I’ve been doing quite a bit of gardening during the UK lockdown and it always seems like an upheaval to replant the seedlings you’ve grown from scratch. They look quite happy sitting in their seed tray; it’s a safe and known environment, the only one they’ve known for all their short lives.

But if they stay there much longer, sooner or later they’ll outgrow the tray, and will probably eventually die. They need a more spacious place in order to thrive. The spacious place will not be as safe, of course; it could be that other plants will cast a shadow over the seedling; or someone trimming the hedge might step on it by mistake; or, in our case, it might fall prey to a peeing cat.

But at least it will have the chance to grow, which as the old children’s hymn goes, could be said to be the main point of being alive (“All that we need to do, be we low or high/ is to see that we grow nearer the sky”:  Lizette Woodworth Reese, 1856-1935, to the tune WATER END).

Corona has jolted me out of my tray, as it were, and made me more prayerful. 

It sounds like such a positive thing – who doesn’t want a more prayerful priest? But it certainly didn’t feel positive at the time.

By prayerful I really mean contemplative – it sounds grand but isn’t – it’s just wordless prayer, which I sometimes find easier than prayer using words these days.

The tricky part of contemplative prayer is the way you manage your wandering thoughts, because you can be sure that as soon as you decide to sit awhile in wordless prayer, your thoughts will wander around aimlessly covering the events of the day, or of yesterday, or they will start to focus on  something in the future. A million things will pop into your mind, and it will seem like sitting there apparently doing nothing is a colossal waste of time.

So sitting quietly focussing on what or whomever you conceive to be God, is very hard.

But it’s a lifesaver if you suffer from anxiety.

Corona lockdown made me unreasonably anxious. Eventually this became physically located as IBS (irritable bowel syndrome) so that every few days I couldn’t eat, slept poorly and felt washed out and run down. After six weeks I was so out of touch with my once healthy body that every day was a huge mental struggle and sometimes I felt like I’d never return to ‘normal’.

And anyway, normal seems to be a word we have all had to re-invent recently. I think that was the thing that was so frightening…

One of the hardest things about anxiety is that you don’t want to face it.  Distraction is reasonably effective (many episodes of Poirot) but this only works for a short time. Sooner or later you’re back with your consciousness of being anxious.

And consciousness has a nasty habit of never really going away. It’s there at night; it’s there in the early morning; it’s there when everyone’s gone out except you and you’re wondering what to do with your time when you have no energy to actually do anything.

This is where contemplation comes in. Cynthia Bourgeault has a helpful, if counter- intuitive insight in her book Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening (Cowley: 2004). In prayer she encourages someone suffering with an unpleasant or overwhelming emotion to stay with it and even to ‘welcome’ it as a physical sensation which cannot be repressed (p. 143).

It’s counter-intuitive because (in my case) having anxiety is so unpleasant that I want to pretend it’s not there. In addition shame about what others will think stops me from being honest that it really is there, and that it’s robbing me of life to the full.

But in the moment of acknowledging it is there, in the quiet of sitting alone before God, I am real and myself. And I always find, in retrospect, that God is not anxious about my state, as I am. He is perfectly present, loving, accepting and patient. He desires those who suffer to have rest and adequate time to recover. He doesn’t see such a person as ‘ineffective’; such a person is exactly where they need to be at that moment.

And self compassion eventually leads to compassion for others.

So contemplation became a kind of spiritual, mental and physical daily check- in for me, and it was happening, in some form at least, three times a day.

First thing in the morning is difficult for me as I’m not an early bird, but I wanted to say to God, most mornings: ‘here I am; I feel terrible, I slept badly, but I’m here, I’m alive and between us we can probably make something of the day, even if it takes two phone calls to friends to get me through from a human point of view”.

Then at around ‘tea time’ I would be feeling a bit better – I don’t know why – I speculate that when you’re anxious, the whole day spreading out before you feels a bit overwhelming. But there’s something about late afternoon onwards, when other people may be stopping work, that feels more acceptable in terms of sitting back and taking stock. That would often be my best contemplation time, assisted by the Centering Prayer App, which at least makes you sit still until the time is up, whatever the quality of your concentration.

And finally I would sit quietly again before sleeping. Sometimes this was a time for more desperate prayer (“please help me sleep; prevent me from panicking”) but latterly, as I recovered*, it was a time full of gratitude for small victories: “thank you I could weed the garden for a few minutes”; thank you for so-and-so whose encouraging message got me through the afternoon”; “thank you the headache finally went”; “thank you I enjoyed my meal”.

Just thanks upon thanks, because when you’re not yourself, and then you start to feel yourself, even if just for an hour, it’s so wonderful and you realise everything good is a free gift.

So contemplation is my lifeline. I check in with myself regularly and I sit with difficult things. Now I’m better, I can sit with other people’s difficult things. I sit with physical discomfort, if need be. I sit with things that aren’t sorted; situations that are, for the time, not improving, and things I don’t understand, or want to understand. I sit with things that are overwhelming that I saw in the news and cannot imagine even happening.

And most of all, I sit in the present, because God is nowhere else but there.

I am, falteringly but definitely growing in my more spacious (and slightly more scary, these coming-out-of-lockdown days) environment.

*Anxiety that prevents you from living your life is an illness and may need, as in my case, to be treated with medication. As well as contacting prayerful friends, talk to your Doctor!