Biography
Father Patrick Brennan is the pastor of Holy Family Parish in Inverness, Illinois, an active and vibrant congregation in Chicago’s northwest suburbs. For thirteen years, he was Director of the Office of Evangelization for the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago, where he developed innovative renewal programs for local churches. He’s an expert in the field of evangelization and church renewal and has served as a consultant throughout the country. Father Brennan is a psychotherapist and the author of several books, including Spirituality For An Anxious Age and The Way of Forgiveness. [Biographical information is correct as of the broadcast date noted above.]  

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          and 30 Good Minutes.

"Jesus Stopped!"  
I see many people in counseling and psychotherapy. Many tell of their struggles with anxiety and stress, and the pain that they are in because of those two realities. Others speak of their battles with depression. Some speak of suffering from anxiety, stress, and depression. For a moment, let’s look at these emotional cousins—anxiety, stress, and depression.

Anxiety can take the form of vague, undefined fears, or acute panic, such as people experience in panic attacks. In normal, healthy fear, people know that they’re afraid and what they’re afraid of or whom they’re afraid of. But in much of today’s anxiety, people feel a fearful discomfort, and they cannot even pinpoint or target where the emotional pain is coming from.

In many instances people have a chronic sense of vigilance about life. They deal with a lot of "what ifs" concerning the future. In their "what ifing," they are highly conscious of the negative, disastrous outcomes that could visit their lives. Some people’s anxiety is much more acute, causing them to experience panic attacks, powerful waves of anxiety that cause physiological symptoms that include feeling nauseous, or that one’s going to pass out, or even have a heart attack, a stroke, or die. Panic attacks have been known to produce a kind of secondary fear, in which one fears being afraid, or fears being in situations or with people that might cause the panic again.

Often in panic victims, we begin to see patterns of avoidance—people avoid the people or the situations that might prompt the panic. In such situations, people are becoming increasingly emotionally disabled. They often feel that they are losing their minds—though in actual fact they’re not. But such emotional situations can cause a considerable amount of wear-down emotionally as time passes.

Stress. Stress is a pattern of living for some time with feelings of anxiety or panic. Stress is a psychological and a physical state. One’s feelings of fear, anxiety, or panic begin to negatively affect one’s physiology—blood pressure may be raised, cholesterol might be exceedingly produced, the gastrointestinal system may be aggravated. Stressful people live with a chronic "fight or flight" approach to life. Feelings all the time are present in these people, feelings like they’re under attack, they’re either ready to defend themselves, or to take flight to avoid being hurt or injured.

We in the adult world certainly experience a good deal of the anxiety, panic, or stress of our culture, but we also hand it on to our children. Literature has begun to abound on the topic of kids under stress, hurried kids, teens who are into self-destructive patterns of drug or alcohol use, dis-ordered sexual experiences, violence, and gang involvement. Our news programs regularly carry stories of kids killing kids, and kids having kids.

Ours is truly an age of anxiety and stress. Whether anxiety and stress are felt by adults or young people, there seems to be a common denominator in the experiences—anxious, stressful people often are not in touch with themselves. They/we are not in touch with what we’re thinking, what we’re feeling. Often in anxiety and stress, unnamed, poorly digested emotional states or thoughts and convictions cause a kind of emotional indigestion that expresses itself symptomatically as anxiety, panic or stress.

Now, if we’re going to lower some of the anxiety and stress levels in our lives, we certainly need to adjust our schedules better so that there’s time for relaxation, recreation, and relationships. In this schedule adjustment, I believe we need also to make time just to listen to ourselves, to get in touch with and to name some of what is present within us—some of our thinking patterns, some of our convictions, some of our feelings. We need to get congruent with ourselves.

I counsel people to trace their angry, stressful feelings, almost like tracing the cord of a lamp back to a socket into which it’s plugged. Much like electricity flows from the socket to the lamp, so also there are a lot of unnamed, misunderstood thoughts and feelings in an anxious person that need to be discovered and better understood. Listening to ourselves, gaining insight into ourselves, is a first step toward healing, toward gaining greater inner peace.

Connected to anxiety, panic and stress, and sometimes free-standing by itself, is another painful emotion, and that’s depression. As with anxiety, there are a number of types of depression—there’s bipolar disorder, which takes a person from one emotional extreme to another, from the heights of elation to the depths of despair. There’s also dysthymia, which is a long-lasting, low grade depression over years, and then there’s major depression, which is a significant episode in one’s life characterized by feelings of helplessness or hopelessness.

Depression is an insidious disorder in that people can be falling into it and not even recognize it; they can in fact deny that it’s happening to them, until a kind of free fall occurs in which a person finds himself or herself in an emotional hole that he or she cannot get out of alone. Often depressed people need the help of a counselor or a therapeutic group setting to begin to deal with and overcome depression. A key first step again is the posture of listening, in the case of depression, to some of the accumulated losses, hurts, or anger that may have snow-balled into depression. In anxiety, stress, and depression, listening and gaining insight are crucial first steps toward recovery.

There are four issues that I think need to be looked at in trying to transform the painful emotions that we have been talking about into more positive, life-giving energy.

There’s a school of psychology called "Cognitive Therapy" that says that our feelings flow from pre-conscious, unconscious patterns of thinking that we engage in. We’re thinking things about ourselves, about people, or life in general; and we don’t even notice it. Often these thoughts or convictions are mistaken or flawed. Examples of mistaken, or flawed thoughts are convictions like: I’m inferior. People are out to get me. Life is unfair. Things will never go my way....and on and on. From that core of "stinkin’ thinkin’", we often generate feelings of anxiety, panic, stress, or depression, that produce the pain within us.

So in our listening and in our naming, it’s crucial to ask the question, "What really was I thinking when I felt so anxious or so depressed?" By changing our cognitions, our patterns of thinking, we can begin to change how we feel. "I am competent. I am lovable. People are good and loving. Life is wonderful. I can accomplish much of what I set my mind to..." all of these produce joyful, positive feelings that change the inner landscape of our psyches, as well as eventually change our behavior, our patterns of action, and our style of relating.

Secondly, research has shown that emotional states also have a biochemical component. A pattern of neurons in the brain, firing at inappropriate times, can cause what is called neurotransmitter fluid to flow at inappropriate times in inappropriate amounts. A depressed person, an anxious person, can either be "short on" or have "too much of" these chemicals in the brain. In addition, other physical conditions, like an overactive or an underactive thyroid, can contribute to feelings of anxiety or depression. Now, all of this suggests that a good physical that assesses the body’s chemical activity is a must in trying to alleviate anxiety and depression.

There’s a third factor that influences us emotionally, and those are situations or people that we interact with daily. Environmental stresses at work, difficult relationships at work or at home, can make us extremely anxious or depressed. Often in these situational, emotional patterns, we act too much like victims and martyrs, as if we’re stuck with the problem, stuck with person, stuck with the situation and the emotional pain that they cause us. We need not be controlled by our feelings. No, rather we can manage our feelings.

Feelings are like gasoline in a car. We have our foot on the accelerator, and we can decide how much energy we want to give to an individual or a situation. We can modulate our feelings. Some people or situations deserve a "10" on the emotional scale: but some deserve a "5"; and some deserve a "1"; and some deserve a "0". To some degree, how much we allow ourselves to be flooded by anxiety or depression is really our call, our decision.

There’s a fourth factor that needs to be looked at by those of us who claim to believe in God, and that’s the role of spirituality in our emotional health. In my own journey toward wholeness, I’ve had periods when I’ve suffered from anxiety and depression. Some of these times have been rather protracted and difficult. During those times, I saw how so much of my fear, or so much of my gloom, was indeed a spirituality problem. I really didn’t believe in God, God’s love, God’s power as much as I claimed. I was into what Cardinal Newman called years ago, "notional faith," rather than real convictional faith; I was into spirituality as a 50-minute hobby, as Stephen Carter describes so many of our faith styles in his popular book, The Culture of Disbelief. In my mid-twenties, I learned the importance of spiritual surrender, surrender into the unconditional love of God as a loving parent. I learned to "let go" of fear, people, situations that I was trying to control. I practiced an adaptation of Jesus’ final words on the cross, "Father, into your hands I hand over my life..." and over the years, many times a day I hand over myself, and many other people, and many worries and many situations.

In terms of managing depression, I’ve become more and more convinced of the power of prayer, the power of grace in breaking the free fall of depression, getting new footing, and moving on to more positive approaches to life and relationships. I’m convinced of the wisdom of 12-step spirituality that teaches us that a power greater than ourselves can restore us to wholeness. But we need to call on that power very intentionally, realizing we cannot "go it alone," we cannot "do life ourselves." At times when doom and gloom had me convinced "I can’t," God’s grace and God’s power, tapped into through prayer, transformed my inner world into a posture of "I can," or "I will."

On occasion, counselees or people in spiritual direction will openly confess, "I long ago gave up on God and prayer. How would I begin again?" And my answer is quite simple -- you begin by beginning; but keep it simple. A person in emotional pain, seeking healing and recovery need only murmur or say, "God, help me," or "Lord, have mercy," or "Into your hands," but say those words or others from the heart, not from the head. Pray out of the brokenness, out of the void, out of the turmoil, out of the darkness. Don’t try to use prayer to get rid of the pain. Rather in the pain, realize God’s saving presence with you in the pain, as God the Father was with Jesus as He hung on the cross. And we always need to pray with persistence, to practice a discipline of prayer. Mysteriously, persistent prayer in the midst of pain will result in a new experience of inner peace, courage, hope that we didn’t know before. As Jesus says in the Gospel of Luke, "Ask...seek...knock. God gives the Spirit to those who pray." Jesus does not assure us of all the things that we pray for. Rather He assures us of the presence of the Spirit as the net result of persistent prayer.

I believe that one of the most striking figures in the gospel stories is Bartimaeus from the 10th chapter of Mark. The language of the Gospel passage suggests that this blind man, Bartimaeus, didn’t quietly and politely ask Jesus for sight! No, we’re told Bartimaeus continually shouted out, over and over again, "Jesus, have pity on me...Jesus have pity on me...Jesus, have pity on me." And because of that man’s persistence, Jesus stopped. "What do you want," asked Jesus. Bartimaeus answered, "I want to see." Jesus gave that man new vision, new sight.

So many of us in this anxious, depressed culture that we live in are saying the same thing as Bartimaeus. We want to see; we want to see things in a new way. Well, Jesus will stop for us and gradually impart to us new vision, as we passionately seek out His healing presence and touch in persistent prayer.

Biographers tell us that Martin Luther suffered from bouts with depression. In a time without sophisticated anti-depressant drugs, Luther had to learn to catch himself going into a difficult emotional period, and then take steps to stabilize his inner world. He had to take the steps talked about today to change his thoughts and feelings, to adjust the environment that he was in or his response to the environment, and to do what he had to do to place himself in daily conscious contact with the loving Higher Power.

Folks, spirituality holds such good news for those who suffer emotionally from anxiety and depression. Life in God is a source of new, positive cognitions or thought patterns that can turn around painful, dysfunctional emotions. Life in God is also a source of a mysterious, life-changing power that we do not have in and of ourselves. We’ve traditionally called that grace.

Keep in mind the reassuring words of the First Letter of John, Chapter 4, "Perfect love— God’s love—can cast out fear....Love is still imperfect in the person who is still afraid."

Interview with Patrick Brennan
Interviewed by Bud Knoedler

Bud Knoedler: Patrick, I have a question about your involvement with church renewal, which is a phenomenon that’s happening in many denominations, including yours. My question is this: that in the increasingly secular society that we live in, is there any evidence that today’s baby boomers, or the younger people, are turning to the claims of scripture, to the claims of Christ, to a relationship with God, for answers to the difficult questions in their lives such as you have talked about -- guilt, anxiety, stress?

Patrick Brennan: Yes, there’s some growing literature being done, some research being done, by a fellow by the name of Wade Clark Roof and a sister that works with him, Mary Johnson. There is evidence that baby boomers have sort of bottomed out on the independence, isolation, success track, and are really beginning to look for something; therefore, the title of his book, A Generation of Seekers.

People are beginning to seek, but Roof is saying that people in that big demographic bulge, born between ‘46 and ‘64, they’re not seeking institutionalism, and they’re not seeking religions that are characterized by hierarchy. They’re seeking meaning and spirituality; they’re seeking something to aid them in family life. They’re seeking something that provides them with a feeling of connection or belonging, and sort of relative to what I talked about today, many are seeking inner-healing for emotional struggle. This age group is a highly psychologized generation and they experience salvation through their souls and psyches a great deal.

Knoedler: And you say they’re not seeking this or necessarily finding this through established churches, denominations. And if not, how then?

Brennan: Many of the main-line churches are suffering in terms of numbers. I find that people in this age group and younger folks, Generation X’ers as they call them, in their twenties, are crossing denominational lines. In my age group, or in the culture I grew up in, Irish-Catholicism, you operated a lot on guilt and obligation, but people today are voting with their feet, and they’re going to congregations and communities where they’re really fed spiritually.

Knoedler: There seems to be no lessening of the use of drugs in our culture, especially among our youth. In your experience with young people as you’ve had, how do the claims of scripture speak to this problem?

Brennan: Well, I just had a discussion with our youth minister out at Holy Family about this, because we’re conscious of a rise in the incidence of alcohol and marijuana use among some kids. I think kids are looking for a high and they’re looking for inner-peace. Only substances provide artificial highs and artificial peace. I really think it’s only in a spiritual life and a spiritual program that kids or adults will find a natural high and a natural peace.

Knoedler: And how do you encourage them to attend these kind of non-structured, not necessarily in the church, gatherings where they can get this training?

Brennan: In the early church, they didn’t do a lot of knocking on doors and doorbell ringing. Evangelization took place by contagion, word of mouth. People heard about passionate communities and the life-changing experience that membership in the community could bring, and they were magnetically attracted to these groups, and I think that’s how it’s going to happen in the future. I think excellent parishes, excellent congregations will attract, and lifeless, dispirited, maintenance-type parishes will not.

Knoedler: And they have found ways, non-traditional ways, of having meetings, perhaps not even in the church, but sponsored by various denominations.

Brennan: Sure, I was in Southern California last spring and I noticed that two Presbyterian churches were actually offering services away from the campus for younger families.

Knoedler: I’m sorry we don’t have more time in this interview. It’s been great to have you here.

Brennan: It’s good to be here again.