Barnacles, Thorns, and Theology

My mind is encrusted with barnacles of memory. They poke their little creature heads up from within their hard, circular, igloo-like shells, beating against my skull at the slightest provocation–a scent, a song, or a long-forgotten turn in a road I haven’t driven down in years.

They are the keepers of every bad decision, every embarrassing mistake, every stupid thing I’ve ever done, there to torment me with pain from the past. When one of them pops up, you’ll see me suddenly shiver, or shake my head quickly, gasping a little gasp and making a small moan or a grunt, trying to force the creature back into its shell, trying to make it stop prodding me with my every failure, all my shortcomings, and all the “potential” I’ve wasted.

Some of them are very old, some newer, and their colony continues to grow despite my efforts to scrape them off.

Then there are the thorns. Those are the sudden, unexpected shocks of fear that don’t come from my mistakes, but rather from some obscure, or newly discovered, tidbit of knowledge that’s gotten stuck in my head. They stab at me, not with the thumping of memory but with a sharp realization of danger–the discovery of what might be an exceedingly poisonous plant growing brazenly in my flowerbed, or finding out that skunks are prime carriers of rabies when there’s a family of them living under my deck.

Odds and probabilities are meaningless to me when one of those dagger-like factoids embeds itself in my mind. I give myself a deadline to get over it. Usually the deadline is associated with a known incubation period or average time for symptoms of something awful to appear. I plod through my days until I can give my mind permission to let it go, or until I can accept that I’ve survived whatever spectacularly unlikely threat I perceived as imminent and personal to me.

I was fearless when I was younger; I remember the day my brain broke into these shards of OCD and anxiety. And rereading what I wrote about that a few years ago just created another barnacle of failure. And too often, fear still controls my days.

But last week, a blog I follow called Edge of the Atlantic, by a writer named Bill Schulz, posted an essay by a priest and theologian named Ronald Rohlheiser that presented a way of thinking about my barnacles and thorns I hadn’t considered before: the unwelcome thoughts, memories, and fears are akin to dark temptations. They turn me away from a life of love and compassion, and cause me to focus far too much on myself. They are demonic–a manifestation of a kind of evil that must be firmly denied: get thee behind me, Satan!

If you’re an anxious person, like me, and one who is willing to entertain the idea of faith in a higher power, however you may define it, I encourage you to read that piece. It has helped me. It has buoyed me when my courage was failing. It has reminded me to turn toward prayer and faith when my fears are running amok, interfering with joy and gratitude.

I’ve been struggling with obsessions, fears, and anxieties for 40 years, and I’ve declared many times in this blog that I am determined to live free of them–but I have failed repeatedly to escape the grip of barnacles of memory burbling up to pound my head, or thorns of fear like little spears stabbing at my core. But I’m going to keep trying, and maybe that simple ancient admonition, “Get behind me, Satan! Satan, leave me alone!” will help keep me from losing any more time in this precious life to painful memories, or fears of bad things that never happen. It’s worth a try, and it’s been working for me so far.

wishing you release from whatever demons may plague you, I remain,

Your anxious but trying, fearful but determined, failing but still slowly moving forward, hoping for joy in whatever time I have left,

Ridiculouswoman