It was the first Sunday of Advent. My daughter and I were sitting on the church steps. Her anxiety was raging so fiercely that she was unable to enter the church. I had promised we could sit outside if that would help her feel safer.
Actually, I had told her that she did not have to come with me at all. Her anxiety over mandatory Mass attendance had been gradually increasing, casting a dark cloud over our weekends. The pressure of having to go to Mass was destroying her. The pressure of having to get her there, knowing her resistant state, was destroying me. We had worked ourselves to a fever pitch.
Intellectually, I suspected that my daughter’s anxiety was severe enough to justify excusing her from mandatory Mass attendance on the grounds of mental illness; yet the voice of fear screamed that if I gave her an “out,” I would never get her into church again, and that our other children would follow her example. Other fears, half-submerged in my subconscious, hinted that if I did not exert a nauseating level of coercion, I was not really “trying hard enough” to justify excusing her.
And yet…a strangled instinct beneath all the fear and self-judgment whispered, “The loving God you know now does not desire this trauma for you and your child.”
I passionately desired to believe the whisper, but I was afraid.
*****
Yet something had broken this week. Despite all my coaxing and strategizing, I was forcibly confronted with the realization that my daughter’s anxiety was simply out of my control; that her resistance reflected a “can’t,” rather than a “won’t.” A trusted priest had advised me not to force her to attend Mass under these circumstances. And so, despite the fearful voices, I had taken a desperate leap.
“Look, honey. Mass isn’t required if someone is too sick to go; and sometimes anxiety can get so bad that it is a kind of sickness. If you truly can’t handle it, you don’t have to go. But…” I choked back a sob. “…I have to go. My soul needs it.“
Would she choose to brave Mass, or to let me separate from her? Both alternatives reduced her to blind panic, but after a great deal of angst on both our parts, condensed into a wild fifteen minutes, she decided that joining me was a lesser evil than watching me walk out the door.
That is how we found ourselves on the church steps, listening through the open doors to the faint echoes of chant, and dimly observing the glimmer of Christmas trees around the far-off altar.
*****
“Can I read the readings out loud?”
My daughter agreed to let me use her Mass journal.
“In those days, in that time,
I will raise up for David a just shoot ;
he shall do what is right and just in the land.“
As I spoke the ancient words of hope, tears choked my voice. My daughter looked at me in surprise and alarm. A moment later, we were both weeping, right there on the church steps.
We finished that Mass inside the church, momentarily triumphant against our respective enemies.
*****
Moreover, a new layer of suffocating, scrupulous dependence on control was stripped from my heart that night. All my life, I have found the Sunday Mass obligation anxiety-inducing. Although I rationally understand that I cannot accidentally fall into mortal sin, my OCD is uncomfortable with how “easy” it would be to break the obligation.
When I am sick, I worry that I am not sick enough to justify my absence. I am assailed by guilt and anxiety if I have to spend a significant portion of the Mass caring for children outside. One of the reasons my daughter’s Mass anxiety has been so difficult for me is the fear that it will undermine my own Mass attendance.
Even as I have overcome some of the more oppressive scrupulous obsessions in my past, this one has lingered. “Better safe than sorry,” it whispers. I really am required to attend Mass, so what practical difference does it make if I do so with a rigid attitude?
Yet it does matter. Fear clouds my intimacy with God. Fear also obscures my loving relationship with my children, and influences the relationship with God which I am able to model for them.
That night, I was forced to let go of lingering vestiges of fear. Giving my daughter permission to miss Mass was a leap of faith; an act of trust in the mercy and love of a God who simultaneously terrified me. After all, I had to accept the possibility that my daughter might take me up on my offer.
Shockingly, though, that has not occurred. The mercy and compassion that cost me so much to offer seem to have given her enough space to be drawn towards the Good herself.
This act of compassion for my suffering child also reopened a blocked channel of God’s mercy to the scrupulous part of myself: the part which clung to the shield of perfect rule observance to protect it from a distorted image of God. Only by mustering the courage to extend compassion to another was I able to glimpse the gentle God who was looking upon me with compassion.
It turns out that my capacities to receive and to extend compassion both depend on authentic trust in God’s loving-kindness. Fear is not an adequate substitute for trust.
But beyond the darkness of fear and the chasm of faith, that trust leads to intimacy.
Catholic and OCD 