Belonging to a Good Story
What is anxiety? You know I’m not a psychologist, but I do have some thoughts about it based on my own experiences. Maybe you’ll recognize something of them in your own. The point I want to make here is that anxiety sets in when I believe my life to be a disconnected series of events, but that belonging to a good story can restore in me a sense of purpose, and with it, peace.
First, it seems to me that we didn’t use the word “anxiety” all that often back in the 80’s, when I was coming of age. It existed, of course, anxiety. But we mostly just sang about it in songs like Billy Joel’s Pressure, Genesis’ Land of Confusion, and Driven To Tears by the Police.
In that last song there’s a verse, “Seems that when some innocent die, all we can offer them is a page in some magazine.” A page. Just one page. And not from a book, but from a magazine, the social media of the day, that story-less storyboard of our own age.
But what a way for Sting to say it: “all we can offer them is a page.” He is lamenting not only our often inadequate response to anxiety, but also something of its cause. I think anxiety sets in when we live page after page, but with little sense of any story connecting them.
Social media can feel very disjointed, like a magazine. It’s not so much a story as a digital publication of various articles and images. The title of a magazine may function like an algorithm, but neither propose a cohesive story. As a result, they make us feel disconnected from their seemingly unrelated events, first of their pages and then of life itself, which creates anxiety.
Only a story can satisfy our heart’s longing for purpose. Only a story. A storehouse of ideas, no matter how useful, may be a magazine of ammunition, but it’s still not a story. Nor is an algorithm. Although it makes use of precise rules and procedures to solve problems, an algorithm is still not a story.
So what do I mean by story? I mean it in the sense of a continuity and cohesiveness that gives my life meaning. Instead of thinking of my life as a succession of frames on a screen, changing from one image to the next but only ever showing me the one, like the single page of a magazine, a story incorporates the frames and pages of a past as necessary parts relating to every page of its future.
Therefore, reading can help us. Returning to the written pages of a book is, by its nature, a good way to overcome anxiety. When we read, all the pages that came before the ones we’re reading at present are bound together with all the pages yet to come. A book promises a cohesive story, even though some previous chapters were rough, and even as future pages remain a mystery.
But a book may be too far a jump if we’re very attached to the screen. We might turn to movies or shows that can draw our attention into a good story when suffering anxiety. Only the purposeful beginning and fulfilling conclusion of a story can save us from the despair and anxiety we feel when losing ourselves in the disconnected scroll of media consumption.
Man can handle difficult pages, even chapters, if he believes the story is good. It’s the dis-integration of life that causes us anxiety. God heals us, not by promising that no pages of the book will be unpleasant, but that all of them belong to a life that is good and worth living. Peace returns when we can see that nothing is wasted. The past is made good by belonging to a good story, and the future as well. +
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Thank you, Father, for writing your Son, the Living Word, into our story.
And thank you, Lord Jesus, for writing us into Your life with Him.
Truly, You have written our names into the Book of Life.