The easiest place to start this particular story is to jump to the start of the era: my first year of college.
Much of my faith was deeply formed in my later high school years – my graduating class had something of a dramatic, charismatic revival in our senior year – and that will be relevant later; but for now, I’d like to start with the very first college assignment I ever received, the summer before I entered my freshman year: my university’s Honors Program had us read the entirety of St. Augustine’s Confessions.
St. Augustine changed my world.
He opens his part-autobiography, part-philosophical meanderings with the question of whether we should know God before we call upon him, or whether we should call upon him first to know him: having recently been troubled by whether my own conception of God was “correct enough,” I scribbled, “Is this guy me?” in the margins. Thus began an immediate kinship with a man who lived nearly a millennium ago.
Someday, I’d love to write a memoir of how so much of my journey mirrors St. Augustine’s; we have defining moments of innate sinfulness from our childhoods, strong ties to rhetoric and academia, incredibly gradual conversion narratives, and a deeply-rooted struggle with the same sinful temptation. For now, though, it’ll suffice to say only that his writing gripped me. Here was someone who had the same questions I did, a journey I saw myself on, and the same inability to express profound ideas with brevity. (I say this with the deepest love – neither Augustine nor I know how to be succinct!)
All this to say – perhaps my very first gateway to Catholic theology was discovering that “the Great Cloud of Witnesses” had real people in it, people whose stories I’d never been told but found utterly compelling. “The Communion of Saints” that we recite in the Athanatian creed felt more accessible than it ever had.
Subtle Scruples
Perhaps the second-most notable part of my journey in this same time period was my struggle with what some call “Scrupulosity” – or Religious OCD.
In my senior year of high school, the faith communities I was a part of began to run very charismatic; there was a lot of prophesying, visions, healing, and a general connectedness to the Holy Spirit I’d never encountered before. I learned to hear from God in new, far-more-present ways, and it was a whirlwind of a spiritual high.
Somewhere in the middle of my first semester of college, though, I began to realize that some of the little tugging sensations I’d felt in my brain during those times… weren’t God. The little things that had “just felt right” began to grow into more and more nonsensical ideas – you need to go sit with that man over there right now or he won’t know that God loves him; if you don’t fully explain exactly why you were late to lunch, you’ll be lying and a horrible Christian – that didn’t align at all with what Jesus would say or do.
And if those thoughts weren’t from God… how could I trust anything God might be trying to tell me?
I prayed and prayed. There was no clear answer. Eventually, I threw up my hands and cried, “Fine. God, if you’re not going to speak to me in a way that’s clear, I’m not going to speak to you.”
I never lost my faith, but I effectively crossed my arms and turned my back on prayer for a long while – for most of my second semester of college – and fell into a deep pit of apathy. Why wasn’t God speaking to me? What was wrong with me? If that voice wasn’t God, then what was it?
Finding Hope
So much made sense when I started seeing a therapist. As it turns out, a lot of the ‘promptings’ I’d thought were from God were instead a form of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, or OCD, called ‘Scrupulosity’ (or Religious OCD). It’s characterized by intense compulsions and feelings of guilt directly linked to morality, goodness, and one’s own personal faith – in my case, Christianity. I would feel like I was sinning or disobeying God if I didn’t act on my compulsions – often things like talking to people who sat alone in the cafeteria, or picking up litter on the ground. Learning that there was a name for this and that I wasn’t just “bad at hearing God’s voice” or a “Bad Christian” was more liberating than I can say.
I came out of that period of time, like most who experience dark seasons, a stronger person. I knew myself better, and I knew more of my own mind. What I still didn’t know (and what I’m still learning) was how to re-engage with some of the more mystical, Holy Spirit-borne gifts and experiences I know I engaged with when I ran in more Charismatic circles. Would God still give me leadings that were from him and not OCD? Could I still get specific words from him? It felt like stepping out onto the ice; I moved slowly, not wanting to fall through the surface into the frigid fear of thoughts that weren’t mine.
The heart, I’d learned, could well and truly be deceitful above all things; which was why, unsurprisingly, when the Great Books program I was studying under began to introduce texts that made up the ancient pillars of Christian Theology, I was more than ready for something solid to cling to.
Next post in this series: Sacramental Theology
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