First Parish Bedford UU

“Anxiety! The Strange Case of Claustrophilia” or

“You’ve Got to Stop Living in a Vacuum!”

A Sermon by the Rev. John Gibbons

delivered at The First Parish in Bedford, Massachusetts, Unitarian Universalist

on December 7, 2008



Reading





The Long Walk

BY DAVID S. BLANCHARD,
Consulting Minister, Unitarian Universalist Church of Utica, NY

The best story I ever heard about gift-giving has nothing to do with Christmas, and everything to do with Christmas. It’s about an African boy who wanted to give a gift to his teacher who was going home to England. The child had no money and his options were few. The day before the teacher was to leave, the child brought her a huge seashell. The teacher asked the boy where he could have found such a shell. He told her there was only one spot where such extraordinary shells could be found, and when he named the place, a certain bay many miles away, the teacher was speechless.


“Why...why, it’s gorgeous...wonderful, but you shouldn’t have gone all that way to get a gift for me.” His eyes brightening, the boy answered, “Long walk part of gift.”


“Long walk part of gift.” Most of the meaningful gifts we give to each other require some version of that “long walk.” The long walk we sign on for with children, who need our patience, our wisdom, our honesty, and our trust more than we might first have imagined when their lives began. The long walk we share with our spouses, which takes us through uncharted, unexpected territories of sickness and health, richer and poorer, better and worse. The long walk we take with our friends when they are grieving the loss of someone they love, when they are ill, when they are discouraged. The long walk of feeling a sense of unity with those whom prosperity has left behind. The long walk of reconciliation with all that separates us from a deep sense of life’s great purpose and meaning. “Long walk part of gift.”


When Christmas has been tidied up and packed away for another year, the gifts acknowledged, many already forgotten, the New Year stretches in front of us. What will get us through those months, with all that they may hold, will not be the things in the boxes. We must look to the hands of those who bought and wrapped and carried those gifts. With their gifts, they are telling us something too wonderful, perhaps too embarrassing, for words. They are telling us that, for us, they will take the long walk.


So when you open the box and find the chainsaw, the long underwear, the fruitcake, the pot holder, or the seashell from a distant ocean, remember that it’s not just “the thought” that counts. Remember too, “long walk part of gift.”



The Sermon



Last week I received some letters from my mother Mary Lou, which would not be too surprising except that she’s been dead for seven years. 

They actually were sent to me by Mary Lou’s best friend Phyllis who saved a batch of letters she received in 1980.  My mother wrote letters in batches, often daily, to her friends, to me, to my high school friends, to politicians, to relatives in the nether branches of the family tree.  She once sent a care package to me that included a stick of butter.  She was, indeed, unpredictable. 

So on December 4, 1980 she writes, “Can’t believe that when another month rolls around it will be 1981.  Where has 1980 gone?  And also it was November 4 when the die was cast for the next 4 years.  It’s hard to understand how that man…the moral majority…the reactionaries…& all the rest made it.  But I guess we didn’t have a spark to get us fired up…or something.  Do you watch the McNeil-Lehrer report…& tonight it was Uhlmann, McGovern & Church whose years of being the sane humanitarian legislators have now come to an end.  They must have seen it coming but perhaps too late…or couldn’t believe like the rest of us that RR (Ronald Reagan) could do it.  I’m not worried that we will be able to survive but what about the kids & their kids…and the less fortunate’s who even now are just holding on.”

She talks also about the weather and peoples’ health and how she took a job with the US Census bureau (mainly, I think, so she could walk around town and chat with people).  “The job is shuffling yellow cards with an odd assortment of people I’ve never seen before.  But 1 gal thinks she remembers me from the Adlai Stevenson picnic in ’56.  You were there too, Phyllis, and John got lost, the only child to do so, but it all turned out OK.” 

And then she complains about my father Don’s pipe-smoking.  And they bought a new refrigerator: “the old one finally gave off fumes…telling us it was tired.”  

It was in 1980 that I started as minister in Mendon and Uxbridge, churches that did not impress her much but, she said,  “John has to start somewhere.” 

“And Sue and John bought a 150 year old house.”  “(The) floors aren’t level,” she complained.  “We put up a clock but couldn’t use a level because the wall and floor were crooked.”  “They keep the thermostat at 62.  Don didn’t think he would visit there again in cold weather.”  (Buying that house) wouldn’t be my choice but people are different.” “So it goes.” 

“So it goes,” I think, is a phrase she cribbed from Kurt Vonnegut.

Then there was this:  “Talked with John yesterday.  They are feeding Eric the pumpkin left from Halloween.  I’m sure it’s been refrigerated but who ever heard of feeding a 5 mo. old pumpkin?  Of course, not really much different than the squash I loaded into John.”  “So it goes.”

But amidst all her diverse commentaries, the one that surprised me, buried amidst the news and the trivia, was this:  (Again this was written 28 years ago) “Have word of Tom & Mary Ayers son & Bernadette Dohrn who went into hiding after the days of rage & weathermen have come forth.  Apparently there are still charges against her but have been dropped against the Ayers young man…who is 35 now.  Imagine being undercover for over 10 yrs.  They have two children…but now will be in Rogers Park.”

What?  Who?  You know, that’s Bill Ayers she’s talking about – the one who became an issue in the presidential campaign!  Apparently, my mother was “palling around with terrorists!”  I had no idea!  (There was, by the way, an op/ed in yesterday’s New York Times written by Bill Ayers that explains that, whatever mixed and muddled actions happened in opposition to the Vietnam War, he really was not a terrorist.)

Well, enough of all that and I’ll let you know if I get more letters from Mary Lou.  But I think with these letters I may have received my very best Christmas gift, a gift that comes with its own version of “the long walk.”

A lot of who I am comes from Mary Lou and, though I’m not nearly as faithful a correspondent as she was, there were some essential life lessons from her that I’m still learning and that consciously and unconsciously I’m probably trying to pass on to you.  The lessons have something to do with acknowledging that the world  - our world – is a big and diverse place with a lot of odd and interesting people and that we have some responsibility to make it better and, well, it’s actually possible to have a pretty good time while doing so. 

There’s more to life than we think, more even than we can imagine.   That’s pretty much the summary of my ministry.

Now it says I’m here today to talk with you about “anxiety” and I promise you we’ll get there but this sermon, too, comes with a long walk.

Let’s start with the purpose of the church.  The only purpose of the church, I think, is to encourage us to grow spiritually.  Now, I’m going to let you split whatever hairs you like over the meaning of that but, to me, it means there’s more to life than we think, more even than we can imagine.  There’s an interconnected entirety of which we are a small but not insignificant part. 

You know, that’s really what Karen was talking about last week:  that poem by Thich Nhat Hanh – we are the mayfly and the bird, the frog and the grass-snake, the child in Uganda and the arms merchant, the 12 year old girl and the pirate rapist…”Please call me by my true names so I can learn all my cries and laughs are one, so I can see that my joy and pain are one.”

Over the last few months, you’ve heard me think out loud about our rites of passage: how a child dedication says that infants are born into a community larger and stranger than its own tight-clutching parents, that teenage coming-of-age signals passage into a weirder and wider world; that marriage is a wholesale turning over of one’s selfhood to the weird and wideness of another person; and that a memorial service signals that even death is not the end. 

As I have learned, dead people can still use the postal service; my mother may be more alive to me today than when she was drinking A&P beer and walking the streets.

I drift to old Walt Whitman:

Why should I wish to see God better than this day?

I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then,

In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass,

I find letters from God dropt in the street, and every one is sign’d by God’s name,

And I leave them where they are, for I know that wheresoe’er I go

Others will punctually come for ever and ever.


To grow spiritually is to progressively realize that there is more to life than we think, more even than we can imagine.  Spiritual growth is a long walk of breadth and depth and limitless dimension.

OK, so what’s this about anxiety?  It’s at this point in my sermon-writing that I turn to google to get the etymology of anxiety.  And what comes up?  Pop-up ads for…

Anti-Anxiety Remedy!  Proven natural remedy for immediate relief. Safe and non-addictive. Seredyn.com

Stress Relief Marriage & Business Consultant, Licensed Psychologist, Call Today! www.DoctorJosephHarrington.com?

But here google gives the etymology and it’s just what I was hoping:  1623, from L. anxius "solicitous, uneasy, troubled in mind," from ang(u)ere "choke, cause distress" (see anger). The same image is in S.Cr. tjeskoba "anxiety," lit. "tightness, narrowness."

Anxiety is the choking feeling you get in a tight, narrow, small place. 

When I announced anxiety as my sermon topic, I think I had in mind the choking feeling I had when I saw that the mail brought – not just letters from my mother – but tight, small, narrow envelopes from my bank, statements of my retirement account and the church investment account.

There’s a lot of anxiety going around these days:  533,000 jobs were lost in November, the most since 1974…unemployment…there are fears to fear and fear to fear.

And so I recently read a “history” of anxiety and I’ve learned that humans tend to find scapegoats for their anxieties, and when in the Middle Ages, for example, there were crop failures and financial panics, “animals were summoned to court for infringing on or demolishing the human food supply.”   That’s right: people blamed their problems on animals.

In “The People Versus Locusts,” the bishop prosecuted locusts as “the guilt of the accused has been clearly proven by the testimony of worthy witnesses and…by public rumor.”  Therefore, “we admonish the aforesaid locusts and grasshoppers and other animals by whatsoever name they be called, under pain of malediction and anathema, to depart from the vineyards and fields of this district within six days….” 

“Pigs went to the gallows, donkeys languished in jail awaiting trial, slugs were excommunicated, moles were sent into exile.”  In 1487, “Jean Rohin, Cardinal Bishop of Autun, “enjoined the slugs in every parish to quit their territory; but after three warnings, the slugs stubbornly refused to progress more than 6 inches in any given direction and were regretfully excommunicated.”  You can’t make this stuff up! 

No doubt, Jews and gypsies also suffered at the hands of the church.

And anxiety is much with us today.

According to the World Mental Health Survey, conducted in 2002 in eighteen countries, anxiety has become the most prevalent mental health problem in the world.  And, as usual, Americans take more than our fair share: The United States has the highest level of anxiety in the world.  Among Mexicans, by contrast, 93.4% have never experienced a major episode of anxiety (or depression, for that matter).

“When Mexicans are beset by what they (and other Latin Americans) call ataques de nervios, they recover their composure twice as quickly.  Their stresses are great: poverty, domestic violence, crime in the border cities and in the urban centers.  But there simply isn’t a great deal of existential gnawing on the furniture.”

One observer says, “In Mexico it is said that people work in order to have holidays,” while in North America, if you have too many family commitments, it interferes with one’s career.  Therefore, “in North America it is best not to have families while in Mexico it is best not to have careers.”

In the U.S. mental and emotional problems now top physical causes as the primary reason for worker absenteeism.

Anxieties about our health and cancer, in particular, are illuminating.  In the 19th century, “being crushed in a rail accident or during an earthquake, drowning, being burned alive, hit by lightning, or contracting diphtheria, leprosy or pneumonia all ranked higher than cancer.”  People today rank cancer as their greatest health anxiety whereas heart disease and car accidents are likelier to be our downfall.  We are most anxious, most fearful, of that which we cannot see.

I hope you understand that I am not diminishing in any way our anxieties nor their reality.  I am saying that we’re rather adept at misidentifying, projecting and oddly focusing our anxieties onto erroneous small, tight, narrow things – be they slugs or bank statements.  Or peas. 

Now I realize that your patience with odd and eccentric illustrations may be waning, but I have one more: the fear of green peas.  The BBC recently aired a story about a woman who had grown terrified of peas.  After the birth of her first daughter, Louise Arnold developed an embarrassing and unmanageable terror of the vegetable.  ‘I’ve got to stop this,’ she told the press, ‘because I can’t bear to be in the same room as peas.  There have been occasions where I’ve been out for a meal and asked the waiter for no peas and had to rush out of the restaurant when they forget.  I can’t even go to my local pub because they serve peas on the menu.  I’d love to lead a normal life and be able to go into the pub and have a drink.’”

Anxiety is the choking feeling you get in a tight, narrow, small place.  Anxiety is what happens when our sense of ourselves, our self-worth, when our life and our world are shrunken and condensed and diminished to something the size of a green pea.

Recently I’ve been traveling with my friend Harold, our minister in Newburyport and Harold has claustrophobia – he’d have to get out of elevators and other small places.  But today I think that claustrophobia actually may be a healthy thing and, instead of a healthy claustrophobia, when anxiety gets the best of us we develop a perverse kind of claustrophilia.  We weirdly fall in love with our neuroses and focus in on our smallest selves. 

“I’m nothing, and yet I’m all I can think about,” says the guy in the cartoon.   Another of my favorite cartoons shows a man yelling into the end of a vacuum cleaner hose, “You’ve got to stop living in a vacuum.”

And so, what to do?  The purpose of the church is spiritual growth, to grow our awareness that there is more to our world and our life than ever we think or even imagine.

We move in this direction – and we loosen the grip of anxiety – when we make connections between our small isolated and alone individual life and lives and we grow in our ability to see and feel our selfhood connected with life and lives beyond our own.

Do you recall the lines from E.M. Forster: “Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect…”

Our spiritual task and opportunity is to make the connections that expand our life and lives and free us from all that chokes our breath and tightens and narrows and diminishes us…and connects us with mayfly and the bird, frog and grass-snake, child in Uganda and arms merchant, 12 year old girl and pirate rapist, John Steven Vipon and his namesake John H. Vipon who writes “Miss you son,” the dead come to life, that which is dead in us comes to life.



“My soul is alarmed, said King David.  How do you quiet the soul?  With drugs?  Through forgetfulness?  By shopping. Or winning fame?  Plan super-prudently for the pandemic flu.  Assign your fear to green peas.  Or deny that you even have a soul: banish it with reason, drown it with alcohol, lose it in the ecstasies of orgasm.  Pick a fight with your neighbor, or a neighboring nation.  Avowedly, determinedly assert control.  I’ve run through the options.”

Just to be clear:  I’m saying that the antidote to anxiety is to lose some control, to connect with life larger than your life. 

You have to figure out what exactly this means in your own life.  I know that this is what you must do, but I actually have no exact idea how you will accomplish this.  I hope that this week you’ll wonder about this.

My mother goes on to say… “Getting to the rambling stage….& it’s bed time so better leave the rest of the rambling for another day…Enjoy the holidays…Somehow it doesn’t seem just right not to have family about but so it goes.  Love…this may be your Christmas greeting too…more love.”