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.

Article

Comment

Community

Freedom

Politics

5 May 2025

4 min read

From councils to conclaves, there's a vital common ingredient

Church and state alike need pluralism.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

A gate to a churchyard displays a sign saying polling station.

A polling station through a churchyard.

Southwark Diocese

Rumours that Donald Trump may suspend the US constitution in order to seek a third term as president and yet darker threats that his regime may even harbour autocratic ambitions have reminded the West that we should not take democracy for granted.

Parliamentary democracy, we have widely assumed, is A Good Thing. It’s so good that we not only want to share it but impose it on other populations. The Iraq war on which the UK and US embarked in 2003 was fought, we were told, for freedom and democracy, but it didn’t quite work out like that.

By democracy, we tend to mean political accountability, through which parties of government exercise power through the will of the people they serve, expressed in regular plebiscites which ensure that no one can cling unchallenged to power. The recent English council elections are a small example of what we mean by that.

The Trump phenomenon, though, begins to point towards the prospect of a popular will that is in favour of a form of government that doesn’t correspond to our usual liberal assumptions. There are voices, among them that of the writer Margaret Atwood, which anticipate a suspension of US democracy as a consequence of the President’s insanity.

Most of us in the UK might argue that democracy need to be more than a system in which majorities have their way. We want our governments to be under the law too. And then we have to decide not only what law, but whose law. For those of religious faith, that question will partly and significantly be answered by God’s law, on which arguably western civilisation is built.

This is where pluralism comes in, without which democracy can’t operate effectively. A state is a collection of political and civic communities, in which individuals have rights and duties, which are protected in law.

This model is based on Roman legislature, intensely centralised and systemically suspicious of private societies, which is why early Christians were persecuted under it. The collapse of that empire left a legalistic vacuum, into which stepped nation-state kingdoms and the early medieval Church.

Unlike political parties, we don’t compete for control, but form a community that points towards a saved and healed world.

It was this latter organ of state that inherited the basic principles of Roman law, centralised, universal and sovereign, under the Pope. And it is that organ that will meet in conclave to elect a new Pope. To describe that election as democratic is more than a stretch, in that the demos, as in common people, are uninvolved and arguably unrepresented.

So the Church is not a democracy, any more than God is accountable to his creation. Rather the other way around – some denominations speak of God’s “elect”, those he chooses for salvation. In Christian thought, God is a servant king, but nonetheless an absolute and, some who oppose the divine might say, tyrannical authority.

How are we to respond to an undemocratic deity? One answer to that might be found in that pluralistic characteristic of democracy. We’re not good, frankly, as recognising pluralism in our faith systems. At best, we operate in a kind of absolute duopoly – you believe, or you don’t. A pluralistic model would be one in which we learn of the divine will through the entirety of creation, all manifestations of belief and unbelief, rather than simply our own.

Pluralism is healthy, in secular politics as well as in religious observance. It has been observed that the old UK political duopoly of Labour and Conservative has been broken in these local elections by Reform UK and resurgent Liberal Democrats and Greens. It’s the polar opposite of the gathering autocracy in the US and gives a voice to a range of worldviews.

This is not an argument for theocracy, but it is to claim that the Christian tradition rests on the principle that no political order can claim the authority of God other than the Body of Christ. And the Body of Christ incorporates all members of the human race. Unlike political parties, we don’t compete for control, but form a community that points towards a saved and healed world.

The choice here is between a kind of secular citizenship, a form of multi-culturism which strikes an accord between varied communities on universally enlightened principles. Or we can respond to the energy on which that secular utopia might be founded, in building communities of the willing towards global justice and peace. That is a diversity mission for the Church.

So, it’s less about democracy than pluralism. And that pluralism has to become a recognisable characteristic of the body of the faithful, which it all too often historically hasn’t been. One can only hope and pray that it might be a mission that is also at the heart of the deliberations that lead to a puff of white smoke from the Sistine Chapel in the coming days.

Celebrate our 2nd birthday!

Since Spring 2023, our readers have enjoyed over 1,000 articles. All for free.
This is made possible through the generosity of our amazing community of supporters.

If you enjoy Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?

Do so by joining Behind The Seen. Alongside other benefits, you’ll receive an extra fortnightly email from me sharing my reading and reflections on the ideas that are shaping our times.

Graham Tomlin
Editor-in-Chief

Join with us now