By Jackson Posey | Sports Editor
Scraping at the soil, clawing the faintest twigs away from the blaze, we busy ourselves with preventative lifestyles — a little self-love here, a mental health day there. The fire consumes house after house as we quibble over beverages. We consume instead of quench.
The nation’s two great ingestible vices — digital content and depressants — boast the intractable harmony of snuffing out the inner voice. “Rotting” and excessive drinking have the same end goal: forgetting. Life has scared a generation away from pondering the far edge of happiness.
The late essayist G.K. Chesterton observed that safety, and thus freedom was found within restraint. Like children atop the grassy shores of some tall island in the sea, our capacity for feeling and expressing joy is correlated to our proximity to the edge.
“So long as there was a wall round the cliff’s edge they could fling themselves into every frantic game and make the place the noisiest of nurseries,” Chesterton wrote in “Orthodoxy.” “But the walls were knocked down, leaving the naked peril of the precipice. They did not fall over; but when their friends returned to them they were all huddled in terror in the centre of the island; and their song had ceased.”
The naked peril of the precipice haunts this generation. Postmodernism’s great successes — cultural iconoclasm and moral relativism — have become its greatest failures.
Few have retained the confidence to stand; those who have tend to make a show of inching as close to the edge as possible. Standing, walking, being — it’s all become a game of show-and-tell-and-watch. The “vlogification” of daily tasks has glued a smartphone to the hands of the insecure. A moment of silence feels like an eternity.
Because what lies inside the quiet is precisely what we’re afraid of.
Standing alone before God, with no digital guardrails to prevent a plummet over the edge, the winds around our little island pick up. Whirling under their weight, we grasp at stray blades of grass, desperately searching for something to hold onto. Gravity, once taken for granted, begins to fray. We feel as if we may fly off into eternity at any moment.
And then, with little warning, the wind stops.
All becomes calm.
Everything is still.
The lilies, unbothered by the tempest, twirl amiably. The sparrow chirps, cheerily hopping around the open plain. He gives a wry smile as he finds some spare seeds beside a stone — one more day.
Jesus’ teachings on anxiety draw on the simplicity of the created order. The lily doesn’t sew, or even spend weekends thrifting, yet arises every morning clothed in a brilliant array of radiant beauty.
The sparrows have forsaken Microsoft Excel, ignored the deluge of Klarna pop-up ads and never once considered sports gambling. And yet here they are — alive. Thriving and whistling through life like a cheerful neighbor in his garden.
The lily does not find fulfillment in success, but in total dependency.
“Which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life?” Jesus asks his disciples in Matthew 6. “Do not be anxious, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the Gentiles seek after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.”
Jesus acknowledges the ultimate fate of the lily: being “thrown into a fire” for kindling. History, and indeed postmodernism itself, has demonstrated that much of the beauty around us will burn with little to show for it. A shady tree will fall; a favorite bird will stop returning to the windowsill.
In the end, the earth will sink into the sea, the sky will grow dark and all things will come to a close. The entire experiment of mortal humanity will prove to have been little more than a blip on the infinite timeline of heaven. Still, even amid the wind, there’s hope: the shouted triumphs of chaos are its death throes.
One man, enthroned in heaven and blazing with glory, will bring the chaos to an end in the flash of an eye. The one who feeds the sparrow with his own nail-scarred hands offers us safety and respite. He offers us comfort and peace. He offers us all we’ll ever need.
When the wind swirls, when we stumble off our center, the rebuilt walls catch us. We exhale. There is freedom within structure; there is life within limitation. We inhale the soft morning breeze floating over the soft seas. It’s going to be OK.
Though the winds howl and thunders roll, we can watch in contented silence, safe from the peril of the precipice. We no longer feel the inescapable urge to pick up pennies in front of a steamroller. We can rest in comfort, safe and secure. We can roast our little marshmallows and pop our favorite corn over a flaming jumble of overripe lilies because our Father knows just what we need.
“Do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself,” Jesus says in Matthew 6:34. “Sufficient for the day is its own trouble.”
