Beauty When the Chest is Tight

I still deal with anxiety. From snow canceling service and church activities (2 weeks now) to Uri being randomly sick (probably from eating the weird snow) and how my mind played through every awful scenario imaginable. Even when I prayed and try to stop the steamrolling…my mind is like “nah fam, we’re gonna keep spiraling”. Then we had to take Zeta to the ER for an ear infection, on top of Jackie being in the ICU and getting her mom to and from the hospital…it compiles fast and takes your breath and leaves you exhausted. Other times, my anxiety is like a buzzing. Not an audible one, but one that just seems to go through my whole body. An edginess almost constantly, when it’s a bad day. And then my mind spirals into “what if my kids become the worst parts of me?” “What if my wife misunderstands my silence?” All the things. I become exhausted physically and the only reprieve is the soft touch of Holly on my worn down head before we sleep.

Anxiety has a way of shrinking the world.

Not all at once and usually for me, not in a drastic dramatic way. It’s more subtle than that. It narrows my vision and tightens my chest. It convinces me that everything important is either already lost or just about to be. My mind races ahead, rehearsing catastrophes that haven’t happened yet, while my body bears the cost as if they already have.

For a long time, I assumed anxiety was primarily a failure of trust. If I believed better, prayed harder, rested more in God’s sovereignty, surely the knots would loosen. And sometimes they did. But far too often, they didn’t. Which forced a harder and more gracious realization: anxiety is not always a theological error, it is usually a human condition. A little chemical imbalance…probably from microplastics. Sulforaphane will help me, or at least that what Holly tells me. But what about my faith?

Scripture seems to know about anxiety all to well.

The Psalms are riddled with anxious prayers. “Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me?” (Psalm 42:5). Jesus himself, on the night before his crucifixion, confesses, “My soul is very sorrowful, even to death” (Matthew 26:38). This is not the language of stoic calm. It is the language of embodied fear, carried honestly into the presence of God.

What surprises me, though, is how often God responds to anxiety not first with answers; but with beauty.

Consider Elijah for a moment. After the showdown on Mount Carmel, after fire falls from heaven, Elijah collapses into despair. He runs and hides and has the audacity to ask to die (1 Kings 19). God does not rebuke him with a lecture. He nourishes his soul and his body. He meets him not in the wind, earthquake, or fire; but in a gentle whisper. The Hebrew there suggests something like “the sound of thin silence.” God’s comfort comes aesthetically, almost artistically, before it comes theoretically.

Beauty, I’m learning, has a peculiar power to reach places anxiety fortifies.

The early Church understood this. Gregory of Nyssa wrote that the soul is drawn toward God not by coercion, but by desire. That we are “wounded by beauty” and pulled upward by it. Anxiety contracts desire inward, curling the soul in on itself. Beauty does the opposite. Beauty opens us up and destroys the loop.

Augustine knew this too. In Confessions, he describes his restless heart not as a puzzle to be solved, but as a longing misdirected. “Late have I loved you, Beauty so old and so new.” For Augustine, God is not merely true or good. God is immensely beautiful. And it is beauty that reorders a disordered soul.

This matters because anxiety often lives below the level of argument. You can know all the right things and still feel overwhelmed. Beauty doesn’t argue nor does it require explanation. It just shows. And in showing, it reassures the nervous system that the world and my mind is not only dangerous; it is also meaningful.

That’s why Scripture is so saturated with imagery. “Consider the lilies of the field…” Jesus says to anxious hearts (Matthew 6:28). He doesn’t give a treatise on providence. He points to flowers and invites the eyes attention. He slows us down enough to see that the same God who numbers our days also clothes the grass with splendor.

Beauty doesn’t remove anxiety overnight. It doesn’t magically rewire the brain. But it does something quieter and just as important: it reminds us that anxiety is not the deepest truth about reality.

Hans Urs von Balthasar (standing firmly in the patristic stream) warned that when beauty is severed from truth and goodness, the Christian faith becomes brittle (capable of being defended), but not loved. Anxiety thrives in such brittleness. But beauty reintroduces tenderness and gives the soul something to rest against.

Sometimes, for me, beauty looks like liturgy. You know, the steady, rehearsed words of the Church carrying me when my own words fail. Sometimes it’s music that reaches me before I can interpret it. Sometimes it’s light through trees, or the Eucharist held in trembling hands, or the utterly unnecessary joy of laughter with my kids. It’s the touch of my wife in the silence. None of these fix everything. But they recalibrate and relocate me again. They remind me I am still here, and God is still with me.

This, I think, is part of the promise Paul gestures toward when he writes, “The peace of God, which surpasses understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 4:7). Peace that surpasses understanding doesn’t mean peace without reason. It means peace that arrives by another route and what I’m finding out is that it’s often the route of beauty.

Anxiety tells us we are alone, threatened, and unmoored. Beauty whispers back that we are addressed and that the world is not closed, but open. Beauty speaks softly that even in fear, we are still being drawn.

And maybe that’s enough for today. I hope it is for you.