" appeared in the July issue of the Journal, is now a pastoral counselor at the Center for Religion and Psychotherapy of Chicago. We learned of his new professional affiliation too late to make the change in the note accompanying his article. - - T h e Editor