Stress replaces God. It fills our lives with meaning and purpose, protects us from apathy, provides a direction. Apathy is depressing and tiring, it is without this direction. We are missing God, and we know it. Perhaps not missing God, but ignoring God at a fundamental level, where one’s strength is greatest. A truth in experience we neglect.
What Christians and others call God is this very energy, this very power that we can sense, that at times we can even harness, that at times pulls and pushes us in certain directions, even simply to make certain decisions despite what logical facts may be before us. This is the meaning in life, and our vocation is a response to this meaning. A response to us, as individuals, and our relationship with the greater truth, meaning in the world.
When we abandon religions, above all we abandon a focus on this very meaning. We miss it, it becomes ever more evasive and unclear and distant. Uncertainty of a different sets in, or in the least, we stop seeing the deepest connections between ourselves and the greater reality of our society, our world, our reality. We become increasingly out of touch. We lack direction, purpose.
This is where work and progress and careers come in. We’ve been able to substitute Work for God as our purpose, our meaning. Our prayers have moved from silence in the Church to working in the office. Our hopes, from peace and salvation (personal and universal) to greater economic success and fortune. It is our jobs that give us meaning. And it is stress that gives us passion. We feel alive when we are stressed because we once again feel at the mercy of something bigger, something towards which we are moving.
The glory of God is a human being fully alive. “Fully alive” means movement. We no longer let God pull us, and so it is stress which fills in the emptiness. Jesus is our savior from dangerous apathy and its fake idols and saviors. Stress is a fake idol.
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