3 Practices for When the World Won't Stop Being on Fire

What to do with your soul when the news is relentless

Photo by Flavio on Unsplash

You don’t need me to list it all out, you already know. You’ve already seen the headlines this week, probably more than once, probably late at night when you told yourself you were just going to check one thing. The economic anxiety is real, the political noise is real, the sense that something foundational is shifting beneath your feet and nobody in charge seems particularly concerned about it is real. And if you’ve spent any time at all in deconstruction or reconstruction, you came into this moment already a little tired or already a little tender. Probably already carrying more than most people around you probably realize.

The world actually is a lot right now. This isn’t anxiety lying to you. Some of what you’re feeling is just honest grief about real things, and it deserves to be treated that way. What I want to gently push back on is the idea that consuming more of it is the same thing as caring about it, or that staying perpetually activated is the same thing as staying faithfully engaged. It’s not!

And the tradition we’re recovering together has something to say about that.

The ancient church didn’t have the twenty-four-hour news cycle, obviously, but they knew what it felt like to live in an empire that was chaotic and cruel and completely indifferent to their wellbeing. They developed practices to stay rooted enough to live in it with integrity. These are spiritual disciplines that have survived every empire that tried to outlast them, and I think they’re worth trying again.

1. Let Silence Be the First Word

Most of us have never actually experienced intentional silence because we’ve never let it get quiet enough to find out what’s in there. The moment there’s a gap, we fill it. Whether it’s the commute, the line at the grocery store, or the thirty seconds before sleep—we reach for the phone because the silence feels like wasted space, and also because the silence is where all the things we’ve been avoiding are waiting patiently for us.

Henri Nouwen wrote in The Way of the Heart that solitude is the furnace of transformation, the place where we stop performing even for ourselves and simply exist before God. That sounds beautiful and it is, but it’s worth saying that it doesn’t start beautiful. It starts uncomfortable. It starts confrontational. The first few times you actually sit in quiet without giving yourself an exit ramp, what comes up is usually the thing you’ve been outrunning. Maybe it is the fear you dressed up as productivity. Or the grief you buried under information. But if you stay in it, something eventually settles because you stopped sprinting away from yourself long enough to remember who you are underneath them. Even fifteen minutes of silence in your day changes the texture of the whole thing.

2. Pray Words That Have Already Survived

One of the quieter gifts of liturgical tradition is the way fixed prayers function when you have nothing left to generate on your own. When you’re too wrung out to come up with original spiritual thoughts, you can borrow someone else’s. The Psalms especially. Psalm 46 has been close to me lately.

“God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear, though the earth should change, though the mountains shake in the heart of the sea.”

That was written by someone who also believed the world was coming apart at the seams. It has been prayed through plagues and wars and famines and the rise and fall of empires. It arrived on the other side of all of it still intact.

There is something deeply stabilizing about praying words that belong to the whole communion of saints across all of history. You are not the first person to feel like the ground is moving. You are not the first person to be frightened by what the powerful are doing. You are not the first person to wonder whether hope is still a reasonable thing to hold onto. Millions of people before you have stood exactly where you’re standing, in the middle of their own version of this, and they prayed these same words.

3. Find One Person and Tell Them the Truth

Not to vent to, not to doomscroll alongside, just one person you can tell the actual truth to. Words like “I’m scared”, or “I don’t know how to hold all of this.” The early church was a community of people who had decided to face hard and frightening things together rather than alone, and that shared witness was itself a form of resistance against despair. You don’t need a program for this, or a formal small group, or the right setting. You need one person who will sit with you in it without trying to fix it or explain it away or hand you a verse and call it done.

And for some of us, one trusted friend isn’t enough. If the anxiety is persistent, if the dread is starting to color everything, if you’re finding it hard to function in your normal life, please consider talking to a therapist or counselor. There is nothing unspiritual about that. In fact I’d argue the opposite. Seeking professional help when you need it is one of the most grounded and self-aware things a person can do. It’s taking your own inner life seriously enough to give it real attention. The church has sometimes made people feel like faith should be sufficient for everything, and that getting outside help is a failure of trust. That is bad theology and it has hurt a lot of people. Your nervous system is not a spiritual deficiency. A good therapist is a gift, and you’re allowed to use one.

One More Thing

None of this will stop the news from being what it is. The world is going to keep being complicated and loud and sometimes frightening, and no practice makes that untrue. But there is a difference between a person who is slowly shaped by the chaos and a person who is grounded enough to stand inside it without losing themselves. That’s what all of this is reaching toward. Just enough rootedness to stay human, to stay present, and to stay open to what God might still be doing in the middle of all of it.

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If this found you at the right moment, pass it along to someone who might need it. And if you want to keep thinking through this kind of thing together, I’d love for you to support my work by becoming a paid subscriber. This community is one of the places I’m trying to practice what I just wrote.