An Hour a Day Keeps the Anxiety Away

I wish I could still walk to Church and make my Holy Hour before the Blessed Sacrament, but I can't, so prayer at home must suffice.

From Crisis

By Ryan Patrick Budd

Catholic tradition has a solution to the anxiety we face in our stressful lives: the Holy Hour.

Perhaps, as the election approaches and the news becomes saturated with grim predictions and shrill voices, we’re beginning to feel that our nation’s destiny is sliding more and more out of control, giving way to feelings of anxiety and tension, or even terror.

From a biblical perspective, this state of affairs—our being helpless before the material forces surrounding us—is actually normal. We always have more or less the same amount of influence in the world we live in. Sometimes, we feel our lack of influence more than other times, but it rarely changes.

If this is so, we must interrogate the anxiety and tension we’re feeling. Where is it coming from? 

St. John Cassian, perhaps the most important spiritual writer you’ve probably never heard of, wrote the first of his famous ten Conferences on the discernment of thoughts. By doing this, he indicated how important this topic is—it is foundational, a sine qua non of a successful Christian life. 

Cassian taught his monks to interrogate their thoughts: Where did they come from? Whose thoughts were they really? Were they from the world, the flesh, or the devil, or were they from God?

If we’re feeling consistently anxious and tense, then our thoughts are coming from the wrong place. St. Paul commanded the Philippians: 

have no anxiety about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God, and the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will keep your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. (Philippians 4:6-7)

This does not, of course, mean we have to suppress our emotions. Jesus Himself shared His emotions with His three closest friends on the eve of His passion: “My soul is very sorrowful, even to death” (Matthew 26:38). Paul shared his anxieties with the various churches in his epistles. 
Rather than suppress these emotions, Paul teaches us acknowledge them but not to be governed by them. Rather, we must “let our requests be made known to God.” Then, the certitude of His almighty power and boundless love will cause His peace to reign in our hearts.

Paul’s answer to helplessness is prayer, prayer with real faith that proceeds from real knowledge. The peace he promises us in return is more than an emotion. It is a conviction, founded in certain truth more than in passing fancy or flights of feeling.

If they’re not from God, where are these thoughts causing our anxiety coming from? If we’re inclined to blame the devil, I think that’s often too simplistic an answer. 

Cassian makes clear that our own mental habits make it easier or harder for the devil to oppress us with anxiety. We must, accordingly, also interrogate our habits to find the source of the bad thoughts that plague us.

We might well consider the story of Liel Eden, a Jewish woman who compellingly shared her journey from secular to observant Judaism and how she came to observe Shabat—the day-long period of silence, rest, and recollection that is the heart of Jewish life. 

Ms. Eden shared how, as a teenaged girl, she chose to stay home on Saturdays in order to observe Shabat, while her family went on exciting trips and ate at great restaurants.

This decision at first made her sad. She was lonely and bored, home alone all day. 

But then she began “making her requests known to God,” and she began to cherish the time of study and prayer where she could not only speak to God but hear Him speaking to her. Eventually, her whole family became Shabat observant, and a newfound peace reigned in their home.

Contemporary Christian tradition has inherited a practice we might call the “daily Shabat.” That practice is the holy hour.

In his classic work Introduction to the Devout Life, St. Francis de Sales considers a daily time of prayer—ideally an hour long, and early in the morning—necessary to maintaining “the peace of God” in an increasingly busy and bustling world. His advice has become all the more prescient as we have all become beholden to what Cardinal Robert Sarah calls “the dictatorship of noise.”
There are many ways to make a holy hour—from kneeling before the exposed Blessed Sacrament to sitting at home with one’s Bible or rosary or a spiritual book. But it increasingly seems that we all must strive to make one each day in order to “keep our hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.” 

By dedicating time—serious time—each day, we establish a firm habit of “making our requests known to God” and listening to His voice, so that we might know the peace that surpasses understanding. The narrative of Heaven will displace the narrative of the world, and it will put the narrative of the world in context.

I know the many objections this will suggest. How are married people with children to do this? How are busy cogs in the “workforce” to make the time? What if I’m always tired? What if I don’t know what to do or what to say?

My simple answer is to answer with a question: How is the way we’re currently doing things working out for us? What kind of Christian witness are we bearing, living as we are? How ready are we to practice the Christian virtues when our minds are absorbed in the narrative of the world?

Perhaps we don’t think we can take a whole hour. Then we should start with what we think we can do. Thirty-one minutes (letting us round up and call it a holy “hour”) would be a great start. 

But we ought to each ask ourselves: If I had one of those apps that monitored our screen time, could we still justify my excuse that I don’t have time for prayer? What if I replaced that screen time with Face time—face-to-face with God (cf. Psalm 27:8)?

We will have to wrestle like Jacob to keep true to this commitment, especially when we will inevitably fail to get up on time, fall asleep during our prayer, and sit there with nothing on our minds except everything we could be doing (including sleeping) instead of giving our time to God. This wrestling may leave us with a limp, but it will also lead to God’s blessing (cf. Genesis 32:22-32). 

As G.K. Chesterton once said, everything worth doing is—at first—worth doing poorly. If we struggle half as hard as the teenaged Liel Eden, who stayed at home alone while her family was out having a good time, I expect we’ll do just fine.

If we must keep tabs on the narrative of the world, because it affects us and our families, we must be even more committed to the narrative of Heaven. That narrative is within our reach. “The word is near you, on your lips and in your heart” (Romans 10:8). We have only to incline our ear, that we may hear.