By Phoebe Farag Mikhail

A little bit over a year ago, my first book, Putting Joy into Practice: Seven Ways to Lift Your Spirit from the Early Church came out. And ever since the global COVID-19 pandemic began, the question of joy during this time of quarantine, stay at home orders, overflowing hospitals, widespread sickness, and numerous deaths comes up again and again. As speaking engagements converted to online meetings and webinars, the question came up again and again. How is joy possible in the midst of so much that is stealing our joy? After some time of struggling with the answer myself, and sharing different ideas with different audiences, I’ve come up with one answer that’s working for me: we can maintain our joy during this time by taking our thoughts captive.

Watch the news (or visit a hospital in New York City), and you will get a sense that we are in war times. We are fighting an unseen force that we don’t completely understand and cannot fully control. This unseen force uncovered vulnerabilities in our society we didn’t realize we had, or didn’t want to admit we had.

As in war times, we are all doing our best to contribute to the war effort. Soldiers on the are health care workers and essential service workers. Doctors and grocery store cashiers, nurses and gas station attendants, emergency medical technicians and internet service providers. The rest of us are shopping for the elderly, sewing face masks for frontline workers and for each other, and donating money when needed. Some of us are finding ways to support local businesses, and sharing information about new jobs and other forms of economic relief. Authors and artists, libraries and museums are offering ways for us to enjoy the arts without having to travel for them.

However, when we ask those on the frontline what would be most helpful to them during battle, the answer is simple: stay home. Staying home, staying put, that is how most of us are contributing to win this invisible war. And staying home is its own sort of battle.

At home, stripped from our usual amusements, our numerous ways of living outside of ourselves, our multiple commitments that seemed so important until they were suddenly not so important at all, we are fighting a battle with our thoughts.  Even those of us for whom being home during this time means juggling remote work schedules with our children’s remote schooling requirements, our thoughts still intrude on us whenever we need to get things done.

I’m one of those finding myself juggling more than I was before the quarantine. I manage my children’s schooling, cook and keep the household running during the day; teach my own students remotely in the evening, and then work on writing, grading papers, and lesson planning well into the night. My husband and I tag team when we can, though he faces even more of a workload than I do.

Still, in the midst of this, anxious thoughts invade.

What if one of us gets sick, what will happen to the family? What if our parents get sick? How long will we have to live like this? What if one of our incomes stops?

Angry thoughts invade.

What if the information we have is wrong or incomplete? What if the politicians don’t make the right decisions about public health?

Thoughts of despair invade.

What if everything I’m doing now is meaningless?

We stop our work to scroll the news, latching onto anything hopeful. We can’t focus so we get on social media to reach out to the friends we can’t see in person. Our shiny, bright screens are there to offer us distraction, but they’ve lost their luster. We try to get back to work, to the task at hand, and the thoughts keep pressing to the forefront.

Left unchecked, sometimes those thoughts consume us, rendering us unable to focus on what is important and necessary. They turn into irritability towards those around us, or even lead us to seek distractions that numb us to the worry and pain—such as screen addictions, alcohol, even drugs. In other words, these thoughts unchecked lead us to what the Church Fathers and Mothers call “the passions.”

In my book, I talk about the “Joy Thieves.” While Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection conquered the great enemy of joy, death, there are still thieves that want to steal our joy. “These passions, or logismoi, also called “thoughts” and sometimes called “demons,” include gluttony, lust, greed, anger, envy, sloth, and vainglory. Each begins with a human thought or need that is not, in and of itself, sinful,” I wrote. Yet these thoughts, if they take root in our hearts, can steal our joy.

Centuries ago, a few Egyptians willingly went out into the desert and carved out cells to live in, stripping away almost everything that occupied them in the world, and facing headlong the same battle with their thoughts and passions. Some did so as hermits, others did so in communities, just as some of us are facing stay at home orders alone, and others with families. They’ve been doing so for at least 1700 years now, taking to heart these words from St. Paul:

 “For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal but mighty in God for pulling down strongholds, casting down arguments and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God, bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ.”

2 Corinthians 10:4-5

Tamav Lois Farag further quotes Abba Poemen in Balance of the Heart: Desert Spirituality for Twenty-First Century Christians,

A brother came to see Abba Poemen and said to him, “Abba, I have many thoughts and they put me in danger.” The old man led him outside and said to him, “Expand your chest and do not breathe in.” He said, I cannot do that.” Then the old man said to him, “If you cannot do that, no more can you prevent thoughts from arising, but you can resist them.”

Balance of the Heart p. 122

What are these weapons of warfare for bringing every thought captive? Well, they are the spiritual practices. How do we resist? By putting them into practice. Each of the spiritual practices I mention in my book are also ascetic practices, honed by the Christian tradition over centuries. During quarantine, I have found three of them particularly helpful: praying the Hours, giving thanks, and arrow prayers.

Arrow prayers came to my immediate help whenever anxious thoughts intruded.

Trying to force myself to focus on whatever was at hand was a fruitless effort. I finally realized there was no point in trying to prevent the thoughts from intruding. Instead, I turned each one to a prayer:

“My Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, protect us.”

“My Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, remember this sick person.”

“My Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, comfort this family.”

“My Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, give the leaders wisdom.”

“My Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”

“Arrow prayers” are short prayers that call upon the name of Christ in word or intention, and can be easily repeated throughout the day while doing other tasks. Although they were started by the desert monastics, “arrow prayers are for all of us,” as I write in my book. Some are short verses from the Psalms, like “Save me, O God, for the waters have come up to my neck,” and the most popular one is the Jesus Prayer: “My Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”

Arrow prayers help us pray unceasingly, help us feel peace and stillness when repeated often, and go straight to God’s ears when prayed in adversity. They are the prayers that my spiritual father recommended to me specifically for helping me calm my anxious thoughts.  “Your thoughts can be your enemy, or you can make them your ally,” Anne Bogel writes in Don’t Overthink It. Arrow prayers help make my anxious thoughts my allies instead.

Giving thanks came to my rescue when angry or irritable thoughts intruded.

I’ve occasionally come across the memes chiding us that we are “not stuck at home, but safe at home.” And while this is a nice sentiment and a good perspective to have, it doesn’t consider those who might not be safe at home, or those who have no home at all. It also doesn’t fail to shame us for the difficult emotions we are processing, even when we are safe at home.

Yet, we are called to give thanks to God “in any condition, in every condition, and in whatever condition.” That means we are called to give thanks whether we are safe at home, not safe at home, stuck at home, and even if we have no home. Thanking God for our safe homes, if we have them, is only the beginning. Giving thanks in a way that helps us experience joy starts not by counting the blessings we may be privileged to have, but by remembering the people through whom God shows us His love.

On particularly hard days, I’ve gone through my gratitude journal just to remember the people I’ve been thankful for and how they’ve shown me God’s love. I’ve made lists and started writing thank you cards for them to mail. At a time when it’s difficult to get together in person, a letter is a still a physical way of reaching out. I talked about giving thanks this in greater depth on this webinar with Paraclete Press. The desert father Abba Copres said, “Blessed is he who bears affliction with thankfulness.” (From the Sayings of the Desert Fathers, translated by Sr. Benedicta Ward).

Praying the Hours came to my rescue when despair intruded.

The “Hours” are times of the day—in the Coptic Orthodox Church, seven times during the day—for prayer. Each “hour” of prayer (it takes only a few minutes) is primarily made up of Psalms, and no matter what hour we pray, there’s always one Psalm in which the words express despair and trouble—but always end with hope in the Lord. Not only this, but the Psalms are full of what desert father Evagrius of Pontus calls “counter-statements,” as Nicole Roccas describes in Time and Despondency. Counter-statements are scripture that “talks back” to the thoughts that plague us, and Evagrius has an entire manual of these for different destructive thoughts, or passions. These verses are to be used to “cut off” destructive thoughts. One of his favorites comes from Psalm 43:5, which is prayed during the Third Hour in the Coptic Prayer Book of the Hours:

“Why are you cast down, O my soul?

And why are you disquieted within me?

Hope in God;

For I shall yet praise Him,

The help of my countenance and my God.”

Psalm 43:5

When we pray the hours regularly, we repeat the Psalms until the words become our own, as St. Athanasius said. Some verses can also become arrow prayers, and others, like the one above, counter-statements. In moments of despair the verse asks me the question, “Why are you cast down, O my soul?” Nothing that casts me down or disquiets me can keep me down when I am reminded to put my hope in God, who knows all things and promises to be with us when we are suffering.

Many of us are suffering from a sense of isolation. Loneliness has been a struggle for so many even before these days of social distancing. Even before we were asked to shelter in place for what has now been over a month, we have already been living increasingly isolated lives, each of us moving through life in a whirl of commitments and activities that make us impervious to one another. The loneliness was already crushing us before it became enforced.

Praying the Hours takes us out of loneliness and into a transcendent connection with many others, both on earth and in heaven. This is because the practice of praying the Psalms at fixed hours of the day pre-dates even Christianity. These words have been prayed by generations. Even Christ Himself prayed them, and Christians continued to do so, especially in the monasteries, where the days are ordered by the Hours. As I write in my book,

The moment I pick up my prayer book to pray, someone else is praying the same prayer, someone else has prayed another prayer a few moments before me, and others will be praying when I stop. In this way, when I pray the Psalms, I become part of an eternal chorus, even if it seems like I am praying alone. “For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them” (Matthew 18:20).

Putting Joy into Practice, p. 37

When we pray the Hours we are never alone. And when we pray the words of the Psalms, we are filled with hope rather than despair.

These are three of the tools the desert fathers and mothers have used for centuries to do battle with their thoughts—during times of persecution, plague, and famine. We know they work because they continue to use them, and so can we. We may not be able to get rid of them entirely, but we can resist the destructive thoughts with these practices, and take our thoughts captive. Not only this, but through them we can experience the joy that is only found in the giving and receiving of sacrificial love. 

For Further Reading

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