Stress is a normal physiological response to events that upset your balance and make you feel threatened. The perception of danger, real or imagined, causes the body to move into an automatic “fight-or-flight” response. In situations of real danger this mechanism can save your life. However, activating it chronically endangers your life.
The aim of this article is not to review the causes, symptoms and solutions to stress. There are many excellent resources for this you can find here or here.
Instead, I wish to explore whether and how a relationship with God reduces stress. Studies have shown a positive correlation between faith and lower levels of anxiety and stress, but bringing statistical evidence is not my intent either. My aim is to look at the topic from a philosophical-experiential perspective.
Speaking of experiential perspectives, whenever I want to explore the meaning of an idea deeply, life brings me a challenge to help me understand it experientially. I found out recently that I have the beginning of a cataract in one eye. Since it is not yet “ripe” the recommendation is to wait. Since I never like to wait without doing anything, and I also don’t make any assumptions when it comes to conventional medicine, I started looking for a better solution than cutting out my eye lens (a not-as-nice way to say “cataract surgery”). I found an ophthalmologist in California who gives drops that apparently are working for people to dissolve the cataract. There’s one catch. He’s in California and I’m in Israel.
This dangling of a solution before my nose challenged my trust. In religious terms, it challenged my trust in God. In logotherapy terms it challenged my trust in life. Either way, there is a direct correlation between trust and stress. The more trust, the less stress; the more stress, the less trust. And I was stressed.
If belief in a higher power was helping me, I would not worry or have unreasonable expectations. I would accept change as a normal part of life and therefore tolerate uncertainty and unpredictability. I would have inner control and a sense that I am supported. I would not be experiencing fear or anxiety, helplessness or powerlessness but embrace the challenge and embraces my feelings. I would have hope, perseverance, lightness of attitude and confidence in what I’m doing.
Not having all of these to the greatest degree, the question was formulated in my mind. When I have a stressor in my life, what difference, if any, does my relationship with God make?
There are two elements to a relationship with God that seem to eliminate stress: a) support and b) having a task.
First, you are not alone. Isolation is one of the hardest factors to deal with when you are undergoing any kind of pain or struggle. It has been found that children who are with their parents during a disaster fare better emotionally than when they are alone, even when the circumstances are not as terrible. We want to feel we’re supported, cared for and looked-after. If the caretaker is all-powerful and has infinite love and compassion, this creates a feeling of utmost security. You are never alone. Someone who both loves you and has infinite power to help you is right there with you. That’s really big.
Secondly, you have a job to do. In Logotherapeutic terms, you always have a task, a mission to carry out that life, so to speak is waiting with bated breath for you to fulfill, because no one else can do it instead of you. No one can take your place. When you are feeling powerless (and there is nothing like illness or disability to make you feel powerless), you are empowered by your task.
However, empowerment within the context of a relationship with God is not the same as empowerment in any other context. If you leave God out of the picture then most of the time you are helpless, but in this one small area, this one time you have power. Even with your power, it’s all up to you.
In contrast, seeing the world as a system that is being guided by a Creator who had a purpose in mind in creating it, generates a different feeling. There is something you can do, but that “something” is not significance because you feel helpless about everything else. It has significance because it is the part you have to play in the magnificent orchestra of life.
You cannot see the bigger picture, the intricate, delicate balance being adjusted by the One who is orchestrating everything. At the same time, you are part of the system in which you are given important tasks to do, like a worker who knows his job makes a difference even though he doesn’t know the master plan of the business.
When you care about serving a greater cause, every job is important. How do you serve your Creator with poverty and how do you serve with wealth? How do you serve in a situation of conflict between people? How do you serve when you’ve made a mistake and how do you serve when you’re wildly successful? The question uppermost in your mind is not “Why is this happening?” but “How can I serve from this place?”
Yet, in spite of the power of faith to bring calm and serenity through support and empowering service, a relationship with God can actually increase stress. You want and need the support of someone who is caring. – What happens when you feel the effects of this relationship as hurtful? A greater depth of God’s involvement in your life is threatening. I felt it was a set-up, a tease. “If you’re going to help me, then help me! Don’t show me a solution and then put it beyond my reach!”
There’s no question a trusting relationship with God would bring a sense of peace and serenity if trust meant sitting back secure that nothing bad will ever happen, but we make a mistake in thinking trust means that. There are no guarantees in life. So what does trust mean?
Trust in a benevolent Creator means that whatever happens, it cannot possibly be because God is cruel or that God hates me. Thus the more challenging the situation the more it stretches you not just to cope but to continue to believe in God’s love for you and to find a way to imagine, if not see, that from a transcendent perspective this, too is good.
So in addition to support and service, the relationship is marked by surrender to that which I don’t understand. A personal relationship with God is marked by dynamic movement of alternatively stepping forward to take control and stepping back to release what is not in your control.
Surrender is very different from the powerlessness that people feel when they are experiencing stress. What is the difference between powerlessness and surrender? You can hardly call giving up control you never had to begin with, voluntary. In this sense surrender can be confused with resignation. But resignation is a condition of refusal to acknowledge the truth of your limitations on one hand or the truth of your abilities on the other. Feeling resigned to your situation and powerless to change it, you try to control what is not in your control, the reverse of what you should be doing. In contrast, when you acknowledge the truth of what is not in your control you also admit and take responsibility for what is.
The meaning of surrender is not defeat but giving-one’s-self-over-to. When you are learning anything and you try to manipulate the process, you just get in the way of the teacher’s guidance. It’s only by emptying yourself and being open to receive and absorb the guidance that you learn. Thus, surrender is about trusting that whatever happens is the right outcome. Not everything has to go my way.
Still, things can change unexpectedly. Human beings at one and the same time are part of nature yet stand apart from nature. To be human is to be experience divine providence and operated within the system of miracles, the undercurrent of existence that overrides nature.
For this purpose, prayer is one of the avenues we’ve been given as human beings with which to effect change. As the midrash elucidating the story in Genesis tells it, the grass did not grow until human beings were there to appreciate it and ask for rain. When it comes to miracles and not just the workings of nature, we are God’s helpers.
More than any other topic, the interface between logotherapy and religion revolves around the issue of stress because stress forces you to look for the meaning, both in the sense of what you need to learn from the event and what you need to learn about yourself and your relationship with God.