On the Grace of Doubt

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As always, dear friend, this is a thought in progress. As if I needed to remind you, but remind you I will. I am simply a guy who longs to walk with God. Nothing more than that, and I think in the depths of their hearts, most or maybe all people long to walk with God in just the same way. Most of what is written here is honest wondering, and then sharing what I notice, and welcoming what others have noticed in their own wondering. Even, and especially, if they have noticed things that I have not. Even things that seem to contradict my own noticings. If what they have noticed might help me to stay in step with God, then yes, please. Though I no doubt fail, and fail often, I pray that my longing to walk with God is and will be bigger than my longing to be right.

Ready? Let’s go.

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From the Place where we are Right
 by Yehuda Amichai and Stephen Mitchell

From the place where we are right 
flowers will never grow
in the spring. 

The place where we are right 
is hard and trampled
like a yard. 

But doubts and loves 
dig up the world
like a mole, a plow. 
And a whisper will be heard in the place
where the ruined 
house once stood.

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One of the things that I’ve come to appreciate since (at least) October is how loves and doubts  - working beside one another in the afternoon sun -  loosen the barren, hardened dirt of my certainty, and enrich the soil for new and lovely creatures to sprout, to take root, to reach for the heavens, and eventually to bloom. Paradoxically, perhaps, loves and doubts invite new growth. Loves and doubts seem to spark the redemptive process.

In his reading of Amichai’s poem, Padraig O Tuama, offers this nugget:

It isn’t to say (because of your doubt), “You don’t belong anywhere, leave, be gone!” It is to say doubt and love are two things that can hold you. Love, alone, I don’t think is enough because it’s easy to love something and nonetheless be violent in its name. This is about saying “doubt and love.” The doubt that says, What if I need to pay attention to another point of view? How willing am I to ask myself a question that might mean that I have to stand on new ground, that I have to go a bit deeper, that I have to employ doubt and love and maybe even bring some of my loyalties into question in order to ask something that has a deeper integrity.

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I wonder if every awakening starts with the courage, and I think it does take courage, to question whether one is seeing the creation as it really is, or seeing it through a lens that either distorts reality, or at least limits our field of view to a very small portion of the grandeur of what is. Perhaps we have unquestioningly accepted the lens we inherited from those we love. From those who love us. Perhaps we constructed our own lens before our vision was fully developed and we never thought to consider a different one. I think of this: We don’t wear the eyeglasses our parents passed down to us from their parents. Nor do we use the same prescription our first eye doctor wrote for us when we were children. And at the very least, don’t we wipe away the mud and the oils that have accumulated on our lenses over time?

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I have come to wonder if surrender, the honest prayer of repentance, is planted with a seed of doubt, usually in times of difficulty or suffering. I wonder if true clarity begins to form when a person, after years of trying to get it right, begins to question his or her faith in the precise lines and clear boundaries (that were appropriately and lovingly given to him or her early on) and instead places his or her faith in God alone, even if and when that means letting go of old beliefs that, over the years, may have taken up more and more of the frame, and left less and less space for God. Even when that inevitably means embracing mystery and not knowing. In this way, perhaps doubt, when accompanied by love, is a grace. An invitation into an honest conversation with God. I am challenged to see how it could be otherwise, and how such an invitation could be anything other than a grace.

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On doubt, Kathleen Norris wrote:

I assumed that religious belief was beyond my grasp. Other people had it, I did not. For a long time, even though I was attracted to the church, I was convinced that I did not belong there because my beliefs were not thoroughly solid, set in stone.

…

I had thought that my doubts were spectacular obstacles to my faith and was confused but intrigued when an old monk blithely stated that doubt is merely the seed of faith, a sign that faith is alive and ready to grow.

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I wonder how this might resonate with you, friend. It resonates deeply in me. Like Norris, I believed my doubt disqualified me from faith. That faith and doubt could not coexist in the same person. And that any trace of doubt implied I was faithless, and that the only way I could enter a church was as an imposter. I was a Doubting Thomas. I suspect that Norris speaks for many of us. And it breaks my heart that so many know only a God that expects us to come to Him, doubt-free, and to remain without doubt forever. And if we cannot, to risk God’s turning His face from us..

In my story, it was not a wise old monk who offered a new perspective on the doubt I had kept hidden for so long, but the pastor of a church I never expected to attend. This pastor simply read the story of Thomas after Christ’s resurrection. Jesus, knowing his words from the week before, came to Thomas, and said:

Reach your finger here, and look at My hands; and reach your hand here, and put it into My side. Do not be unbelieving, but believing.

This was not a finger-waving Jesus at all. This was not Christ admonishing Thomas. It was not Jesus telling Thomas to come back after he got his thinking right, and definitely not until he had eliminated his own doubt. No. This was compassionate Jesus. There was a breathtaking intimacy between Jesus and Thomas. A remarkable vulnerability from Christ, and it seemed to spring from Thomas’s honest doubt. Not in spite of it.

Reach your finger here.

Look at My hands;

Put your hand into My side

Can you imagine? If you can believe that Jesus is God incarnate, it’s almost too much to comprehend. It is too much. Honestly, I cannot read this without tears. It changed everything for me. I am no longer afraid of honest doubts. I welcome them. Mostly because I have taken my doubts to God, and God has honored my trust with compassion.

And it has been so encouraging to know that many, like Thomas. like Norris, like me, and perhaps like you have struggled in the same direction. (How astonishing and encouraging it was for me to learn that St. Mother Teresa struggled with doubt for many, even most of her mission years.) The Bible is filled with people, some regular folks like me, and even some faith giants who doubted and who brought their doubts to God, and though they may not all have come away without battle scars, God honored their courage and honesty.

Don’t believe me? Look closer. I wonder how I came to believe that doubt is shameful and to be hidden away. I am all but certain that idea did not originate with God.

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As a quick aside, this does not imply that nothing is clear. Eugene Peterson, in Run with the Horses, writes:

Not that there are no clarities in the life of faith. There are. Vast, soaring harmonies; deep, satisfying meanings; rich, textured experiences. But these clarities develop from within. They cannot be imposed from without. They cannot be hurried. It is not a matter of hurriedly arranging "dead things into a dead mosaic, but of living forces into a great equilibrium."' The clarities of faith are organic and personal, not mechanical and institutional. Faith invades the muddle; it does not eliminate it. Peace develops in the midst of chaos.

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The question then, is what are these clarities to which Peterson refers? Where is the peace that is developing the midst of chaos? I cannot tell you what they ought to be for you. I cannot impose them on you any more than you can impose yours on me. But I can remind you those things things to which I have given my heart, and how very clear they have become as my mortality became more than a merely hypothetical-somewhere-off-in-some-distant-decade-sort-of-thing. These are the clarities that beckon me from my bed, and promise new mercies every morning. In Merton’s words, these are the dawn deacons, the clarities, without which, I am not sure I could, or would want to wake at all.

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God is good. 
God is here and now. 
God is sovereign. 
God is relentless in His pursuit of His beloved, which is every single person I have ever met, or ever will meet. 

And one more that I am thinking of adding to the list:

God can handle my honest doubts.

After all, what do truth and God have to fear from honest doubts, and who am I to reject such grace?

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Be well friend. And know that you are deeply, deeply loved.

Oremus,

C

...Though truth and falsehood be
Near twins, yet truth a little elder is;
Be busy to seek her, believe me this,
He's not of none, nor worst, that seeks the best.
To adore, or scorn an image, or protest,
May all be bad; doubt wisely; in strange way
To stand inquiring right, is not to stray;
to sleep, or run wrong, is.

From Truth by John Donne