Doubt: Hesitation, uncertainty, reservation, misgiving, distrust, disbelief, qualm, suspicion, skepticism.
Many of these are qualities that I try to inculcate in my students. As sad as it may be, this civilization has a penchant for being misled, hoaxed, bamboozled, defrauded, swindled cheated, tricked, fleeced, conned, and duped by whomever has the charm and skills to do so. As a science teacher I try to help my students build malarkey detectors, something that automatically deploys whenever they hear specious statements. They learn to ask questions to discover the soundness of the statement and to try to learn what evidence the speaker has on which to base such an assertion. They can then decide for themselves whether or not to believe the statement. The ideas of UFOs, global warming, and psychoanalysis each have their proponents and detractors, but each person must come to their own conclusion about their veracity.
If he had been a student of mine, I would have been proud to hear Thomas after that long-ago Easter evening: “Yeah, right! I won’t believe it unless I see the wounds in his hands and put my hand in his side.” I would have been in the same state of mind. The idea that Jesus could have risen from the dead was so preposterous, outrageous, absurd, unnatural, and so contrary to our common experiences that just someone’s assertion that it had happened, no matter how trustworthy, would be too much to swallow. My malarkey detector would be on Red Alert.
During my lifetime of attending churches of various types, my experience has been that, on the whole, churches are much better at giving answers than at receiving questions. I find that many folks are shy about asking questions because either they haven’t found anyone who will honor their questions or they find when they do ask a question they’re treated as if they’re heretics or have already lost their faith, and it only gets worse when they point out that the answer they get doesn’t answer anything for them.
Sunday School and Confirmation Classes have been usually structured for a long time now to churn out routine answers to routine questions at regular age levels. Unfortunately, the very age at which most people outgrow Sunday school and the Confirmation class and become confirmed is exactly when we begin to grow into the spiritual confusions that are the essence of adulthood. At that point the old answers get a bit thin. It is difficult for most of us (at least in the Episcopal Church) to picture God as a very old white-bearded man on a throne who sits above creation and occasionally stirs it with a stick. But what have we replaced that image with? If we face our questions about what we have been taught, we have two choices: We can allow our spiritual lives to remain in adolescence and assume that faith has something to do with accepting childish answers to complex issues; or we can follow our questions to the center of the mystery that stretches far beyond theological politics and historical documentation. We can search to the point where only wonder will do; or we can turn the spiritual life into some kind of corporate strategy aimed at collecting and storing up rituals so we can earn our way to heaven. The one answer leads to the awesome indefinable nature of God; the other reduces God to the exercises of a theological athletic field, neither of which may be very helpful.
We have to be comforted by the fact that all the great spiritual models of the ages before us found themselves, at one point of another, plunged into doubt, into darkness, into certainty or uncertainty: Augustine, John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila, Meister Eckhart, John the Baptist, Thomas, Peter, one after another of them all wondered, and wavered, and believed beyond belief.
Doubt does not presume the static nature of God or of our spiritual life. Doubt takes us beyond ourselves to the guidance of a God whose face is not always in books. Doubt is what leaves us open to truth, wherever it is, however difficult it may be to accept.
Doubt forces us to reconsider everything we have been made to believe. Without doubt, our life would be a series of packaged assumptions, none of them tested, none of them sure, and all of them not belonging to us, but to someone else whose truth we have made our own.
The problem with accepting truth as it comes to us rather than truth as we discover for ourselves is that it’s not worth dying for—and we don’t. It becomes a covering, a glaze, of ideas inside of which we live our lives without passion, without care. This kind of faith happens around us but not in us—we just go through the motions. The first crack in the structure and we’re gone. The first chink in the wall of the castle and we’re off to less demanding fields.
How would Thomas’ life have been different if, when the ten disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord,” he had said, “All ten of you saw him at the same time? Well, that’s good enough for me. I believe you. What do we do next?” That, of course, isn’t what he said. John’s Gospel makes Thomas a stand-in for us all who want to see something for ourselves before we decide whether or not it is true. I, for myself, have heard some convincing stories about stigmata, out of body travel, and weeping statues of the Virgin Mary, but so far I have not experienced any for myself. Until I do they remain hearsay. I can’t in honesty say they are not true, but they are not true for me. Unless I see, I will not believe.
It’s an understandable attitude: John understood it enough to include Thomas’ story in the Gospel. Even Jesus understood it. He didn’t dismiss Thomas from his circle of friends for not believing what they had told him. By the end of that Monday night no one there had to take anyone’s word for anything. They all saw and believed.
But where does that leave us, who were not there and will never lay eyes or hands on the concrete person of Jesus? We are outside the circle of the story by thousands of years, and yet Jesus seems to include us in it, too. Speaking to the rest of us, Jesus says, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”
Doubt is the mother of conviction. Once we have pursued our doubts to the last, we have forged a stronger, not a weaker, belief system. These truths are true, we know, because they are now true for us rather than simply true for someone else. If we try to stop a person from questioning the unquestionable, to suppress doubt, to discourage thinking, we are only making them more susceptible to the cynical and more unaccepting of naïve belief.
It is doubt that is the beginning of real faith. The only corrective for passive disbelief is passionate doubt. Our world is filled with people who never question whether or not the government and the Constitution are attuned, whether our churches and the Gospel are compatible. So we produce unpatriotic patriots and corporate believers, people who are more committed to the system than they are to the following of Jesus. And we produce them at an alarming rate.
Without doubt, there is a complacency of untested faith that makes us vulnerable to the whims of change and disciples of a thousand idols. If God is still an old man in the sky for us, then to find not a hint of him in space exploration can be a real challenge to faith. If we never put our own beliefs to the test of inner truth, we are susceptible to every peddler of intellectual schemes who stops us along the way. We become consumers of multiple falsehoods in our very desire for truth.
But doubt reduces complacency and leaves us open to larger, better explanations than the simple ones we give to children until they are old enough to absorb the fact that God really is “pure Spirit,” however much we cannot imagine what that is, or how it can be, or what it means to the place of God in a material world.
There is a bit of Thomas in each of us who will not believe without seeing for ourselves that what is said to be true does indeed have some kind of truth to it, no matter how illogical, no matter how obscure. It is at the point where we desire to see, because down deep our hearts believe what our minds cannot explain, that faith sets in. But the path to that kind of faith is only though the darkness of doubt.
There is a point in life when reason fails to satisfy our awareness of what is clearly unreasonable and clearly real at the same time—like love and self sacrifice and trust and good. Data do not exist to explain these unexplainable things. Then only the doubt that opens our hearts to what we cannot comprehend, only the doubt that makes us rabidly pursue the truth, only the doubt that moves us beyond complacency, only the doubt that corrects mythologies not worthy of faith can lead us to the purer air of spiritual truth. Then we are ready to move beyond the senses to the mystical, where faith shows us those penetrating truths the eye cannot see.
