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Good morning. I’m really worried about the anxiety suffered by so many teenage girls. According to a leading charity 40 percent are affected, twice as many girls as boys. Along with the pain of anxiety come the remedies: pills, therapy, breathing techniques, exercise. Get out into the fresh air early on the day. Switch off your devices an hour before you go to bed. I know these things help. But they don’t help us answer what this anxiety actually means, because sometimes illnesses have a meaning beyond the individuals who are suffering. We do live in a very scary world, and it is all made more difficult because we are all so interconnected. I found teenage life terrifying enough and that was in the 60s, which seemed at the time to be a shocking era, but now seems relatively innocent – there was no internet and limited television. But today’s teens can’t avoid living in a world of mirrors and clashing images: beautiful perfect bodies mingle with sexual violence, desirable thinness with gastroporn, relentless exercise with the siren call to sleep for ever. Last week I heard a cantata by Bach for bass voice in our cathedral here at Portsmouth. The libretto looked forward to Easter and the verses spoke of sharing willingly in the cross of Christ. It linked that sharing with the way we wander through this world like a ship at sea tossed to and fro by grief, suffering and distress. That Bach suggests, out of his Lutheran piety, is our human condition in this brief life. If I take that seriously I begin to see our distressed teenage girls as unwitting prophets, whose mental pain reveals to society what we are doing to ourselves by a lack of taste, judgement and wisdom. But those young women might also be on the brink of discovery. One of the early Christian desert fathers is reported to have said, ‘Anyone who has a heart can be saved’. Anyone who suffers anxiety is on a search for their true centre, their heart. If they can learn compassion for themselves that heart centre will always be sensitive to others. Therapists are often wounded healers, passing on their hard won tips to those who are struggling. If you are capable of grief for yourself you can become capable of empathy. And love. The final aria of the cantata is a great affirmation of faith. This world is a place of longing and yearning. In the end our triumph is to leave anxiety where it belongs, in the grave, while the little ship of the soul reaches its harbour of peace. We should listen to our teenage girls. They shine a light on much that is wrong with us and in supporting them we may be helping to heal ourselves.