As a child, there was a recurring nightmare that would wake me. I could never capture the image or the scene. The closest I could ever come to describing it was pins of light piercing through outer space, or shards of blinding white lightning splitting across an endless night. Along with these pins of light came the sound of drums or barrels, pounding or rolling in a crescendo as the light expanded in the darkness and grew nearer. First there would be one shard of light, but soon other shards would start out of the darkness and split the void, piercing and blinding until there were many shards and they converged and diverged in chaos, illuminating nothing but confusing everything. It reminded me of the void or chaos described in various creation stories of the world, from various cultures.

The nightmare would wake me in a disturbed state. My mind would race to examine what the nightmare meant. I never fully grasped the images, but the dream felt like a painting of anxiety or a depiction of what “racing thoughts” feels like. In fact, I suspect that’s what the nightmare signified or emanated from, not that I am a dream interpreter. This nightmare differed a great deal from those where I was being chased or had fallen off a cliff, because those made sense when I woke. I could gather myself in the safety of knowing that it was only a dream. But these shards of light and pounding drums scared me due to its uncertainty of form and meaning. The best scary movies are the ones where the director and storyline disallow the viewer from seeing or understanding the monster until Act III, or like the movie Bird Box, where the monster is never seen.

Uncertainty is what scares us and makes us act irrationally. For evidence of this outside of a dream, consider the run on toilet paper when the pandora’s box of Covid-19 entered the stage of the world. How odd that millions sought two-ply tissue as a solvent for fear. Fortunately, I had already stocked up on toilet paper, so I had certainty that we could outlast the siege on the tissue paper supply chain, but this phenomenon made for one of the most interesting behavioral things I’ve ever witnessed. I recall other behaviors that baffled me, such as people refusing to make eye contact, even outdoors on public trails where we stood far more than six feet apart. I was reminded of the Ken Follett novel, World Without End, which describes a period of plague in the 1300s. One of the characters advises another not to look at anyone with the plague: “You catch it by looking at sick people.” Behaviors that happened 700 years ago appeared to be happening again. I also re-read the opening of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, which was written during the plague of the same period, in Florence, Italy, and he describes varied reactions to the fear, which paralleled exactly what was happening in 21st century America. Some Florentines quarantined heavily while others lived as if there were no concern. Some turned to prayer and others to debauchery. The great thing about old literature is how it shows that human nature never changes, even while the technology around us does. We learn things about the world through science, but we’re still the same creatures and deal with uncertainty in polarized ways. We always seem to be re-discovering the truth, or redefining it, because we want to rid ourselves of uncertainty. But that’s not going to happen. Uncertainty is here to stay. This reminds of the quote by astronomer Robert Jastrow:

“For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance, he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”

That isn’t a quote to mock science, but it speaks to the beyondness that lies past our physical world and universe. I believe that there are things beyond science, that cannot be “found” like atoms and planets can be found. In other words, we cannot get rid of the unknown and uncertainty, not with the hearts and minds that we are born with, not with the world we reside in, and honestly, I don’t think we really want to remove uncertainty. We may think we want to remove uncertainty, but we don’t. Here’s why.

The world would be uninteresting without uncertainty. There would be no fear, but nor would there be surprise. There would be no pain, but there would be no joy or wonder. If the world had certainty in all things, and free will was not a thing, we would not have walk-off home runs or Hail Mary passes to win the game. We would not need to wrap gifts or experience nervousness before going on a first date. If we had 100% certainty on every event surrounding us, we would be machines. Philosophical arguments about determinism vs. free will, or materialism vs. spiritualism, have gone on for centuries, but it’s clear to me that free will is real. I suppose eventually we just choose a worldview that decides for us (there’s a joke in there somewhere). Freedom, believe it or not, is not a one word slogan on a USA t-shirt, it is something much more. This is a better definition: “Freedom is the power, rooted in reason and will, to act or not to act, to do this or that, and so to perform deliberate actions on one’s own responsibility. By free will one shapes one’s own life…The more one does what is good, the freer one becomes.” (CCC 1730-1738)

Now that I’m warmed up, I can get to the point. I seem to need a longer stretch each time before I start to jog, perhaps so I don’t pull a muscle. While uncertainty has an upside and can be fun, there is a flip side of the coin where anxiety, worry, and fear can cripple us. This often happens in the night, in the form of racing thoughts.

What I mean by racing thoughts is the overactivity of the brain that keeps you staring at the ceiling and blocks any cohesion of thought. This often happens before a big event like delivering a work presentation or starting a new job. The night before a test or a game or a marathon often kept me awake, even when I seemingly was not upset or nervous about the day ahead. The brain just turns on, and the switch to turn it off becomes temporarily out of order. Other events like moving to a new house or starting a large project or going on vacation - the details of these plans invade your head and they don’t shake out. In all of these types of activities, racing thoughts can bring stress, but the brain and nerves are chewing on something that could be constructive, or, at the very least won’t kill you. This is the racing thoughts of anticipation and details, and this kind of worry can come fast and hard, but is tolerable mostly because you have some control over the upcoming event. Control is the keyword here, as worry and fear increase in parallel to the grip on your desire for control.

There is a fun kind of fear and worry, like that which comes from horror movies and rollercoasters. The fear of a scary movie excites us just like the intense speed of a rollercoaster drop because it feels like we could die. But we know that we won’t, so it’s a thrill, not actual fear.

Fear without consequence is the fun kind. Horror movies and riding roller coaster takes some courage to do, but the safety net is there. You can pause the movie. On a rollercoaster you have the assurance of engineering and the preview of hundreds of people ahead of you completing the ride in one piece.

Real fear is the one where you have no certainty and no control. It’s the kind in the late night that seeps into your mind hot and clutches your heart with its cold hand. You can’t stop the thoughts as they teem upon you like the zombies in The Walking Dead. And there is no engineer to fix it. The TV and phone can’t drown it out and it’s too late to call a friend without seeming insane, without appearing vulnerable (God forbid). The racing thoughts come hard upon each other like waves in the sea. You can medicate it away, if you’re lucky, for the night with alcohol or drugs or sleeping pills, but they often just make it worse, if not that day, then later on when you need to medicate again, and again, and sooner or later the medication stops working.

This real fear is best met head on in the only way that it can be turned back and that is by prayer, by radical trust in God, because this real fear comes from yourself. Just like the boys in Lord of the Flies, the beast in the woods is out there, but the beast only exists out there because it is actually a projection of themselves. Trust always defeats fear, and fear is born from a focus on the self, for the craving of control and certainty. Trust in something outside the self is the cure. God’s grace confers certainty. Grace and certainty comes to those who trust. I can’t explain why. It just happens. A “Now I lay me down to sleep” prayer will help a child, an adult needs something a bit different, but in the end just as simple and sincere. You need to yearn for the trust and the grace will arrive. It must be a surge of the heart, letting go. This is hard to do. For people battling their vices, like those quitting drinking, trusting that you can make it through the night may seem a bridge too far. Or for parents who are up waiting for a teenager to come home, or for someone in mourning the loss of a loved one, letting go of fear may seem a mountain too high. In fact, racing thoughts often happen because of a loss, as I have heard people that are quitting drinking talking about their loss of being “normal” and fitting in with their friends. Saying goodbye to a vice really is like mourning the death of your old self, your old life. I’ve had my share of pity-parties (but they aren’t fun…you get no balloons or cake at these kinds of parties). Usually, I am wanting my will to create action, to make something happen that won’t, or can’t, and that makes free will a burden rather than empowering. The worry and fear can turn to anger, where we want to will away the sense of suffering, by any means, by pills or by miracles, whatever! We’ll take anything to calm the thoughts. We want our freedom, our peace, our way, and dog gone it, we want some sleep. The question underneath it all is just this tiny little problem called suffering and evil. This tiny little problem is only the most difficult philosophical question and biggest blocker to opening any door to religious faith. This is why C.S. Lewis’ The Problem of Pain keeps selling year after year and sticks like glue to the best selling list of books on death and grief. Because why? Why do we have to go through this? Why is there suffering and pain and struggle? (And here is where I’ll sidestep and refer you to read Lewis for that answer, not my writings.)

Somehow the brain can play games like the Geto Boys song “My Mind was Playing Tricks on Me” where the first lines sum up a night of racing thoughts. This song goes to the corners of fear and worry and comes out swinging. (I’ve redacted some of the swear words).

I sit alone in my four-cornered room

Starin' at candles

At night I can't sleep, I toss and turn

...

Four walls just starin' at [me]

Both rap and country music find these edge cases of our lives and conjure an experience in song, from that deep seeking in the soul, and the words have teeth that will bite you if you’re not careful. Later in that same song, a lyric says: “Late at night, something ain’t right.” He’s got the racing thoughts, and can’t fix it.

Rap and country music, whose fans would probably not admit any similarity, touch upon lonely and desperate moments, which is where the best art has always come from, and always will. There is a macho attitude in both genres but on the other side of macho sits loneliness in its various guises. The broken relationship, the aftermath of rejection, the places of unknown outcomes, the hours of weakness and despair, the isolation from bad choices, the agony of loss; these are the places of uncertainty where we can know for certain that there is a God-shaped hole in our hearts. These are also the times when racing thoughts attack a soul.

In those nights of racing thoughts, the replay of thoughts can start in a trickle. The replays then get accompanied by newly invented thoughts, or the spawning and ripening of unrelated thoughts, which then somehow mingle in with the others. All of these swarm into an invasion on the mind, in an onslaught of whispers. Like a primitive CPU, our single-threaded brains cannot flip back and forth fast enough between the context of one thought to the next and it soon becomes deadlocked. A comment from a peer or family member will rewind and start again. You come up with a thousand responses that you wished you had uttered. Or a comment on the internet can send you reeling, knocking you far off the road of tranquility and into a ditch. Concern over a child can drive parents to extreme worry, as kids get left out or insulted or suffer some health issue that the parent cannot take upon themselves. There is money, always money, mostly its absence, never its surplus, that bothers us. Schemes that we have in place, plans, expectations, the fear of failure and the fear of missing out…in a million varieties anxiety can not only invade you, but can conquer you in a matter of minutes.

The answer to anxiety is trust.

To trust, you need to leap and not know where you will land. That is a wild strategy, but it works, especially when other ideas may be leading you away from that choice.

There is a passage in the powerful chapter 6 of John, where Peter shows us what trust really means. This is the only chapter in any Gospel where Jesus loses followers after saying hard things while establishing the holy Eucharist. And after seeing followers leave, Jesus says to Peter, “Do you now also want to leave?” And Peter replies, “Where else would I go?” I hear that response from Peter and it hits me like electricity. It stings me like a current, because it is so true. I recall the first time I read those words and actually understood what he meant, and I had to set the book down because I realized it was true. I couldn’t read any more. Peter’s simple answer summarizes faith. Once you know the answer, there is nowhere else to go. Not only will you not leave, you don’t ever want to leave.

If you’ve tried everything else and you come to know that Jesus is the way, nothing can replace that faith. Peter knows he has found the way, the truth, and the life, even if it’s difficult to understand or unpopular. Having found this answer to life’s riddle he will not abandon it, he will hold fast to it like the parable of the treasure in the field or the merchant and the pearl. He will fail. He does fail. He will fail again. As a human being he must fail, but he will return again and again, as where else would he go? To what? To whom? He knows that the path to truth and peace is only through God.

There is one even better Gospel example of trust. Peter’s saying “To whom else would I go?” is powerful, but another example goes even further. There is Jesus himself in one of his most human moments in the agony in the garden of Gethsemene, on the night of his arrest. He must endure a night of racing thoughts. Even Jesus, who could calm the wind, who could walk on water, must face the terror of uncertainty and death. Temptation and desperation agonizes him, as he knows the Crucifixion awaits. This is Jesus, the Son of God, facing something like what we face, only with more serious and guaranteed consequences, and as always, always, without fail, he shows us how to live. The entirety of the Gospels is Jesus showing us over and over how to live our lives.

In that night dealing with his own fear of things to come, he is praying. He prays to God. Notice in reading the Gospels, whenever Jesus is facing something difficult, he prays. This is Jesus showing us how to live. On the night before he died, he is asking for guidance and putting his total trust in God. To me the question he asks to God and the answer he discerns is the answer to all of life’s nights that are seized by fear. He wants to escape the coming suffering and asks God to stop what is happening. He experiences sorrow and worry and fear. He too, like us, wants to control what is to come and he says these words:

“My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me; yet, not as I will, but as you will.”

That moment makes him so very human as even he doubts, even he has anxiety. He is doing battle with a temptation to escape, to control, to win. But then he prays further and says if this is God’s will then let it be so. He surrenders his will to God’s will. This is the great “thy will - not mine - be done.” That is the answer. It is always the answer. Even Jesus, the incarnate God who bore all our human flaws and fears, turned to God in heaven when he needed help in his night of racing thoughts. He shows us the way. Our nights of terror pale in comparison to the agony in the garden, but we can know the way through the fire because he showed us how. 

These nights come for us all and I can squirm and worry and let anxiety wreck me or I can trust and say “Thy will be done, God.” This is yet another “Surrender to Win” moment, and it’s the same question as every time and it’s the title of this website. Why did Peter sink? Because he took his eyes off God. Because he wanted his own will to be asserted, not God’s. Because he turned back to himself instead of keeping his trust steady.

There is a passage from Thomas a Kempis that speaks to this free will problem which drives us all crazy. When we don’t get our way, how easily, how very simply, we get upset and off track. As long as we get our way, we are happy. But when our will is disrupted we instantly flake out:

“But too often some hidden force within, some attraction that meets us from outside, will sweep us off our feet. Plenty of people are influenced in their actions by these undercurrents of self-seeking, without having any idea of it. All seems to go well with them, as long as everything turns out in accordance with their wishes, their plans; but when once their wills are thwarted, they lose their balance and get depressed in no time.” (Imitation of Christ Book 1.14, paragraph 2)

Free will is like a gift and a curse at the same time, and this is one of these interesting contradictions in Christian faith. Yes, I am free to make choices, but no, I don’t get to control anything.

Even if you are an atheist, God is there for you on these nights and you can try it because you have nothing to lose. It’s also free. No downloads or appointments needed. If it doesn’t help, then you can go on being atheist the following morning, and seek out pills and mindfulness and therapy. I’m not making fun of those things, I just wonder why are so many of us stubborn to try prayer in the 21st century. I was like a mule. I wouldn’t dream of trying prayer until I quit drinking, but I was willing to try anti-depressants and relaxation CDs and therapy. It’s almost like in our consumer mindset we want to pay for a product or we don’t think it can be effective. If you try prayer, you don’t even have to tell anyone the next day. It can be your own little secret. I think the stubbornness today is that we don’t want anything budging in our “freedom” because we don’t want to be told “no.” This seems a very American and modern idea, to be the god of our lives and creator of our own worlds. The funny thing is that we are shutting out something that doesn’t actually limit our freedom, it actually expands it.

The grace of Christ is not in the slightest way a rival of our freedom when this freedom accords with the sense of the true and the good that God has put in the human heart. On the contrary, as Christian experience attests especially in prayer, the more docile we are to the promptings of grace, the more we grow in inner freedom and confidence during trials, such as those we face in the pressures and constraints of the outer world. By the working of grace the Holy Spirit educates us in spiritual freedom in order to make us free collaborators in his work in the Church and in the world:

Almighty and merciful God,in your goodness take away from us all that is harmful,so that, made ready both in mind and body,we may freely accomplish your will. (CCC 1742)

In fact, I just took a lot of words to say what Padre Pio said in very few words to everyone who asked him for help. Padre Pio would say to people: “Pray, hope, and don’t worry so much.” That pretty much says it all. It seems so simple when you say it like that. His response was so concise that you can buy a pair of socks with those words. I should take that as a hint to be brief. St. Francis said we should always be brief, since Jesus himself “kept his words short on earth.” I still have much to learn.

So, in summary:

“Pray, hope, and don’t worry so much.”

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