Though I have been a high school teacher for nearly two decades, August still feels like an extended Sunday evening. A low-level anxiety hums in the background as I ask myself, “Can I do this again?” After three months of sabbatical spending relaxing summer days as I please, the start of a school year jars me back into the relentless demands of being a teacher — managing 30 teenage boys in a classroom, the bottomless well of grading, taking my turn to supervise a couple hundred kids in the cafeteria for a period. One of my colleagues likens teaching high school to doing improv theatre all day, five days a week!
While the August anxiety returns year after year, over time, I’ve learned how to pray with it, make peace with it, and allow it to be a gateway to deepen relationship with the Spirit. I’ve discovered that there is a spirituality of anxiety.
Our Catholic tradition has long recognized that anxiety is an unavoidable part of the human condition. Jesus offered this advice, “Do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own” (Matt 6:34). Paul advised the Philippians, “Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God” (Phil 4:6). And at Mass the words of the Eucharistic prayer include, “…protect us from all anxiety.” The Trappist monk and writer Thomas Merton observed that experiencing anxiety is a sign of our vitality, of being alive.
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So how might anxiety be an opportunity for spiritual growth? When the August butterflies begin to hit my stomach, I recall a wisdom I learned from studying the work of Jungian psychologist James Hillman: a symptom suffers less when it knows where it belongs, which is to say that not everything can be immediately fixed or resolved, but it can be properly named. When I humbly and simply acknowledge that I am feeling anxious, I know I have taken a step toward a more healthy way of engaging the emotion.
Having recognized and named my anxiety, I can then recognize and withdraw the projections anxiety often triggers. Sharing my worries with spiritual conversation partners as well as my wife Jessica — also a seasoned teacher — helps me become conscious of the fact that I tend to project my negative emotion onto others — I want to blame someone for the way I’m feeling. I look with an unreasonably critical eye to what school administrators say and do, or I peruse my class rosters, anticipating students who might be difficult. Sometimes I fall into regret and self-criticism, asking “Why did I choose to become a teacher?!” But I’ve learned that wisdom — and peace — comes from withdrawing the projections, holding the anxious tension with integrity, and intentionally, patiently creating a space for grace to be born within the discomfort.
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Finally, when I am feeling this push and pull between God’s promise and my own fears, I pray with Genesis 12:1, where Abram is called to leave his home and go “to a land that I will show you.” For teachers, every school year is that unknown land, a place of new students, some new colleagues, and unexpected challenges and changes…and this is exactly where God needs me to go. I ask the Spirit for the grace to patiently bear the anxiety, trusting that God will lead me through it so that God’s purposes can be accomplished in some small way through my work.
The priest, theologian and spiritual writer Ronald Rolheiser, OMI, observed, “What will cure our fear and anxiety is a deeper surrender to love, both in terms of our intimacy with those we love in this world and in terms of our intimacy with God.”
Fr. Rolheiser’s words draw me to a sentiment we find nearly 150 times in the Bible — “do not be afraid.” Whatever anxieties you face this August, I invite you to name them for what they are, accept them as part of our human condition, and stay and pray with them long enough for God’s grace to be born. Our anxieties can become opportunities to say “yes” to trust, to surrender to a deeper love and faith, and to have faith in the goodness of God and the guidance of the Spirit when fear and worry cast their dark shadows.