Doubt as a Spiritual Path

A sermon delivered at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation (Blacksburg, VA), August 15, 2004, by the Reverend Christine Brownlie.

One morning as I was having coffee with Jill, she surprised me by asking my opinion about a situation that had come up with one of her neighbors. This was a man who had lived across the street from her for many years and while she was friendly with his wife, but she didn’t know him very well.

She said that they met one evening as they were both hauling out their trash cans and he suggested that since it was such a lovely evening, they might take a walk around the neighborhood. So off they went.

They’d barely gone 10 feet when he asked her if she was “saved.” Jill taken aback by this unexpected question, and she hedged a bit. “I think I am.” She said. Her neighbor then asked her if she believed that the Bible was the inerrant word of God. This was too much for Jill, and she replied that she didn’t believe that. What’s more, she didn’t understand how anyone could. In her forthright manner, she went on to explain about the history of the scriptures, the problems of translation, and politics in the early church. After a few minutes of this monologue, she realized that her neighbor looked as if he’d been hit from behind by something very heavy, and she fell silent.

“I thought you were a religious person!” her neighbor exclaimed. “My wife says that you’re always talking about your church. How can you not believe in the Bible??” He began to question her about other beliefs. Surely she believed in Jesus — in heaven and hell, in God?

Jill is in her 70s and she’s a well-read and thoughtful person — as well as being pretty forthright. So she was very comfortable explaining that her religion didn’t hinge on faith in creeds or deities or holy books. She said that she wasn’t sure about the existence of God — she’d never felt solid about that issue. But she was certain that Jesus was a wonderful man and role model, and that his message of love for neighbor and doing unto others had influenced her life. She wasn’t sure what happened to people after death, and if there is a heaven, she expects that everyone will be there. Oh and by the way, she has recently felt very drawn to some of the teaching of the Buddha and Lao Tzu.

Her neighbor stopped in his tracks, “I don’t get it!” (Jill said that now he looked like she’d revealed that she was from another planet.) “How can you have a religion based in doubt?” By this time they were back home, and Jill thought her neighbor probably poured himself a healthy shot of some potent elixir as he recovered from their conversation. She said it was several weeks before her relationship with either neighbor was back in a comfortable groove. She asked me if I thought she should have revealed so much about her own theology.

I don’t know why Jill’s neighbor was so distressed. Doubt is a common experience in all religious traditions, including Judaism and Christianity. Jesus’ cry of anguish on the cross, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” is a poignant expression of doubt. The Jewish scriptures offer us some of the most honest expressions of doubt that I’ve ever read. Read the Book of Job, which ends with Job saying,

“All right, you win, I’ll stop trying to understand why I had to go through all this misery and grief and accept it as a mystery that’s beyond me. I shut my mouth.”

Our reading from the Book of Ecclesiastes, basically tells us that there is no way to make sense of life, there’s no way to predict how your life will turn out. God is present but unpredictable and even unfair: the battle does not always go to the strong nor the race to the swift. Enjoy the good things life offers you, because bad times are surely in your future.

If you compare these books with the steady confidence of the Psalms, (think of the promise of Psalm 23: “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.”) and you have to wonder about the theology of the men who put the Jewish canon together. How can expressions of such exalted faith and such sinking doubt both be present in the same scriptures? My guess is that these rabbis knew very well that the peaks and valleys of faith and doubt are common human experiences.

Most people who call themselves religious seek the mountaintops of faith. We Unitarian Universalists are different. We love the valleys as much or even more than the peaks. For some of us, doubt is not a low point, something we need to overcome; doubt is our way, our spiritual path.

So what is doubt? Are Atheists doubters? I would say that atheism is not doubt — the convinced atheist knows that there is no God and this claim of “no God” is just as much a statement of faith as the faith claims of the Apostle’s Creed. Since there’s no way to prove either the existence or non-existence of God beyond a shadow of a doubt, both claims are statements of personal faith that don’t make room for doubt. I suspect that many UUs find themselves in a middle ground when it comes to claims and denials of religious doctrines. We’re just not sure; we can’t commit to either “yes” or “no.”

Let’s take the question of God’s existence. For some of us there are times when the Divine seems real and present. We experience something unnamable that tells us that Life has meaning beyond the day-to –day struggle for survival. There is something more, something bigger than our individual existence. We might describe those moments as a sense of connection with the transcendent of what we would call ultimate in life. In these moments of profound experience, we feel confident and grounded.

Then come the days when God seems distant, dead or just a figment of the human imagination. As far as we can tell, Life has no meaning, no rhyme or reason at all. Why is there so much horror and suffering in the world? What’s the point of all that we do, of all that happens to us? When I’m in this mode, I recall the words of Shakespeare’s Macbeth that I was made to memorize when I was in high school:

“Life is a tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

But it’s not just despair or a sense of futility that awaken my doubts about the meaning of Life. Sometimes new and astonishing information about the universe can bring me to doubt. I’m fascinated by the photos that come back to us from Hubble and other spacecraft, and I love to look at the stunning photos on the NASA Web site. These pictures bring the vastness and the exquisite unseen beauty of the universe to my laptop. Sometimes when I look at the endless array of stars and galaxies, I catch myself humming the tune to the old hymn “How Great Thou Art.” But other times I see these same pictures and I’m convinced that my brief life on this little fly-speck of a planet means absolutely nothing. My sense of connection to God, my experiences of the transcendent, and my faith in the meaning of Life seem laughable and foolish. Like Job, I must shut my mouth, for I have no confidence in my own understanding.

So there I am, going back and forth, wondering and questioning. Sometimes I find a place to rest my heart, yet I know that each resting place is a temporary or at best incomplete shelter. The reality of my life is that the unanswerable questions of human existence rise up again and again, like a tide pulling me out into a sea of uncertainty and doubt. Why are we here? How should I live? What happens to us when we die — and what does life mean in the face of death? And like the man who interrogated my parishioner, I have to ask: is this any way to be practice a religion?

I say, it is. I say that as reassuring as it may be to claim with confidence that one knows the truth about the big questions in life, doubt leads us to places and ideas that we’d never seek out if we were firmly settled in either “YES” or “NO.” It seems to me that in an odd way, both believers and unbelievers who claim to know the answers suffer from a blindness that hinders both reason and imagination. Both the believer and the non-believer are caught up in a hunger for certainty that makes doubt too hard to bear.

Every once in a while, Maria Rott, our wonderful pianist, plays an aria from Handel’s Messiah for the postlude. Each time she plays that first triumphant phrase,

“I Know That My Redeemer Liveth.”

“No he doesn’t.”

What I find so valuable in doubt is that it carries me away from my assumptions and unexamined definitions and brings me to the living waters of possibility. Doubt keeps me engaged in the persistent “big questions” of life. It moves me out of declarative mode — when I speak my truth with certainty and drops me gently into interrogative, a slower current that allows me to question, dialogue — maybe reframe and reclaim ideas and words that I have crammed into tiny little boxes and labeled “false” or “worthless.” It clears a space for new thoughts, alternative interpretations, and the inexplicable experiences that human beings sometimes have as they look for those truths that are beyond the province of reason and the scientific method.

Doubt keeps me humble — I can say “I believe!” knowing that my faith is placed in ideals, intuitions, and hopes that will change and evolve as I grow and question and wonder about what is true and right and real.

Being a doubter doesn’t mean that I jump at every version of spirituality that comes along. I do claim a few “rocks” of truth as my foundation and something to hold onto when the tides of life tear at me, and I feel that I might get pulled under in despair and cynicism. I still claim that there is the possibility of goodness in every person. I do believe that there is more to life than what we can touch, taste, and see and that this “more” is the source of the meaning of life. But what that more is — I can’t quite name.

I know that some of us who are doubters struggle now and then with a longing for certainty. Even if we left a religious tradition that told us what to believe, how to pray, and how to be faithful to the teachings of that faith, we wonder if something important is missing from our spiritual lives. I’ve had many conversations with parents who are concerned that their child might not be getting the kind of solid foundation that they received in their early years. One mother once said to me,

“I guess what this is really about is that there are times when I wish you would just tell us all what to believe — and if you did I’d be mad as heck!”

And I do understand that mother’ s wish, for I too long for a spiritual home to dwell in with peace and security, ready to claim that at last I’ve got it! I wonder if there might still be a chance to join the Church of Safe Harbor, where I could sing “Blessed Assurance” with assurance. The truth is that I’m a life member of the Church of the Winding River. In place of blessed assurance, this church offers sandbars, white water, and deeply forested banks where you can’t be sure what you’ll find. In this church we sing the John Jacob Niles carol, “I Wonder as I Wander.”

As a doubter I take comfort in these words of Karlfried Graf von Durckheim,

“When you’re on a journey, and the end keeps getting further and further away, then you realize that the real end is the journey.”

May it be so!

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