Navigating our way in an Age of Anxiety

The Right Reverend Robert Atwell

Donald Barnes Memorial Lecture

St Peter’s, Belsize Park, London NW3

24 September 2025

Including the launch of Robert Atwell's new book "Bewilderment", available from Canterbury Press.

It’s a real joy to be back at St Peter’s and a privilege to be invited to give this annual lecture in memory of Prebendary
Donald Barnes.  When I was Vicar of St Mary’s, Primrose Hill next door, I was glad to offer holiday cover here from time to time,
and it is good to see familiar faces from those days.  It is especially good to see Sally, Donald’s widow, together with friends
and former parishioners who held Donald in particular affection.

Although Donald had already retired by the time I arrived in Primrose Hill, we had overlapped when I was a young
wet-behind-the-ears curate of John Keble, Mill Hill.  In those dim and distant days Donald was Vicar of St Peter’s, Cricklewood
and we served in the same deanery.  Never short of an opinion and always happy to hold forth on any and every occasion
about the vital importance of ordaining women to the priesthood, I admired this seasoned warrior for truth and equality
who must have been a thorn in the flesh of successive Bishops of Edmonton.

One nineteenth century bishop, frustrated at the conservatism of his clergy, wrote a short verse with the request
that the Dean of the Cathedral read it at his funeral:

Tell my priests when I am gone
O´er me to shed no tears.
For I shall be no deader then,
Than they have been for years.

Frustrated at the glacial pace of change in the Church of England, I think Donald would have heartily endorsed those sentiments. 
I remember his contempt for one colleague who announced that his motto in life was, ‘Start each day with a smile
and get it over with.’  As Donald commented, too often we clergy do not exactly radiate the unconditional, affirming love of God. 
So much for the recent past.  What, I wonder, would Donald would have made of the present and the missional challenges
facing the Church today?

An Age of Anxiety

You don’t need me to tell you that we live in turbulent times.  A heady cocktail of confusion, fear and uncertainty is pulsing
through British society.  For many people and for a variety of reasons, the future isn’t what it used to be. 
History has no full-stops or demarcation lines but historians find it convenient to attach labels to periods of history. 
At school we learn about the Dark Ages, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason. 
Scholars of Late Antiquity call the period in European history that runs from the end of the third century to the seventh century
the ‘Age of Anxiety’.  The Roman Empire was falling apart.  People were anxious.  The road system, which had guaranteed
the swift and safe movement of food and commerce throughout Europe was no longer being properly maintained. 
Believe it or not, people complained about the number of potholes.  There was a loss of confidence in civic life. 
Cities were becoming lawless.  People no longer felt safe.  Families began to seek refuge on country estates, many of which
became fortified enclosures.  Rumours of barbarian incursions caused widescale panic.  With the forces of chaos at the gates
of Rome, civilization was under threat.

Parallels with our own age are not hard to draw.  There is increasing lawlessness on our streets as we have seen this summer
with protests outside hotels housing migrants.  Anxious middle-class citizens increasingly choose to live in electronically gated
enclaves to keep ‘undesirables’ at bay.  Fewer people bother to vote in general and local elections, and the government
is worried about the decline of social capital, the glue that holds society together.[1]  In many countries, including our own,
there has been a collapse of trust in government, politicians and treasured institutions like the BBC, the police and indeed
the Church.  The smell of social and institutional decay is in the air. 

Although we are more protected and secure than earlier generations and have a higher standard of living than our grandparents
enjoyed, with better medicine, safer transport and social security, public confidence is remarkably fragile.  Many have yet
to recover from the trauma of the Covid pandemic.  There is unease about immigration in general and asylum seekers
in particular who are seen by some as threatening community cohesion.  Meanwhile the territorial and economic ambitions
of the superpowers, the intractable conflicts in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, climate change and the manipulation
of trust on social media combine to generate waves of uncertainty and fear.  Cyber-attacks and international terrorism,
dark forces intent on causing havoc, threaten our way of life.  We find ourselves living in a second ‘Age of Anxiety’. 

Commenting on the post-Cold War situation in 1993, Samuel P. Huntington, the American political theorist, famously predicted
a ‘clash of civilizations’.[2]  He argued that future wars would be fought not between nation states but between cultures. 
Except over the last twenty years there has been a resurgence of nationalism and power-hungry autocrats (I leave you
to supply their names) are not in short supply.  What we are witnessing is the end of the post-colonial era and a dominant
North American/European way of understanding and ordering the world.  The cultural tectonic plates are shifting. 
Populism is on the rise.  Unsurprisingly, many people feel bewildered and frightened, if not for themselves then for their
children and grandchildren.  How do we navigate our way?  How, as Christians, do we speak into this endemic anxiety? 
Have we anything to say beyond platitudes and a philosophy of niceness?  How do we invite people into the adventure
of discipleship?

Living with uncertainty and change

Living with flux and uncertainty are facts of life in the twenty-first century.  The speed of technological change is mind-blowing
and generates anxiety as we strive to keep up.  In 1993, when Bill Clinton became President of the USA, there were fifty
registered websites.  Eight years later, when he left office, there were 350 million.  In a digital age, the internet provides access
to rafts of knowledge.  It is brilliant, but having access to more information does not necessarily mean we are wiser.  
T. S. Eliot’s lament in Choruses from ‘The Rock’ continues to sound a warning note, as it did when it was first published in 1934:

Where is the life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

Eliot is right.  Life is about more than the accumulation of information.  The Judaeo-Christian tradition insists that we need wisdom
to negotiate change and to navigate our way, and wisdom is not what we know about but what we intuitively know, the distillation
of experience and reflection.  We need soul food for the journey.  We need discernment and, in Christian understanding,
this comes only from God.  In the words of the Prayer Book, we need to pray that the Holy Spirit will ‘give us a right judgement
in all things’.

In the history of the Church, renewal has always come from a fresh vision of God and God’s abundant grace in Jesus Christ. 
Which is why, in my view, there needs to be a stronger spiritual heartbeat in the life of the Church and our amazing network
of parishes, schools, fresh expressions and chaplaincies.  After all, we are in the God business.  It is worship and prayer
that distinguishes us from the Bowls Club and the National Trust.  We may be custodians of some of the nation’s most ancient
and beautiful buildings, but we are not a heritage organisation: we’re the Body of Christ and we’ve a job to do and a difference
to make.  Jesus bid us be salt and light in the world, and if we are to do this with any credibility then we need to embody
a deeper way of living.  And here lies one of the roots of the problem.

The loss of transcendence

In an interview shortly before he died, the poet Seamus Heaney said, ‘The biggest change in my lifetime has been
the evaporation of the transcendent from public discourse.’  In Heaney’s view, our generation has become so enmeshed
in the immediacy of short-term transactional language, buying and selling, exchanging information and exploring options,
that we find it embarrassing and difficult to discuss the deeper dimensions of life, the things that speak of God and eternity.

A climate of negativity and suspicion undoubtedly surrounds religion in Britain today and, for some, religious language has
lost its traction.  Critics delight to cast faith in opposition to the enlightened forces of science and egalitarianism that form
the new secular heartbeat.  For Heaney, however, faith is not in opposition to science: faith enriches our understanding of life,
placing it on a surer foundation and in an eternal perspective.  What Heaney laments is cultural sterility and, what he terms,
the ‘evaporation of the transcendent from public discourse’.  We do not live in a graceless world and need to recover
our confidence in the transcendent, in the things of God.  But Seamus Heaney’s critique does provoke questions about truth
and integrity.  I mean, what is truth?

An era of fake news

It was Pilate who famously asked the question of Jesus at his trial.  The same question haunts our generation, not least because
two new terms have entered the English lexicon: post-truth and fake news.  The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘post-truth’
as ‘relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals
to emotion and personal belief’. 

In George Orwell’s prophetic novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, the ‘Ministry of Truth’ controls the corporate memory of society
by continuously editing history to ensure that there is no memory of a time when Big Brother was not right. 
Orwell realises that if you can control people’s memories you can control their capacity to imagine a different future. 
In an era of fake news and malign postings on social media, how do we know what is true?

What worries me is people’s seeming indifference to the lies they are being told.  In the 1930s Nazi propaganda succeeded
in propagating lies and hatred of the Jews with devastating efficiency.  Thanks to the reach of digital platforms, fake news
has become a burgeoning industry.  Let’s not be naive: assaults on truth, trial by media, and the abuse of free speech constitute
major threats to our democratic institutions and the maintenance of trust in our society.  Cynicism easily takes root in soil
poisoned by lies and cover-ups, particularly when those in positions of public trust are discovered to have been
‘economical with the truth’.[3]

According to Winston Churchill, ‘A lie travels halfway round the world before the truth has got its pants on.’  If that was the case
in the 1940s, how much more so today in the world of instantaneous communication?  Trust is in short supply when you can be
easily hoodwinked by Artificial Intelligence.  In a fog of misinformation, it is easy to lose confidence in the very notion of truth. 
You tell me your truth, and I will tell you mine.  

All perceptions of truth are partial and to an extent provisional, including those of Christians, but this does not mean
that we should not encourage one another to evaluate competing claims to truth.  The idea that everything is true
and equally worthwhile is illusory.   We need to wake up to the huge cultural shift in the life of our nation and, in words
from the First Letter of Peter, ‘give a reason for the hope that is in us’ (1 Peter 3.15).  Developing an apologetic is integral
to our mission and finding our way in this Age of Anxiety.

Walking by faith

The London School of Economics (LSE) identifies what it terms ‘Five Giant Evils’ affecting western society: confusion, cynicism,
fragmentation, irresponsibility and apathy, each of which it says must be challenged lest the fabric of western civilization is
undermined irretrievably.[4]  To their list I would add tribalism.  If the analysis of the LSE is correct, then there is no single remedy
to our current malaise in Britain.  That should not signal despair, but it should prompt a deeper search for wisdom and a desire
to collaborate across political, religious and cultural divides for the sake of the common good.  And that commitment to openness,
dialogue, collaboration, partnership and teamwork needs to be evident in the life of every parish.

In spite of what our detractors suggest, the Church of England continues to exercise considerable convening power. 
We have significant experience of building coalitions of goodwill, which is why we should never allow our network of churches
and church schools to become closed spaces that need to be defended.  Too often these days our churches seem to have
an invisible notice hanging on their doors which says, ‘Members Only’.  We should be modelling partnership. 
We should be offering hospitality and welcome, safe spaces and ‘human-sized’ communities for those worried about
a loss of identity and a lack of social cohesion.  God wants us to be a visible sign of his presence in our anxious world,
communities of hope.

As Christians we have a part to play in our nation’s soul-searching, provided we enter conversations with imagination and humility,
and with a disposition to listen.  After all, Christianity does not have all the answers.  The full purpose of life is not known and is
perhaps unknowable.  In this life, ‘we see through a glass darkly’ (1 Cor. 13.12).  ‘What we will be has not yet been revealed,’
says St John (1 John 3.2).  Being a Christian is about living in the provisional, in Paul’s language ‘walking by faith’,
and that means living with potentially unanswerable questions.  With our neighbours of all faiths and none, we need to reflect
on the ordinary, sad, tragic and funny events of our lives, and identify wholesome values by which to live.

Religion, as I said, has a bad press these days.  To give but one example, in answer to the funeral director’s question,
‘Are you religious?’ bereaved families will typically reply, ‘No, but I am spiritual.’  Religion is seen as negative, a constraint,
a burden. And that saddens me because the origin of the word is the Latin verb ‘to bind together’: religion binds us to God
and to one another and builds us into a community of faith.  Worship is a gymnasium in which God retrains our hearts. 
It is why in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, spirituality is more than a lifestyle choice.  The teaching of Jesus Christ is that
the goal of human striving is not self-obsession but self-transcendence.  The challenge that confronts us on almost a daily basis
is to live without anxiety in the midst of it.  But how?

Living without anxiety in an anxious world

Thomas Merton, one of the great spiritual writers of the twentieth century, says that anxiety is something we impose
on one another.  He says, ‘Ours is a time of anxiety because we have willed it to be so.  Our anxiety is not imposed on us
by force from outside.  We impose it on our world and upon one another from within ourselves.’[5]  If Merton is right,
then we need to do three things.

• First, we need accurately to diagnose and address the roots of anxiety and fear in ourselves.
• Secondly, we will need to marshal resources to build resilience and cultivate an authentic spirituality.
• And thirdly, we will need to put down deep roots into God and strive for a better balance in life. 
  There is a frantic side to modern life that we need actively to resist, and it is where traditional spiritual practices,
  rooted in a rule of life, can help us.  Making and taking time to pray is fundamental to our sanity.

Jonah and a spirituality of bewilderment

And that brings me by a circuitous route to the prophet Jonah and my book Bewilderment.  I have always been fascinated
by the story of Jonah.  It caught my imagination as a child, as evidently it also did the first Christians.  When I was a student,
I was amazed to discover frescoes of Jonah dating from the early fourth century on the walls of the catacombs in Rome. 
The first Christians saw in Jonah a figure of hope in the face of persecution and death.

We easily dismiss Jonah’s story as a fairy tale.  We latch on to the bizarre elements of the story with Jonah being swallowed
by a whale, and neglect what is in fact a profound piece of writing.  It is a radical protest book, taking an apparently pious
individual and turning everything upside down.  The story is larded with elements of Hebrew folklore, but this does not mean
that we should regard it with suspicion.  Anthropologists tell us that folklore is a powerful way of communicating beliefs
about God, the nature of the world we inhabit, and the values of a society.

We think of the prophets as strong and confident figures, but Jonah is neither of these things.  He is a flawed individual,
at times almost comic.  He is petulant, vulnerable, moody and disobedient, but he is also honest and courageous, qualities
that are often overlooked.  In our Age of Anxiety, when the mental health of so many is fragile and people feel adrift
and bewildered, this unlikely hero offers surprising and much needed wisdom to navigate our way. 

Jesus had no hesitation in referring to Jonah and toyed with various aspects of his story, applauding his preaching to
the people of Nineveh and using Jonah’s time in the belly of the whale as an image of his own imminent death and burial. 
Alone among the prophets, Jesus described Jonah as a ‘sign’, but then added intriguingly, ‘And I tell you, something greater
than Jonah is here.’  What is the ‘sign of Jonah’ and does it have any relevance to our generation?  These are questions
I explore in my book and with which I continue to wrestle.

I am not a biblical scholar, and I write as a Christian reader of a Jewish book.  I think Jonah offers a strikingly relevant theology
for our time – one that grapples with isolation, protest, anger, fear, and depression, all under the shadow of divine presence
in the midst of personal turmoil.  For those who feel unmoored in life, Jonah’s story is an anchor of hope and a surprising
source of consolation.  It maps the contours of grace, a grace that can feel especially absent in today’s world. 
I hope my observations about both Jonah and the challenges facing us today will enable a new generation to reconnect
with this ancient text and discover wisdom for their journey.

One of the things that led me to revisit the story of Jonah is his evident fear and confusion in the face of the events
that confronted him.  One Biblical commentator described the book as an ‘exploration of the spirituality of bewilderment’,
a comment that inspired the title for my book.  But there is a personal reason behind my choice too.  If you are a bishop,
people assume that you have all the answers to life’s problems.  I do not.  Nor do I enjoy the intense spiritual experiences
that some Christians describe; so I warm to Jonah in his bewilderment.  Like Jonah, I bumble along, often stumbling
in the process. But I take comfort in a verse in the psalms: ‘Though you stumble, you shall not fall headlong,
for the Lord holds you fast by the hand’ (Ps.37.24).  I have written my book for my fellow bumblers and stumblers. 
If you are one too, I hope it speaks to you.

History tells us that the first English Christians did not so much suppress pagan culture as re-direct it and transform it. 
A similar cultural task confronts our generation.  We need to get back in touch with our roots and recover
our confidence in the transcendent, our faith in the God who makes all things new.  We need to speak with a voice
that blends humility with confidence, not a litany of endless apologies about our many failures.  It is important to be robust
in countering all that is shallow and self-indulgent in our culture, but it is equally important to affirm and celebrate all that is good. 
We need to get out of the negative box that our detractors are determined to put us in and promote a culture of welcome, service,
partnership, thanksgiving and generosity, and surprise our anxious world with our joy.

I don’t know if Donald Barnes was a fan of Billy Connolly, the Scottish comedian and raconteur, but Billy Connolly says
that there is no such thing as bad weather, only the wrong clothes.  If all we Christians do is talk endlessly about the problems
facing the Church today in a secular society, all we will succeed in doing is alienating people.  Miserable Christians are not
a good advert for the Kingdom of God.  It is time for us to stop complaining about the bad weather and find the right clothes.

+ Robert Atwell

"Bewilderment" is available from Canterbury Press.