Doubt and More Doubt
The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts.
Bertrand Russell (1872 - 1970)
There are two ways to slide easily through life; to believe everything or to doubt everything. Both ways save us from thinking.
Alfred Korzybski (1879 - 1950)
To have doubted one's own first principles is the mark of a civilized man.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841 - 1935)
Let there be no doubt….doubt shapes our spirituality. Yours and mine. But that probably comes as no surprise to most of you here this morning. In fact, that doubt is important to our spirituality probably seems obvious to us, as UUs. After all, we are known for being creedless. For welcoming those who cannot accept the rigid tenets of other faiths. We are quite comfortable with the notion of doubt.
And yet, I want to draw your attention this morning to a subtle distinction. We have to be careful about confusing that which we do not believe with that which we doubt. In fact, disbelief often has little to do with doubt.
I think that the word disbelief actually implies a kind of certainty—the certainty that something is not true. Doubt, on the other hand, is what we are less than certain about. I have heard the word “unbelief” applied to doubt, but I think even that seems to imply a firm stance while doubt can occur in the midst of much belief, a much subtler strain in a complex understanding of matters spiritual. Subtle, but fundamental. Without doubt religion is fragile. The whole thing can be quiet unsettling.
This year, in my work as a chaplain intern at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, I saw a wide range of spiritual belief. In the ER, and on regular floors, the way faith or doubt played out in a patient or family’s experience varied greatly. Sometimes the faithful were carried through heartache or worry with their religious beliefs like firm ground beneath them. They took control of what they could, and handed the rest up to God, praying only that they would not feel alone in their suffering, but would be held in God’s hands. Faith carried their spirits through.
Other times, a patient or family would cling to a certain religious belief long after it had become unhelpful or been undermined by the situation, and it only seemed to cause more pain. Why, they would often ask. Why would God do this?
Sometimes a patient who embraced doubt and was therefore able to sit with uncertainty found new wisdom in their experience, because they were open to it.
Other times I was called to serve people who arrived at the hospital without much religious reflection or experience behind them but who longed for certainty, and these were some of the most difficult visits. Where do you begin?
What I saw clearly, however, is that the idea that “faith” and doubt are opposites is false. Although it sounds like a paradox, doubt is required for strong faith; and it takes a lot of faith to embrace your doubt.
In the fall, when I had been working at the hospital for a couple of months, I came across a fascinating article in Newsweek. The author, Andrew Sullivan described watching interviews of the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at the UN. In every interview, Sullivan says, Ahmadinejad had a serene smile. Whether he was just sitting down for the interview, or speaking about volatile political issues and situations, he had the same expression of contentedness. Sullivan found it completely unnerving. Was the man crazy, he wondered? Sure, he was enjoying some political muscle flexing, but not enough to make him look as confident as that. His expression, Sullivan realized, was one of utter calm because, as Sullivan puts it, “the most perplexing and troubling questions we all face every day [had] already been answered. He [had] placed his trust in the arms of God.” Ahmadinejad, it seemed, had a faith that protected him from doubting his own perception. Obviously, this kind of thinking is not limited to leaders in the Middle East.
And outside of politics, I know most of us here have, at one time or another, encountered a religious believer who was similarly without doubt. Or, probably more accurately, who rejected the idea of it, and pushed their own doubts under a rug as much as possible. I think we have all encountered what philosophy calls a “closed system.” I had a conversation with a cousin once whose personal Christianity looked like this: Faith means not letting questions make you doubt. Anything that makes me question my faith is a trick of the devil. You are a trick of the devil. (I’ll bet I’m not the first UU preacher to be called that). And so his “faith” was only strengthened as he rejected his urge to question. There was no way into that logical loop. The system was closed.
And yet, as Sullivan also goes on to argue, truer faith lies in recognizing one’s own limitations of knowing. If God is omnipotent or infinite, then who are we—imperfect seekers that we are—to think we understand what God thinks? He points out that even Jesus of Nazareth, who represents the incarnation of God into the world of mankind had his doubts. “Why oh why have you forsaken me?” He asks on the cross. If Jesus is embodiment of the essence of mankind and God—either literally or metaphorically— then to doubt must be essential.
Well. That’s fine, for fundamentalism, I suppose. But what does this have to do with us? We in the UU tradition already acknowledge that we do not and probably cannot know the ultimate will of God or—if you prefer—we cannot fully comprehend truth—in this world so full of paradoxes and shades of gray. Right living is a journey and not a destination, it is a path that requires discipline and a willingness to do the hard work of continuing reflection. This is the part that requires our attention, I think. A willingness to do the hard work of continuing reflection. Because it isn’t enough to embrace the idea of doubt, one has to go on reflecting on the role that doubt is playing in one’s life. You have to doubt the doubt, as it were. Whew! We’re in deep now!
How does doubt shape your faith and mine?
Recently, I was talking about “spiritual experiences” with my friend Heather, also UU. Heather is a very pragmatic person. A reasonable person. Actually, I did not even know she was interested in talking about spiritual experiences until that day. But I had just finished a year of interning at the hospital, and she was asking what it was like to attend deaths during my nights as the on call chaplain. Then she told me about her dad, who died from lung cancer a couple of years ago.
She began by telling me that back when she was a kid, there was a skinny little tree behind her house, down next to the creek where she used to play. It sprang up in a little grove, planted by Mother Nature, she says but she remembers when it was a sapling. As she grew up, she explained, so did the tree, getting thicker and thicker. Heather could see it from their house, and she and her dad would often stand under it and talk, next to the water. Meanwhile, the creek rose a bit each year in the winter, and each year it washed away more and more of the roots, until finally the tree, now tall and wide, began to lean. “We oughtta get that tree down,” her dad used to say when he was healthy. “I don’t want it to fall on the kids when they’re playing by the water.” Heather agreed, but they never got around to it. When he got sick, and was no longer capable of going out and cutting down a tree, he fretted.
“You’ve gotta take care of that tree,” he always told her. A couple of days before he died he said it again. “The tree.” Heather promised him that “later,” meaning after he was gone, she would get the tree taken care of.
When he died, she took her mom and went home to her partner and her kids for a while. Their minister was out of town, and they had to delay the funeral. Two weeks later she returned. Heather thought of her father as she looked out the window toward the creek. There was the spot where they used to stand. There was the leaning tree. The next day, just after the funeral, she looked out again and did a double take. There was the tree, but it had been, as she puts it, “knocked over.” The branches were sticking straight up over the spot where she and her dad used to stand and talk.
Now Heather, who—as I said, is a very reasonable person—feels in her heart that her dad took care of that tree after he died. Maybe some of us here are uncomfortable with that take, and of course we could all offer up a more rational explanation, I’m sure. That’s fine. I’m also willing to bet there are a pretty good number of folks here who have similar stories, full of strange coincidences and spiritual implications. But whether you agree with Heather’s interpretation or not, what is interesting to me is that this experience, so obviously a spiritual one, is not something Heather feels very comfortable mentioning in church.
I know what she means. It might be awkward, right? I mean, here we are, a people who embrace doubt and reason to the degree that we are known in history as heretics and in some circles still today as “tricks of the devil.” At the same time, we celebrate the wonder and mystery of life but—here’s a question for each person here, including myself—do we do so only at arm’s length?
Perhaps you have heard a story like Heather’s and—even as you were touched by the spirit of it—you caught yourself thinking, “Yes, but...”
Maybe you yourself have experienced something as mysterious and irrational in your own life, and wondered if you were only tempted to believe in it because it is the nature of humans to want to believe in such things...I know I have. And it’s good to have doubts, I’m not suggesting otherwise. We don’t want to dive headfirst into superstition or false hope or--worse yet--ideas that lead down a slippery slope to not using reason at all.
But there’s disbelief and then there’s ambiguity. We are of the nature to experience ambiguity. If we depend on reason to help us sort out our doubts, what do we do with those things that remain unclear? The temptation is to disbelieve, or just not talk about it. We cannot fully comprehend the mysteries of this amazing world of which we have somehow, whether by intention or sheer chance, become a part. But with one eye on the mistakes of our neighbors and ancestors it is easy to be afraid of not doubting everything enough. We don’t want to slide down that slippery slope. So when someone shares a story like Heather’s, there is an expectation of disbelief. But what if that’s really just another way of wanting to be certain we are right—or at least that no one thinks we’re wrong—and that sounds awfully close to those who reject doubt altogether.
I’m not saying you have to agree with Heather’s interpretation, just that there is something else going on in her story, besides the question of the tree. It’s the willingness to draw close to her personal spiritual experience, even though she knows she could be wrong about what happened. Had she been too distracted by her doubts—which she values very much—she would have missed an opportunity to feel one more tangible expression of her dad’s love, as well as a close encounter with the sense of something greater than herself.
This lesson goes beyond mysterious experiences. Life itself is ambiguous sometimes. In chaplaincy, one question I hear over and over again is “Why did this happen?” My answer, 99% of the time is, “I don’t know.” I can’t in good conscience offer folks a theological reason for the senseless things that happen in the world, though there are many others who readily do offer this kind of false security. What is required is a willingness to not know, but to embrace hope. In whatever we do, whether crises or times of awe and wonder, we need enough faith to draw near to those things that touch our spirits, trusting in their authenticity, and at the same time, enough doubt to keep seeking new and deeper understandings of it, because spiritual life is a practice, not a set of rigid beliefs, and because we do not doubt alone, but in this beloved community. There is room for both doubt and faith, and one is incomplete without the other. Without the faith that allows us to risk embracing the mystery, doubt is paralyzing. Without doubt, faith is lacking in what is most essential for authenticity in the human spirit.
As you go out into the rest of your day and week, may you be touched by the transcending mystery and wonder of your everyday world, spurred into continuing growth by your doubts, and emboldened to hold these together in community with one another. May it be so. Amen.