Prayer for anxiety, when there is nothing to name

There is one piece of advice everyone gives about worry, and it is good advice: name what is heavy, say it, hand it over. It works on one condition nobody mentions. You have to have something to name.

Some mornings there is nothing. It is there before the first thought: the middle of the body tight, the breath short, an urgency with nowhere to go. You look for the cause out of reflex, you run through work, money, the people you love, your health, and nothing really answers. This page is about that morning.

Worry has an object, anxiety does not

This is not a nuance of vocabulary. It is a difference of method.

casting all your worries on him, because he cares for you.

1 Peter 5:7 (World English Bible)

The verse says worries, plural, and worries can be counted. The gesture it asks for is a piece of carrying: pick a thing up, take it somewhere else, let go of it. So it assumes you can get your hands round it. That is true of a deadline, an exam, a person you have not heard from, and it is exactly the work done by the page on praying for inner peace: naming the tight things one by one, then setting them down.

Anxiety arrives with no file attached. There is nothing to pick up. And the advice, applied as it stands, turns against you: first find a reason, therefore postpone the prayer, therefore search. Most of us end up manufacturing one, because a plausible reason brings relief faster than a state with no name does.

That is not bad faith. It is what a mind does when it needs things to have a shape.

The psalm names the body first

Psalm 55 goes about it differently, and the order is worth noticing.

My heart is severely pained within me. The terrors of death have fallen on me. Fearfulness and trembling have come on me. Horror has overwhelmed me.

Psalm 55:4-5 (World English Bible)

Four sentences, four full stops. A heart, terrors, fear and trembling, a horror. These are sensations, not subjects of concern, and not one of the four contains the word because.

One thing has to be said plainly: this psalm does have a cause, named two verses earlier, an enemy and an oppression. The psalmist knows where it comes from. But when he reaches what is happening inside him, he attaches none of it to that cause. He describes. He spends two whole verses on symptoms before asking for anything at all.

So Scripture knows a prayer that starts with the body. It is not a way round the problem. It is a beginning.

A note for anyone reading with a French Bible open: the same words are numbered Psalm 55.5-6 in the French tradition, one verse later, because the English text folds the superscription into verse 1. Neither is wrong.

A comfort that does not wait for the crowd to disperse

The next verse is the most useful of all, and it is rarely quoted.

In the multitude of my thoughts within me, your comforts delight my soul.

Psalm 94:19 (World English Bible)

Three things are legible here, and any reader can check them against the text.

First: the multitude. Thoughts in the plural, and not one of them named. That is the exact shape of anxiety, a crowd with no identifiable object, and it is allowed inside a psalm.

Second: the preposition. The verse says in, not after. It puts the two halves in one place. The comfort does not arrive once the crowd has dispersed. It arrives inside it.

Third, and most important: the verse never says the thoughts stop. It does not promise calm. It says that something else is there at the same time.

So there is no entry condition. You do not have to have explained your anxiety in order to pray, and you do not even need it to have got smaller.

One detail ties the two texts together. The English reads “within me” in Psalm 55:4 and “within me” in Psalm 94:19. The same phrase, in both verses, locating what is being talked about. It is inside, and at that point neither verse names a cause.

A prayer for anxiety

To be said slowly, without looking for a reason first.

Lord, it is here before I open my eyes, and I do not know its name. I am not asking You to tell me why. I am telling You what I can see: the breath short, the hands cold, the day looking too large. You do not wait for it to be tidy before You come. Come into the crowd, and not after it. I am staying here, and You are here.

Those who prayed without knowing why

Two ways of holding on, and they are not the same.

Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote his darkest poems without ever publishing them, through years of exhaustion, a priest in working-class parishes in Liverpool and then a professor in Dublin. One of them opens like this.

I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.

Gerard Manley Hopkins, ‘I wake and feel the fell of dark’, 1885, published 1918

The first line gives no reason. It names a sensation on waking, and the poem moves from there. That his exhaustion was real is a fact of his life, never an instruction: nobody has to seek that state in order to pray as he did. What can be taken from him is simpler, and it is plenty. He wrote what he felt before he had anything to explain it with.

Francis de Sales, who spent his life answering anxious people by letter, turns it a different way.

Do not look forward in fear to the changes of life; rather hope that the same Father who has cared for you until now will care for you still.

Francis de Sales, Letters

He does not argue about the future, and that is shrewd, because anxiety always wins that argument: the future is unknown, so anything at all can be put in it. He moves the gaze to what has already held. That is not an argument, it is a memory, and a memory can be checked.

Jesus makes the same move in one sentence, and the English translation does something the French cannot.

Therefore don’t be anxious for tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Each day’s own evil is sufficient.

Matthew 6:34 (World English Bible)

The same word twice. You are told not to be anxious for tomorrow, and tomorrow is given the anxiety instead. Nothing here says there is no trouble. It is measured out: one day’s worth.

When it stops being a question of prayer

This page is about anxiety that comes and goes. There is another kind, which returns, settles in, and stops you sleeping, working or leaving the house. That kind is treatable, and nothing written here is addressed to it on its own: prayer is not a substitute for a doctor, and telling your doctor about it is common sense, not a failure of faith.

And if the anxiety turns into thoughts of dying, findahelpline.com lists free confidential lines country by country. They are there for the people who are worried about someone, too.

One thing to do today

Two minutes, in the manner of Psalm 55.

Name four things your body is doing, right now. Not four worries: four sensations. The chest, the breath, the hands, the jaw, whichever you like, as long as it is physical and you can observe it.

For the length of those four sentences, forbid yourself the word because. If a reason turns up, let it pass without writing it down.

Then one sentence to God, the shortest you can find. Then stop. You do not have to have reached calm by the end of the two minutes; the psalm does not promise it either. If it is the coming night that is already unsettling you, it is the same two minutes, a little later.

And if the tightness does have a name, a real one, then the page on praying through hardship is the right one: there, something exists to be carried.