In a little more than a century, we’ve suffered the Great War, the Great Depression, the Greatest Generation, the Great Recession, and the Great Interruption of a global pandemic that shattered the texture of our lives. We’ve emerged from the worst of Covid like a seagull from an oil slick. We’re saturated with fearful anxiety as we grapple with economic and social repercussions of the pandemic, and with an utterly polarized political environment that has normalized anger and violence.
In such an Anxious Time, I covet counsel from my most trusted advisor, C.S. Lewis. I have a anxiety habit of awakening at 4:38 a.m. and in those pre-dawn moments I often re-read Lewis’ homily “Learning in War-time”, delivered to Oxford students in October 1939. During the previous weeks, England had declared war on Germany in reaction to its invasion of Poland. With war imminent, Oxford students had become anxious and distracted. After all, why bother with normal activities, such as learning, when the threat of a global war had trivialized all activity and thinking outside itself? The rector at the Church of St. Mary the Virgin, the university church, invited Lewis to address the student body. Students packed St. Mary’s, with many sitting in the main aisle or on the ledges of the stained-glass windows.
I have the same core question as Oxford students eighty years ago: does living in an Anxious Time unmoor us from all the activities and joys that we held dear in Normal Time? Put another way, how can I survive with sanity and relationships intact?
Lewis issued a straight-forward challenge: do not permit external pressures and internal emotions to convince you that we are living in an abnormal time that necessitates an abnormal approach to the important aspects of life.
Yes, we must adjust to living with repercussions of Covid and with political insanity. Yet we are not the first humans to live in a moment marked by a pervasive, seemingly unstoppable danger. I think of my grandparents only a few years after Lewis spoke to Oxford students. They had sons far away fighting in the Pacific or Europe, and I’m sure the risk of loss continually weighed on them. But they went about their normal activities of job, raising vegetables in the garden, hosting family for Sunday lunch, and sitting together in chairs under the trees in the front yard. These are the things that make life worth living.
Lewis defined “three enemies” that attack during stressful times: excitement, frustration, fear. For each enemy, Lewis prescribed a deliberate way of thinking as a defense.
The intrusion of excitement is nearly irresistible today with continuous connectivity to 24-hour news and social media. Unbridled excitement, Lewis alerted us, is unwise in that it leads us across false ground. His counsel was tough: we are to deliberately strive to restrain our thoughts and emotions.
Percolating excitement steals our attention from those things we want to be and do, leading to frustration. Instead, Lewis counseled, we are to be “today-minded” by relentlessly giving attention to doing good each day, no matter the anxiety. It’s the wise counsel that Tolkien expressed in The Lord of the Rings: “All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.”
In my heart, anxiety eventuates in a paralyzing fear. Fear of losing comfort, fear of losing security, fear of the decline of aging, and fear that death will separate me from my dear wife. Lewis argued, however, that even our anxiety can remind us of those few things that really matter, and that we stake everything on the Shepherd of our Souls, the shepherd who is good.