I first saw a therapist when I was in college. My anxiety was out of control and I needed help. It was also during this time in my life that I found a lot of meaning in the Desert Mothers and Fathers, a group of ascetics who would go on to form the first monastic community in Christianity. There was a group of people who recorded and catalogued all their thoughts, who often thought they were in hell, who were assailed by demons day and night, yet who still offered a ray of hope.
There’s one passage that has always fascinated me: Abba Joseph raises his hand and says to one of his followers, “If you wish, you can become a flame entirely,” and Joseph’s fingertips light up like ten lamps of fire. It seemed like a reward for all the anxiety I’d felt in the desert. Yes, life was hard to bear, a constant record of every mistake, every calamity, but if you endure, there will come a mysterious moment of power, and your very being can touch God. It gave me hope, but at the same time, I wondered where my ten lamps of fire moments were.
If you think about it, there are a lot of things about religion that make you anxious. The first time I really got anxious was when I was about 7 years old. My church preached a lot about hell and the rapture, and I listened to it a little too much. I remember crying and telling my Sunday school teacher that there was no way to know if I was going to heaven or hell. They told me that my heart would tell me if I was saved. My heart was filled with fear. To make matters worse, I had picked up habits that continued into my adult life. Like the desert monks, I was encouraged to examine my thoughts for sin, and I found a lot of it.
I can’t remember who I was before my anxiety, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t try to address it. Over the past decade, I’ve gone from therapist to therapist, tried medication, and finally found a cognitive behavioral therapist who could help me, but only after a surprising diagnosis: obsessive-compulsive disorder.
What I know about this disorder comes from one incident. King of the Hill One of Hank’s employees declares he has OCD in order to use his disability to avoid work: “If I get off this chair, Garth Brooks is dead,” he tells a skeptical Hank.
There is also a cultural notion that this disorder is centered around organization and cleanliness, but, dear reader, I am neither of those things. Mine is about repeatedly thinking about worst-case scenarios and checking over and over whether I navigated a situation appropriately to avoid a bad outcome.
That doesn’t seem so bad when you consider the endless loop of checking I was stuck in for hours every day. When I was driving, I had to circle around to make sure I hadn’t hit someone. When I read a text, I had to reread it to make sure I fully understood it. When I spoke to someone, I had to repeat the conversation over and over again to make sure I had been as considerate, good, and kind as possible. When I woke up in the morning, I had to reflect on the previous day to make sure everything was OK. Worst-case scenarios never actually happened, but I was still trapped by them.
I have prayed a lot over the last decade, but have never found any relief. I felt like God was totally absent from my struggle with anxiety. One passage of the Bible that gave me some comfort was Paul’s “thorn in the flesh.” Paul asks God to heal this ailment, but it is not revealed whether it is spiritual, physical, or mental. God refuses. The passage ends with a cryptic yet comforting statement: “Strength is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:7-9). Perhaps what helped me most was letting go of the idea of hell, or at least eternal conscious torment. With that gone, I was at least free of any fears about eternity. But overall, my faith did not initially play a significant role in my search for healing.
But with this mental space in place of the constant swirl of anxiety and doubt, something began to change. I felt more connected to God. When I prayed, I didn’t feel out of control. I felt like I was surrounded by warmth and light. It may not sound like a big deal, but after a decade of keeping my anxieties secret from everyone, being accompanied by something bigger than myself was significant.
I had been in therapy for 10 years with little to no effect, but that’s when things really started to change. I always said that meditation wasn’t for me; I never understood the purpose of it. To this day, it infuriates me that silence and blanking out of my thoughts could be effective. It shouldn’t work, but it did for me. I found that emptying my mind as much as possible was a powerful treatment for the constant anxious activity that was relentlessly trying to take over my life.
Meditation helped me observe my thoughts, and when I meditate I sometimes get distracted, like my nose getting itchy.I wondered how to deal with these interruptions. It was only natural to follow advice from the religious group that practices meditation the most: Buddhists. If you look online at Buddhist community groups, you will find many stories about what to do if you feel an itch while meditating. There are many different ways to approach the problem, but the one that felt most logical to me was to observe the itch. Observing allows you to put distance between yourself and the sensation. For me, this central idea guided me to be curious when my thoughts came rather than panicking. When I felt a strong urge to turn around and check if I had actually hit someone with my car, I chose to be curious about it. Why did I think of this now and not while I was driving? What values does my worrying about hitting someone else with my car communicate? That curiosity helped me see that my thoughts do not define me as a person, but are like spam emails my brain is sending me.
In my journey towards mental health, I have come to understand the teachings of the Bible in a new way. It was only by letting go of the illusion of control and the need to deal with every worry and obstacle that I was able to find peace. I may sound like the Sunday school teacher I grew up with, but Jesus said exactly this: “Whatever you cling to in this world you lose, and what you let go of you you gain” (Matthew 10:39; 16:26; Mark 8:35; John 12:25). In fact, it seems like this is where Buddha and Jesus overlap. Whether you call it obsession, anxiety, or being a control freak, the only path to wholeness is to let go of the things you desire most.
For years I thought religion had little to do with my struggles with anxiety and my search for wholeness, but I’ve found that to be the case. Getting my OCD under control has helped me see Scripture and prayer in a new light. Though there’s a temptation to feel like the last decade of my life has been a waste, I’m more spiritually rooted and resilient than ever, and that feels like a hard-won beauty in this chaotic world. At times, I even wonder if I could go down in flames altogether.
