By Sara Billups
These days, you could make a strong case that almost every Christian struggles with anxiety. Our worry may be internal and personal, about our life or the life of someone we love. But often the anxiety we experience trickles down from systems bigger than us that we can’t control.
Not all eras are anxious like this one. External stressors are coming at all of us—war in Ukraine, church, family, racial tensions, AI threatening job stability, social media and more.
As a writer, I am not trying to dig down to the psychological or sociological roots of why our culture is anxious—that’s the role of researchers and practitioners in the social sciences.
Instead, I’m asking the question, “How do we live well in the presence of internal and external anxieties about the physical body, the church body, and the body politic?”
The Physical Body
I’ve lived out real questions of how to hold hope in the presence of uncertainty. I’m a member of the sandwich generation alongside about one in four U.S. adults raising both kids and supporting a parent age 65 or older.
In this season, I’ve found that embodiment—the practice of consciously engaging with my physical body and its sensations rather than just living in my mind—is a holistic way to become aware of how internal and external factors affect my nervous system.
The incarnation offers us a way to think theologically about embodiment. The Bible teaches that Jesus was fully God and fully human. This incarnate Jesus, embodied in flesh, slept, sang, laughed, ate, and suffered. And in the end, God promises that all who love him—in bodies of every color, age, and condition—will be made new.
The body will not be lost or shaken off; the resurrected body will be with God eternally.
The Church Body
I was talking with a friend who pastors a growing church outside Toronto. This friend said he doesn’t often struggle with anxiety, but he sees it manifest in his congregation and in the lives of friends. So many of us have experienced friends leaving church, demoralized and bewildered, or who have abandoned faith structures completely.
A helpful framework is Edwin Friedman’s idea around non-anxious presence: how to take an external posture to counteract the anxiety that can metastasize within churches. In an anxious system, we absorb our anxiety and everyone else’s.
Pastor and author Mark Sayers writes, “By classifying anxiety as a personal issue rather than a systemic issue, we place an enormous burden on the individual, who then must modify their personal life to alleviate the suffering that anxiety brings.”
Collective anxiety has to first be addressed at the leadership level. Nonanxious leaders have learned to model calm and offer it to others in times of panic, when it takes awareness and intention not to pass anxiety down.
I’ve begun to see that just as our anxiety can make others around us dysregulated and uneasy, so, too, non-anxious people can bear peace and calm in a way that others can sense and begin to metabolize.
Looking at the Benedictine vows of fidelity and stability also offer healthy models of spiritual postures for seasons of longsuffering and division.
The Body Politic
Political polarization is one way our anxiety is clear and evident. Each generation has had their own flavor of culture war issues and dysfunction in Washington, D.C., but our current taste is especially sour.
Maybe, like me, you’re wondering how the brokenness of politics could be less ultimate in our lives. Maybe you’re also trying to remain present, engaged and aware of policies and actions that affect people who are vulnerable and where the Church is called to practically serve.
One way I’ve found to ground myself to better be a presence of peace is through the idea of holy indifference that Saint Ignatius introduced in the Spiritual Exercises. In the Spiritual Exercises, he teaches that humans are made to praise and serve God and that the earth was created for people to revere God and find salvation. This central “principle and foundation” is built around the idea that all is gift.
Within that framework, holy indifference is not about trying to wrangle God’s will around a preferred, less anxious outcome. Instead, indifference leads to a state of peace with any outcome if it’s in God’s good order. Practicing holy indifference brings us closer to spiritual freedom, which releases us from striving. Joined with spiritual disciplines, such as prayer and fasting, indifference is an important tool to move you closer to your true self, to who you really are.
Detachment or indifference outside of the Ignatian context may sound like permission to care less or check out. But as the spiritual director Dale Gish clarifies, “For Ignatius, indifference is not about being detached, resignation, fatalism or the absence of desire. . . . Holy indifference is not a state where we do not care about what happens; instead, it is a state of true love.”
Learning this internal practice helps manage anxiety about our individual worries about ourselves, the Church and the world.
With these three practices and others, together we can learn how to face anxiety and look for the joy that can blossom even, or especially, in seasons of personal or collective trials.
Sara Billups is on the Vestry at Grace Church Seattle and the author of Orphaned Believers (2023) and the newly released Nervous Systems, both from Baker Books. You can order a copy for 40% off and free shipping via Baker Book House or at your favorite bookseller.