Friday, August 17, 2012

Snippet of a memoir: OCD and religion, getting saved, or not

  Note: I’ve written before about my relationship with religion, especially as a young girl trying to make sense of God while obsessive-compulsive disorder was running my life. In this vignette, I write about an early religious experience.

  I found out about rededicating one’s life to Christ on May 2, 1975. I was almost 12 years old. It was a Friday, and revival had been going on all week.
  My church had mustard yellow, walk-in carpet, the thin kind that wears well. The floors were dark hardwood, remnants of the church’s past. I sat in the youth choir section, which was directly across from the adult choir section.
  The altar was on my right between the two choirs. A railing encircled the altar and the chairs for the ministers. On the outside of the railing was a section for kneeling sinners, for those coming to get saved or to rededicate their lives to Jesus.
  Every night, as we sang the last hymn, the visiting minister, the revival speaker, put out the call to the altar. As we sang, people would put down their hymnals and walk up to the altar. Some would be crying, some looked scared, some looked relieved, some looked determined. But afterwards, they all looked relieved.

  I hadn’t gone up to the altar all week. I had been baptized when I was about nine, and I wasn’t sure how that played into salvation.
  From what I was hearing from the revival speaker, it didn’t mean anything. I was still a sinner and still far from God and still not saved.
  And there was a specific way to be saved. One had to accept Jesus into their hearts to be saved. Believing that he existed wasn’t enough either.
  During the final hymn all through the week, I had felt intensely anxious. I would feel a growing dread as we sang a hymn such as “Just As I Am.” My arms felt numb, I couldn’t concentrate on the words of the hymn and I felt afraid.
  I wondered if the fear was God’s way of telling me that I needed to be saved. I wondered if I needed to go to the altar.
  I wished I knew what the people going forward had prayed. The preacher usually talked to them, too, at the altar.

  This Friday night, we sang the final hymn, and I felt that now-familiar fear and dread and anxiety. I was afraid to go up to the altar. I was shy. But I was afraid not to go up, too. And some of my friends had gone up earlier in the week and seemed happy for doing it.
  In a daze, I put down the hymnal and walked the short walk to the altar and knelt down. I didn’t know what to do. I closed my head and bowed my head, but I didn’t really know what to pray.
  The prayer that came out without thinking, out loud, in a whisper, was something like, “Oh, God, please forgive me.”
  I remember opening my eyes and seeing the minister smile at me. I looked behind me and saw my parents, who had come up to stand behind me. They were smiling, too. I heard the minister talking to my parents, but I couldn’t understand what they were saying.
  Then I heard my parents tell the minister that I had been baptized. The minister looked at me and told me I had rededicated my life to Christ that night.

  When I got home, I opened up my Bible, the white one with my name embossed on the front that I had received for Christmas one year, and in the front wrote the date and that I had rededicated my life to Christ on that date.

  This was the beginning of my obsession about being saved. I couldn’t resolve within me how getting baptized was something that had saved me when I heard ministers and then, when I started going to Christian schools, school officials and teachers say that you had to accept Christ in your heart to be saved. I knew I hadn’t done that when I was baptized. But I hadn’t prayed that on May 2, 1975. All I’d prayed was for God to forgive me. Was that being saved?
  But what I was learning at church at revivals and at school especially was telling me that one had to pray a certain prayer and ask specifically for forgiveness from sins and for Jesus to come into your heart. That was the only way to be saved.
  I don’t know how many times I prayed for forgiveness and for Christ to come into my heart. I was looking for the feeling that I was saved, for a reassurance that I didn’t need to worry about it any more.
  That was a reassurance that I knew others my age had who were saved. They didn’t seem to doubt their salvation at all. They could point to a date or an age and say with certainty that they had been saved then.

  How did religion affect you when you were a child?

15 comments:

  1. My parents are atheists. So in my youth I never had much to do with God at all.
    But when I was in Africa I was reading a Christian book the one day and I had the most incredible experience and suddenly knew that God does exist. For all people.
    I walked into our garden, looking out over the beautiful scenery there and somehow the sky looked more blue and the trees and the grass were a deeper green and everything looked so alive somehow. I cried and cried, feeling more loved and cared for than I ever had in my whole life. It was beautiful.

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    1. Klaaske, that sounds like a beautiful and life changing moment. That must have been awesome!

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  2. Tina I thought I was already following you through google friend connect but oops I hadn't so following you now as you will have seen. Thank you for sharing your experience of rededicating your life to God. When I was young just a child I attended Sunday school and then due to family problems I was not taken to church any more. How ever I never stopped believing in God and one day as a young teenager I was walking past a shop which had a poster advertising a Billy Graham rally. I felt such an over powering urge to go and it would not leave me. To cut a long story short I went I enjoyed it and then the call came to publicly stand and dedicate your life to God. I felt such an urge I could not ignore it and yet I was really quite shy at the time. This became the start of a second journey for me with church life and deepening my faith, I was already baptised but my church had a service where you joined the church and declared again your dedication to God and your belief in God and his ways. Funnily enough at the Billy Graham rally you gave your name/address and thus it was that a church from my town would be in touch with me and of the three churches it could be the minister who came was in fact from the church I attended as a young child. That minister has been my God with skin on as I have had to navigate the traumatic experiences in my life. The church was my second home and indeed taught me the skills to work with children and young people which I then used in my working life.

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    1. It sounds like your visit to the Billy Graham rally was the start of a wonderful experience. It's great that you have a minister who is supportive of you and helpful through the bad times in life.

      Thanks for following! :-)

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  3. Oh Tina, I'm so very sorry for the pain you experienced. How very sad that what should have been immense comfort turned into torment. Sigh.

    I am very grateful that my childhood impression of God was mostly positive. I felt loved by Him and I felt certain that I loved him. There was no pressure in my world to dedicate myself to Him. As much as anxiety was a part of my life, during my early childhood my relationship with God was special. I'm so sorry it was not for you.

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    1. Sunny, I'm glad that you had a good experience growing up with religion, and that your faith is still so important to you. I feel like I'm growing spiritually. And my experiences as a young person ended up teaching me a lot.

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  4. What a painful experience. I too struggle with religion and OCD.

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    1. Thanks, Elizabeth--sometimes it's difficult, isn't it? But we persevere!

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  5. My childhood experience was positive, with the one exception of something I wrote about once which was my sunday school teacher having a picture of an eye at the front of the classroom and saying Jesus always had his eye on us. She may have even mean't it in a positive way, but I took it as he saw everything bad I did and I took it in a threatening way. I wasn't even a bad kid but it spooked me.
    But for the most part I saw God as a loving God and I based my being saved on faith alone. In our church they really focused on Jesus dying for our sins so I accepted that if God sent his son to die for my sins, he knew I would struggle with sinning in my life and I cannot be perfect and when i asked for forgiveness I was truly forgiven.
    That is not to say I never struggle with guilt or remorse.

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    1. Krystal Lynn, I think that eye would have spooked me, too!

      I'm glad you've had good experiences with religion. I, too, struggle with guilt and remorse, but I try to remember God's grace.

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  6. That sounds really hard for a kid to experience. I wish it could've been easier for you.

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    1. Thank you, Lisa! It was hard going through it, but I think I learned from it--eventually.

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  7. I think the typical alter call with congregants chanting "Just As I Am" is an anxiety-inducer for a lot of people, all the worse for people already struggling with anxiety. Basically I think it's a type of emotional manipulation. And how much worse for a child who has heard mixed messages about salvation and sin?

    My heart goes out to the little Tina who wanted to do right by God but had no real means of expressing her confusion and self-doubt.

    I had no experiences with church as a kid so I can't relate. Oh, wait, except for one time: While my parents were separated, my mother had us living with her brother and his wife (the scary aunt and the scary uncle I've dubbed them). They were church goers so my mom thought she'd tag along. She didn't want her noisy kids to embarrass her though so she let us play in the adjacent school's playground. I believe it was late October. It was cold. The grass was wet and my feet were freezing. It seemed to take forever for my mother to emerge from the church to get my siblings and me. The message: I'm noisy, not good enough for church and an embarrassment to my mother. :) I think I must have been right because I still don't have a relationship with my mother.

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    1. Grace, I agree--it's a form of emotional manipulation. I don't like it.

      I'm sorry you had that experience with your mother. I didn't have an easy relationship with my mother as a child, either, and it extends to the present.

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  8. I had a very similar experience as a child, but I've never associated it with my OCD. I think it's more a matter of a young child trying to do what they think is the right thing while not fully understanding it. Later on I found out that the reason the whole "being saved" condition doesn't make sense is because the whole religion is a mess of historical accidents and politically convenient theology.

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