Challenging OCD on Christmas Eve

A night without usual fears allows faith to be reclaimed.

Paula Duncan

Paula Duncan is a PhD candidate at the University of Aberdeen, researching OCD and faith.

A nocturnal snow-covered scene of a tree, chapel and Christmas tree casting shadows.

A chapel in Krün Germany.

Andreas Kretschmer on Unsplash.

The display on my car tells me that it’s just gone 11pm on Christmas Eve, and the temperature is below freezing. It’s the sort of cold that catches your breath the minute you step outside. The trees are glittering with frost. The stars are sharp and clear in the sky. Everything feels still and clean. In the carpark, I can hear the muffled notes of the organ playing familiar Christmas carols. People in Christmas jumpers are trickling in through the main church door. I can see Santa hats, some reindeer antler headbands; some kids have woolly hats tugged down over their ears. I haven’t been to a Christmas Eve service since I was a child.

I take a deep breath and try to let go of some of the anxiety about being here. My Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder doesn’t take a break for the festive season. I have previously written about my experience with OCD: the way that it impacts my experience of faith and how it makes going to church feel difficult. I find it a challenge to sit with the doubt and uncertainty of not being 100 per cent sure that I believe in God but badly wanting to. I struggle with not knowing what verses of the Bible will be read and how I will feel. I worry about something sparking my OCD and then being held hostage by my own intrusive thoughts. This always feels worse when I’m tired, too. I am far more likely to engage with the intrusive thoughts my OCD offers up when I’m not well rested. But I’m here. Despite feeling nervous, I am happy to be here. The warm glow of the light inside the church is welcoming and the low hum of happy voices feels reassuring as everyone discusses their Christmas plans.

There is a flurry of chatter as we are all invited to wish one another a ‘merry Christmas!’ and then we fall into a restless and expectant silence as Christmas day begins.

I don’t have the usual fear of the unknown today. We are here for the carols and the watchnight service – eagerly awaiting midnight and the dawn of Christmas Day. I might not know exactly what the structure of the service will be, but I can almost guarantee that the reading will begin with words from the Gospel of Luke. We’ll be told of the census of the Roman world, and we’ll hear that Mary and Joseph would have to travel to Bethlehem. There will be no room in the inn. The baby Jesus will be born, and laid in a manger.

This story is one that I heard at childhood Christingle services. It’s the one that we were told every year in primary school with abundant colourful crafts to help us to remember the key points. I’m reminded of nativity plays – watching them and being part of them, and the slightly off-key renditions of ‘Away in a Manger’. I remember doing the reading as a Girl Guide – nervously practicing beforehand to make sure that I could pronounce all the words correctly. I remember being proud of myself for standing up and reading at all.

Armed with those memories as I cross the carpark, I know there is going to be nothing unexpected in the Christmas Eve service. My OCD still finds ways to make its presence known – I insist that I get to sit at the end of a row because that’s where I feel most comfortable. I read the order of service a few times to check that everything there is as I expect. I make some concessions to anxiety for the sake of being able to turn up at all. But I am here, and I feel safe.

The readings are exactly as I expected. I know all of the Christmas carols that we sing. At midnight, there is a flurry of chatter as we are all invited to wish one another a ‘merry Christmas!’ and then we fall into a restless and expectant silence as Christmas day begins and we wait for the minister to say a few words about what this means. I am with my family and there are familiar faces in the congregation – people I know from various places. It’s nice knowing that we are all here for the same reason and with the same intention.

There are many cheerful Christmas wishes as we leave the church and I’m proud of myself for being here. Maybe my faith is something I can reclaim from my OCD eventually, however slowly. For now, I look up to the sky as we head back out into the carpark and smile at the stars twinkling down at us. I feel perfectly fine.

Since that year, lockdown excluded, my family have been to the watchnight or the Christingle services most years. As a theology student, I sometimes feel a little self-conscious about how infrequently I go to church. I sometimes joke about being a Christmas Christian in terms of my church attendance and certainly in how I engage with the Bible. I like to read a little on Christmas day and I love watching the televised service on the BBC on Christmas morning. It’s the time of year where I am perhaps most active in my engagement with my faith. I look forward to going to the Christmas Eve church services now. It’s the one time where I don’t have to battle with anxiety about going to church and know that plenty of other people are here as infrequently as I am. My OCD comes along with me, certainly, but I feel safe to be here just as I am.

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Comment

Morality

Politics

11 March 2024

6 min read

The moral sugar high of the protest vote

We shouldn’t give politicians bloody noses over insurmountable single issues.

Yaroslav Walker

Yaroslav is Vicar of Christ Church, Hampstead.

A winning candidate at an election address the audience from a lectern while the loosing candidates look on

The victorious candidate at the Rochdale by-election.

A cat was elected as a Member of Parliament. A cat. George Galloway - former Labour party MP and Rula Lenska’s former cat - has been elected as Member of Parliament for Rochdale. The unique circumstances of the by-election make this a less surprising result than one might think. The Labour Party disowned their candidate, the Tory Party hardly contested the seat, and the sheer number of inappropriate independents meant that a split-vote victory for Galloway was entirely foreseeable. One must also note Galloway’s many skills: as a campaigner, an orator, and a dirty-tactic by-election gadfly.

So…Rula Lenska’s cat did the unimaginable and won a seat in Parliament. How did the cat do this? He convinced people that they could vote for him to protest the current Parliamentary position on the Israel-Gaza War. In his victory speech, Galloway gave an ominous warning: “Keir Starmer…this is for Gaza.” He went on to intimate that his victory was due to the high proportion of Muslim voters in Rochdale; their disgust at the Labour Party’s response to the Israeli invasion of Gaza morphing into a wish to give Keir Starmer (‘one cheek of the same backside’ - Rishi Sunak being the other cheek) a bloody-nose. He warned that Starmer “…will pay a high price for…enabling, encouraging, and covering for the catastrophe presently going on in occupied Palestine, in the Gaza strip.”

My fellow voters are intelligent enough to recognise that the single addition of George Galloway to the green benches will do almost nothing to affect change. They have voted so, the general consensus goes, simply to register their fury at the plight of ‘fellow Muslims’. I simply want to respond with a question. Is this moral?

People vote for all sorts of reasons. If we believe political scientists and pollsters, voters might care about many things, but will end up voting on the basis of one thing. Normally the economy. One’s own economic interest is a perfectly rational reason to vote for one party’s promises than another. There is a potential immediate impact on our lives and those of our family and friends. But Gaza?

Sociologists have spilt a tremendous amount of ink describing how human communities tend towards ‘tribal’ affection. We tend to feel more connected to those who are like us - in terms of geographic location, in terms of obvious racial characteristics, in terms of language and culture, of course religion. The notion that the Gazan War is a war on Muslims would be a natural driver for the Muslim community of Rochdale to vote ‘for’ their fellow Muslims.

On the other hand, in the world of modern ethics there has been a move to recognise that such tribal allegiance is ultimately meaningless - a call to see all human beings as equally worthy of our care and attention, especially irrespective of geography. Peter Singer famously presented the thought experiment of a drowning child - if we are willing to get our shoes wet and muddy to save a drowning child we walk by a shallow pond, why aren’t we willing to give up some of our wealth to alleviate the war-stricken poverty of a Gazan child many miles away?

The people of Rochdale must vote as their conscience requires. I simply worry that their conscience has taken on an impossible burden of care that they will struggle to sustain.

The words of Jesus seem to support such an ethic, which is always global in its vision. We are not only to love our neighbour as ourselves, we are to go out into all the world, evangelising the nations. From its beginning the Christian faith has preached that loving our neighbour means loving everyone. Everyone is a beloved child of God. Everyone is our neighbour. Surely a vote for Galloway, a vote of rage against the occupation of Gaza, is fundamentally moral - either on grounds of tribe, or rejection of tribe. Surely its Christian!

I’m not so sure.

I’m not so sure we fallen humans actually have the capacity to ‘care’ about the horrors that go on many, many miles away. Jesus tells us to love our neighbour as ourselves, but we barely have the emotional energy to love ourselves. We live in a society of such activity and distraction - with a seemingly concomitant rise in the incidence of hopelessness and depression - that I don’t think we can really give our moral and emotional energy to an event as distant and overwhelming as the plight of Gazan civilians. We can barely give it to our families. We can barely give it to ourselves. C S Lewis once wrote that the best way of eradicating suffering was people working away quietly at limited objectives: “I think the art of life consists in tackling each immediate evil as well as we can.”

Jesus was the ultimate localist - God became incarnate as a unique individual, of a particular tribe, of a particular nation, in a particular time and place. Jesus taught an ethic of universal love and dignity and respect, but lived out in specific acts of service. He didn’t wash the feet of all Jerusalem - just his disciples. He didn’t heal all disease everywhere and forever - but he did restore sight to the few blind people he met. St Paul wrote individual letters to individual communities. Yes, he asked them to pray for him and each other, but otherwise told them to focus on their immediate needs and charity and holiness. The popularity of Jordan Peterson is largely based on the achievability of his slightly nebulous self-help worldview: make YOUR bed, keep YOUR back straight, look after YOUR family. Improve yourself first if you want to even begin improving the world. You’ll probably never manage to improve more than your village…maybe only your own household. That might be enough.

I don’t judge those who voted for Galloway as a Gaza-conflict protest. A new campaign, ‘The Muslim Vote’, has emerged to persuade Muslim voters to lend their support to candidates who commit to ‘Peace in Palestine’ – ceasefire, sanction Israel, and a state for the Palestinians. It is becoming clear that what appears to have happened in Rochdale may well happen in constituencies up and down the country. The idea of the ‘Muslim vote’, which Galloway was able to turn into electoral victory, is being given form and force. It is emotive and persuasive, and may well convince people who have no link to Gaza other than their Muslim faith. It is entirely possible that some of the voters have family and friends trapped in the siege. I empathise with their vote and weep for their sorrow.

I don’t judge those who voted for Galloway as a Gaza-conflict protest. I do, however, worry that many have taken upon themselves a fundamentally unwieldy ethic. Galloway is not a one-man parliamentary wrecking ball - whatever he says. The position of the Government will not be changed by his election. The resolve of the Israeli military is unlikely to be dinted by the UK Government, no matter what resolutions the House of Commons passes. The people of Rochdale must vote as their conscience requires. I simply worry that their conscience has taken on an impossible burden of care that they will struggle to sustain. Perhaps they would be more fulfilled and more effective if they cast their vote on the basis of what could be achieved for them in their community, in the immediate future.

We must pray for the people of Gaza, and we must not cease praying; but I would suggest that we must vote in the interests of the people of our own place, our own constituency. Giving the Labour Party a bloody nose over Gaza might be an immediate moral-sugar-high. Electing an MP who will actually work for the needs of the community in their particularity will certainly be less instantaneously thrilling - but maybe it is more moral.