It’s a Tuesday afternoon, and I’m on the floor again.
The height of my twin bed compared to the ground makes for the perfect nook to clasp my hands and close my eyes and pray some nebulous prayer, but usually I find myself bunched over on the floor, Bible open but left behind in some fervent, searching silence.
One hour has probably passed already and maybe even two. There’s a pull in my gut that says it isn’t time yet to stop, even as my words have all dried up. I don’t know if this urge is made up of the suffocating anxiety in my chest or the balm that soothes it. It always feels like a little bit of both.
An afternoon prayer routine is a virtuous practice, I think. That’s the main thing that concerns me—acting dutifully and kindly in my habits and interactions in all the choked corners of my life. I mumble a prayer for forgiveness under my breath in the hallways at each wrongful feeling. In the mornings, I roll out of bed and contemplate whether choosing one pair of socks over another will somehow miraculously affect my ability to be a loving Christian neighbor. This question makes no sense, but I can’t help but feel that there is a right answer somehow and that God is waiting in the wings, watching.
I write in a prayer journal that I feel as if God is holding me at arm’s length, waiting for me to overcome my shortcomings. Everyone reminds me that this is the wrong way to think about it, myself included. I repeat Romans 8:1 tearfully and try to shake the feeling that if I could just overcome a fear or listen to the still, small voice inside urging me almost compulsively forward, then maybe I could finally achieve the legendary status of good Christian and good person and good good good.
At seventeen, I am diagnosed with obsessive compulsive disorder.
One of the greatest miracles therapy ever gave me was this diagnosis. OCD is an elusive beast that assumes the shape of your deepest fears and possesses your mind with a monstrous version of yourself. I don’t know that I would have ever recognized it amid what appeared to be zealous religious dedication. It didn’t help that the church could encourage the kind of thinking I battled, with sermons calling you to assess your naturally selfish heart and take hold of your mind with the iron grip of Christ until you’ve molded it into a humble servant of God. This was not the flaw of a particular denomination or preacher’s message, just an ever-pervasive hum.
Standing now at the close of 2023, I am reflecting on the time I have spent this year learning how to better manage this illness. It will not do to argue with your mind or judge yourself against some moral standard, no matter how horrific the obsessions become—the only relief comes through complete neutrality towards your thoughts and curious compassion.
Yet the more I progress I make, the more alien the church becomes to me. Against a practice of radical acceptance of one’s thoughts and emotions, concepts like sin begin to feel almost nonsensical in response.
At twenty-six years old, I am not where my overwrought teenage self expected to be. If I told her I stopped attending church years ago, I’m sure she would panic at this clear violation of all my beliefs. And yet, paradoxically, standing at a distance from Christianity has led to some of the bigger shifts toward my wellbeing.
My OCD has transformed over the years beyond religious moral panic, but still I find myself left in a complicated relationship with God. I feel some days as if God and I are in a standoff, breath frozen in lungs, each waiting for the other to make a move.
When I hear scriptures read aloud for Advent, a part of me yearns to listen to them the way I would a poem, parsing the humanity and raw emotion behind each word, while a larger part slams down that familiar protective barrier over my mind. I sing Christmas carols and feel simultaneously moved and fraudulent, and I slither out of signing up for devotions at choir rehearsal. I pray earnestly for loved ones’ medical emergencies, and I feel a sickened twist in my gut as I hear a distant worship singer croon that she is nothing without you, Lord.
I am drawn to the call to be good to others, and I am disgusted by the way Christianity is used as a weapon. But I no longer feel guilty for hovering between worlds.
Everything has been changing for me—I question things about myself that I took for granted for years, and I don’t know what to think of the girl who longed for a lifetime devotion to Christ and now happily refuses to rise to the challenge.
But I also know that the me that stands in the future will likely have another story to tell about God that I haven’t discovered yet.
I hope that she’ll wait for me there.
Hannah McNulty graduated from Calvin in 2021 and stuck around Grand Rapids, against all odds. She has spent her last few years singing in choir, teaching herself to love reading again, and trying to learn every fiber art simultaneously. She currently works at Eerdmans Publishing, where you can find her burying her nose in old paperwork and forcing anyone within earshot to listen to her bad puns.
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It’s definitely a struggle. I think most of us wanna-be-faithful 20-somethings are in a similar space, so you’re in good company.
I see echoes of my own faith journey here. Thanks for this wonderful piece
Thanks for this piece, Hannah, and its honest wrestling. I identify with it.