Worry Is The Opposite Of Prayer
For a long time I thought anxiety and crippling worry were for other people. Obviously I had sympathy for those who struggled with this kind of mental health issue, and I recognised that many of us battle the constant tension of anxiety. It was just never something that affected me.
That was, until it came to affect me. Over time, like a leaking pipe through the ceiling, what at first was just a sense of unease came to be panic and anxiety. It was utterly overwhelming and at times debilitating.
Unfortunately, when you’re faced with a kind of anxious breakdown you can’t really think much about anything. But when I wasn’t in those critical, life-or-death moments, I realised a lot about worry, about the nature of worrying, where it comes from and perhaps even a different way of viewing it.
At its bottom, worry is the opposite of prayer. This view of the opposition between worry and prayer has made more and more sense, and helps us to reframe worry in a Christian perspective. I’ve made a table below to illustrate some of the oppositions between prayer and worry.
For starters, the root of much worry is the fear of losing control. We worry as if the simple act of thinking about something enough will change the course of events. We consume ourselves with overthinking and playing out scenarios because we want to be ready for any outcome, and try to manipulate the result by constantly dwelling on our problems.
Prayer is opposite to worry in that when we pray, we are not trying to control a situation. Instead we are content on presenting it to God. We accept that we do not have control, and we let go. We give over to God what was never ours to control in the first place.
In this, prayer is a great relief. Worry is constant tension, like gripping something tightly with your hand. Worry holds on to the fear and tries to squeeze all the pain and discomfort that we can from it, while in prayer we find the cooling assurance of the one who asks, “who can add a single day to his life by worrying?”
While worry has its roots in the future, the possibility of what is not yet, prayer is grounded in present reality. I think that’s why there is such an interest in meditation and mindfulness in our society at the moment. These practices get us out of our worry about the future and bring us back to the present moment. We cannot meet with God, who lives in the present moment, if we are trying to live a few steps ahead in a time which has not come to pass yet.
Prayer reminds us that the only time that really matters is here and now. We cannot encounter God in the future or the past, only in this moment, the same way that we cannot change yesterday or do anything in the future. The present is the only place available to us. At the heart of worry is the belief (or lie) that we can live part of the future now. We must, however, accept that we are confined to the present, and that it is best to live here as fully as possible. Otherwise we risk living in the constructions of our worry, which can only ever be a structure of the potential, not the actual.
Our worry is a manifestation of our self-centred nature. Worries usually come from a place of worrying about me, about what other people think of me, about my lack of money, my lack of status, my fears about whether I am a success or not. By contrast, prayer puts us before God where he invites us to see things his way. The mess of our lives never looks so bad once we stand next to the Father, looking back at ourselves, and think with a little self-deprecation, “it wasn’t so bad after all.”
That’s because worry is our sense of self, the small ego of “I”, running wild in our lives. If we let it, the Self will come to dominant our being. We were not built to be governed by our sense of Self, but governed by our sense of God and our sense of belonging in humanity.
The ego is inherently small, thinks only about itself, and does not have the capacity to allow for God. The small self of the ego is fragile and unstable, though it boasts stability and self-assurance. It cannot compute the difficulties of life, which it sees as failures. With a God-centred perspective, difficulties are in fact an inevitable, even necessary, part of the human experience. When we worry, we are clinging on to our own sense of control and trying to make our circumstances work for our good. We will always be disappointed, and therefore continue to worry, because it will never be within our control.
Anxiety is by nature reductive. Those who have experienced anxiety/depression, or know those people, will have seen how worry seems to reduce our options. It puts us into dichotomy, black-and-white thinking, where there are just two equally horrible outcomes and no middle ground, or even just one inevitable outcome.
Worry takes away our sense of possibility, where the prayerful attitude would bring us into the wide-open land of God’s possibility. When we think that it must be this one thing, the Father says, “what about that over there?” It is only when we let go of our own sense of knowing what is right (the foundation of much worry) that we can come into the expansive clear skies of prayer. In this place, we meet a God who contains all things and seems to be growing exponentially in his ability to hold my life in his hands. Learning to allow God to be God is, I believe, the key to praying away worry.
Ultimately, the choice to worry or pray is exactly that: a choice between being God and allowing God. Worry carries with it the sense that I know best, that I have the power and the right to control the circumstances of my life. Prayer is the act of saying: “I choose to see my life with God’s perspective, not my own.” In this, prayer is more about cultivating and attitude of submission to the ways of the Kingdom than saying the right words to get what you want.
The truth is that most things in life are outside of our control. Prayer and worry represent the two different kinds of response we can have to this undeniable truth. We can deny this fact that we indeed have no control and never had any, and work ourselves into panic and guilt over our inability to form the world as we’d like. Or we can accept the lack of control and recognise that we have never had the power we thought we did.
There is a great relief when we come to fully realise that our worry will not change anything, but that prayer will change everything. Prayer leads us into the expansive freedom of God, worry traps us in reductive thoughts where we are unable to think about much more than ourselves. Prayer is the acceptance of the way things are, which is that we are small and stroppy and don’t have the agency and might of the Lord.
When Jesus asks his listeners who can extend their own life with worry, he is not admonishing his listeners so much as he is inviting them to see the futility of their worrying. See how pointless it is to worry, he says, and then let yourselves be free.
It can be helpful to think about the differences between worry and prayer in this way. Of course, they are not exact opposites, but the idea that both are different responses to the same things feels quite intuitive, once realised.
The point of this reflection is also not to make light of anxiety and worry, or to suggest that you just ‘think’ your way out of these problems, or that you are a ‘bad person’ for worrying. I myself worry intensely, and know that prayer is hardly appealing when I am trapped in the recesses of my own mind.
I have found, however, that the best antidote to worry is prayer, for the reasons I have given above. Encounter with the living God is the cure for worry, one way or another.
It’s not that prayer will change your circumstances. Instead, prayer will change you. It will change your perspective, it will bring you out of your own head and nearer to God’s divine mind. It won’t solve everything overnight, but choosing prayer over worry is the beginning of accepting reality, letting go, and finding freedom in God.
