I have a penchant for worry. I tend to try to control myself with my mind, anticipating the future and making sure I’ve done everything possible to make it work out for me. This has been my orientation as far back in my life as I can remember. Yes, I’m a control freak. I must admit that at this point in my life I am learning that life is beyond my ability to control and that the very effort itself reflects the machination of my ego. Therefore, the old wisdom of Jesus is having additional meaning for me at this point in my life:
Matthew 6 25 “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? 26 Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? 27 Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life[e]?
28 “And why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. 29 Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. 30 If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith?

I love watching the flowers coming to bloom, this process starting prematurely this year due to the very warm winter in North America. Daffodils are strutting their stuff already. (I recall plucking one of them years ago and having a very powerful subjective flash—-“Am I plucking this flower or is its exquisite beauty plucking me?”) And I thoroughly enjoy watching the birds cavort about in the yard, queuing up at the feeder on my deck, dashing in and out, soaring high in the sky, dancing to a nearby tree but sure to return for another bite. I’m struck by their intensity, by their striking colors, and their relentless determination to articulate “bird”in this corner of the world again.

These above verses from the gospel of Matthew reassure us that it is not necessary to worry and fret any more than do these birds and flowers. The Grace that they live in and emanate daily is available to all of us. I’m sure that this peace they have is related to what Wendell Berry had in mind in a poem, ascribing to the world of nature, “the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.” Berry understood that they do not live in terror of the inevitable end that is in store for them and the rest of His glorious creation, the stark finality of death.

But the teachings of Jesus (and other Holy men and women in our history) teach us that death is something that we should not fear, that it is not as stark as it appears, and something that actually can be accomplished before the end of our physical life. People like James Hillman, Karl Jung, Richard Rohr and many others posit the notion that the real issue, in the depths of our heart, is a willingness to let the ego die. They teach that the crucifixion represents symbolically the “death, burial, and resurrection” of the ego.

And I close with an observation from a psychologist of yesteryear, Irvin Yalom: those who are most afraid of death are actually terrified of life.