Another of my anti-scrupulosity tools

Following on from yesterdays post, I want to share my oldest anti-scrupulosity tool in my OCD toolkit.

This is a quote, I believe, from Marcus Aurelius , a Roman Emporer and philosopher.

It also happens to have been the philosophy of my Maternal Grandmother who hailed from Manchester, I'm not sure if she ever read much of Marcus's work but they shared a similar view however unrelated they were.

The quote is :

"Live a good life. If there are Gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are Gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no Gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones."

I think this is a great "in a nutshell" kind of quote. It is pretty blunt but I think it hits the nail bang on the head.

It highlights that living a good life being preferable to living a devout life - something which when you look around the world is not put in to practice enough, when you consider the acts carried out by supposedly "devout" people of many religions.

It is also not specific to any one religion, having originated (if what I understand to be correct) from a time of widespread polytheism.

Any way, most importantly it helps me and it might help you should you share my condition.

One of my anti-scupulosity tools

I have my good friend Paul Walker to thank for the following exerpt from The Chronicles Of Narnia.
Having been forced to see The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe as a young teenager on a school trip, I have avoided ever reading the books - something I may have to put right one day. Anyway Paul sent this to me and it has worked wonders for me when my scrupulosity is bad:

"Then I fell at his feet and thought, Surely this is the hour of death, for the lion (who is worthy of all honour) will know that I have served Tash all my days and not him. Never the less, it is better to see the Lion and die than to be Tisorc of the world and live and not to have seen him. But the Glorious One bent down his golden head and touched my forehead with hi tongue and said, Son, thou art welcome.But I said, Alas Lord, I am no son of thine but the servant of Tash. He answered, Child, all the service thou hast done to Tash, I account as service done to me. Then by reasons of my great desire for wisdom and understanding, I overcame my fear and questioned the Glorious One and said, Lord, is it then true, as the Ape said, that thou and Tash are one? The Lion growled so that the earth shook (but his wrath was not against me) and said, It is false. Not because he and I are one, but because we are opposites, I take to me the services which thou hast done to him. For I and he are of such different kinds that no service which is vile can be done to me, and  none which is not vile can be done to him. Therefore if any man swear by Tash and keeps his oath for the oath's sake, it is me that he has truly sworn, though he know it not, and it is I who reward him. And if any man do a cruelty in my name, then, though he says the name Aslan, it is Tash whom he serves and by Tash his deed is accepted. Dost thou understand child? I said, Lord, thou knowest how much I understand. But I said also (for the truth constrained me), Yet I have been seeking Tash all my days. Beloved, said the Glorious One, unless thy desired had been for me thou wouldst not have sought so long and so truly. For all find what they truly seek."
by CS LEWIS from "The Chronicles of Narnia"

I think it's clear why this helps.
I'll write more about it in the future I think.

I also have another, older antiscruplosity tool that I will talk about in a future post.

A glimpse of my scrupulosity.

This is a very personal blog post. I ask for your understanding and consideration when reading it. Feel free to comment but stand by the principal of "If you have nothing nice to say then say nothing at all".

The problems that scupulosity poses to me.

On one hand, I have my longstanding,  wooly beliefs, my runes, my fondness of heathenist teachings, eastern mysticism and my tattoos.

On the other hand, I love churches, find christianity fascinating, and have a strong desire to share in the positive aspects of it.

Were I not someone who suffered from Scrupulosity as part of their OCD then I would probably find it easy to move between one and the other, maybe even follow this new direction my spiritual path is showing me.

But I am, so I can't.

I did try, in fact have tried on numerous occasions, but I get stuck.

You see there comes a point where, when following the new direction of the path you kind of need to make your mind up about a few things, this leads to conflicts between my two hands and leads to this cyclical wandering which I have been doing for well over 10 years.

So what are these things, these conflicts?

A few examples:
- is there one God or many Gods?
- is one religion right and all the others wrong? Can I belong to a monothiest religion and live with what it teaches about those who do not follow it?
- are people who don't follow a particular set of rules damn to eternal hell without hope of redemption by a loving aspect of the divine?
- if I were to get baptised would I be selling out?
- As someone who practices divination how can I profess one faith when knowingly breaking it's rules?
- How can I condemn something like rune casting when it is something that I do, something that helps people and something that has, for me and others, worked - really work.
- How can I become a christian when I disagree with so many of the instructions in the bible.
- By the same token how can I profess to be "pagan" or "heathen" when, despite having consulted my runes a few days before, I was walking to the theatre to have my operation I was praying to one god, the way that when as I child and as far as I knew there was only one god.
- I am not comfortable to taking any step that would then require me to brand my previous actions/beliefs to have been wrong. They weren't wrong because they were right at the time.

You get the idea.

If I go one way, then I feel like I am closing my mind.

If I go the other way then I feel like I am turning my back on what is a big part of who I am.

I have tried athiesm but that is way to bleak for me.

In fact the afterlife plays a big part in my personal view. You see for as long as I have had an opinion on the existence on "heaven", "afterlife", "valhalla", "paradise", that all but the most evil of souls go there.

With all my concious I cannot bring myself to believe that the criteria for entry into "heaven" (replace it with whatever term you prefer) would be so strict as to restrict it to a very small percentage of the people alive (and that have lived, or will ever lived) - good people as well, people who do so little wrong in their lives but don't quite meet the required criteria.

How can that be?

If that is the way it is then I won't get in.

I don't want to get in.

In fact when I get to the gates, if that's the case, then I'll turn round or chain myself to the railings rather than go in.

But I do want to go to same place as my grandparents, friends and other family that have gone before me. I want that more than anything, that is all that matters to me when it comes to considering my faith.

As it stands I make a crummy heathen, a rubbish christian, an overly motivated agnostic but quite an efficient tortured soul.

So there you are, a glimpse of the inside of my head.

An introduction

I spend a lot of my time pondering my own spirituality and it's relationship to organised religion, Christianity in particular, and it's the resonance I have found in Heathenism and general pagan points of view.

I have no theological training.

I have read a lot about the religions of the world, past and present.

I value what I feel over what is written.

I also suffer from Scrupulosity as part of living with OCD.

I intend to share the thoughts I have on the matters of spirituality and "God".

I hope you'll find them interesting.