Doing Theology Through the Feathers: Reflecting on Practical Theology as a Student with OCD

“Why are you researching theology?” the Parrot asks me, as I submit the application forms for my PhD. He is mocking me. I already know everything he is about to say to me. We’ve been here before, he and I. The Parrot is always there – he is the voice that my Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) takes. He is the voice of every doubt, every intrusive thought, every repeating phrase that gets lodged in my mind. He will bring up the fears I have that I’m not religious enough, as though that disqualifies me from studying theology. He will tell me that I can’t sit in that space of doubt day after day and still remain well. He’ll tell me that I’m doing what I’ve always done, staying because I’m too scared to change and not because I’ve found something that feels like home.

He knows all of this because he is me, but he is also OCD. I picture him bright and vivid – all sleek red feathers and glittering beak. Sometimes it feels like his wings are so vast that they can wrap around my entire brain, obscuring all logic so that all I can see is a wall of feathers. They protect me from a chaotic world that doesn’t follow the Parrot’s rules.

He talks like he’s a friend who knows what is best for me but the Parrot is disfunction in the guise of protection. He is a personification of a disorder – nothing more, nothing less – but he speaks with enough authority that I’m scared of disobeying. The Parrot can remind me of the consequences the minute that I consider straying from his safety.

But I do disobey. “I’m researching theology because I want to,” I tell the Parrot.

Every single day, studying for my PhD in Theology is an act of rebellion against something in my own brain – against the part of my mind that will repeatedly tell me, in its parrot voice, “you shouldn’t be here! I can stop you from being here!”

We both remember the day that I couldn’t go to the final lecture of my first Theology module as an undergraduate. I remember being frozen in place in the corridor. I was trying to tell myself that I’d be fine. The Parrot was repeating the course guide back to me: “death, eschaton, death, last things, death, end of times… Look at all these things you might have to think about!” 

“You’re right,” I’d said, imagining already the Parrot’s parade of horrors that I might have been forced to consider if I had gone to class. I was frustrated, but the Parrot was right. Wouldn’t it have been dreadful if those things had entered my brain?

Now, it makes me think of the common analogy in OCD treatment – don’t think about the pink elephant! And lo and behold, there’s the pink elephant, completely unbidden. You can try and think of other things but there it is. It feels like this is lost on the Parrot – he squawks, “Don’t think about death! Oh, no, you’re thinking about it!” at frequent intervals in his campaign to protect me. The feathers obscure my vision but my fears are tattooed on the inside in vivid detail.

I’m learning now to do theology despite that. Turning up to university, reading books, and sitting in lectures become acts of defiance. Sometimes, the Parrot feels like he has the loudest voice in the room. I have to pause in my reading about causes of OCD because he’s asking, “What if this is how you got OCD?” This time, it’s about people who had streptococcal infections as children developing OCD and what if…?

“It isn’t,” I reply. 

“Are you sure?” the Parrot demands.

“Yes,” I say, doubtfully. For a moment, he’s winning because I bring up a search engine to find out if it could be true. 

The Parrot sees his opportunity. “What if it just wasn’t of any consequence until now, so nobody mentioned it? What if your parents didn’t know that it may have caused your OCD? You should ask them.” It sounds like an instruction, not a suggestion.

I look at my phone and consider dialing right there and then. Eventually, I say, “I’m not asking my parents.”

“You really should,” the Parrot responds. His reply is instant. He has an answer to everything. I can never catch him off-guard, and he is never at a loss for words. In fact, he has plenty more to come: “Ask your parents or we’ll be stuck in this never-ending debate for the rest of your life and this uncomfortable feeling will never go away. We’ll be stuck with it forever. You could be missing something really significant. The story you tell about when your OCD started will be a lie. Your whole theological work will be built on a fabrication because you didn’t just check.”

I manage to close the Google search. “I’m not asking my parents,” I say. I don’t complete the reading that day, but I don’t ask my parents. Neither of us get our way and it’s a stalemate. Another day, I finish reading and I still haven’t asked my parents.

The Parrot is always there, but sometimes he doesn’t always demand as much attention. Those are the days I can most easily return to more challenging texts. Some days it’s easy. Other days, it’s a matter of persistence – a matter of choosing to go to university, of choosing to open books where I know the content might frighten me, choosing to continue.

Very occasionally, it’s just enough to exist. On those days, it’s enough to allow my vision to be obscured by feathers and wait, holding onto the faith that tomorrow, things might seem a little clearer. I can learn from this experience, though.

At the very least, it tells me what Practical Theology means to me, and what it means to place my research here. For me, researching Practical Theology means living through the study of theology. My work is theological because of where it begins for me – in this place of doubt and questioning, but also in a place where faith can exist. This isn’t necessarily a religious faith – my theology is sometimes missing a God and instead embraces every ounce of doubt that lives in my uncertain mind.

Some days, my faith feels like it is in the claws of an imaginary Parrot – a caricature of my OCD. I put my faith in rules created by a disorder, in part of my mind that tells me that following its commandments will keep me safe, keep those around me safe, make the world more manageable. It is a faith, nonetheless, and there are others out there who put their trust in the same disordered way of thinking. Practical Theology allows me to sit in a place of doubt and embrace that experience in a way that other disciplines might not. I am learning not to seek answers that would satisfy my need for certainty in all aspects of not just faith, but life itself. Instead, Practical Theology allows me to accept that I might never be certain and instead to work to make space to recognise and accept doubt. I might never find an answer good enough to satisfy the Parrot, but I’m doing the right work to allow myself and others like me to live well with doubt.

For me, that means doing theology through the feathers.

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Acknowledgements

With thanks to Dr Katie Cross and Dr Léon van Ommen for asking the right questions and giving me a safe, encouraging space to figure out how to articulate this.

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© Paula Duncan, 2023.

This work is licensed under Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).

Cover Image: “Parrot Bird Feathers Plumage” by Rethinktwice is licensed under the Pixabay License.