By Martin Smith
“Come with your doubts; you’ll find a hospitable community here wherever you are on your faith journey.” Reviewing the Web sites of Episcopal churches you often will encounter a deliberate appeal to those who have difficulties believing in some elements of the Christian faith. Certain churches proudly present themselves as havens from the demands of fundamentalist or orthodox communities. Fair enough, but is it enough to be a haven, which exists only to shelter?
A church which welcomes those who identify themselves as doubters is called to be a place of risk and venture in which the actual experience of questioning is explored with candor and even rigor. A community content to vaguely affirm people where they are and leave their issues unexamined and unchallenged would be just as spiritually inauthentic as a complacently orthodox community. A goal for any Episcopal church would be to develop tools for publicly interpreting the various meanings of doubt. It would be good if in preaching and teaching, pastoral ministry and group discussion we demonstrated skills in diagnosing a wide spectrum of experiences that come under the abstract heading of doubt. Here are some themes about doubt that I would want to see openly presented in any community where I was a member, above and beyond our normal dealing with the doubts that are simply due to misunderstandings of Christian faith.
First, there is the phenomenon of healthy developmental doubt. Human beings mature not by seamless progression but by passing through discrete stages. At each stage we make meaning in a certain way. Sooner or later our ways of making meaning come under stress, turning out to be inadequate to challenges of which we have become newly aware. We experience disintegration. And then a new more adequate or comprehensive way of thinking and believing emerges from the confusion. Doubt is an essential solvent in the process of extricating ourselves from a previous stage of faith. Where would we be without this kind of doubting?
It is the Spirit working with our spirit to clear the ground for new construction. We should always be ready to recognize developmental doubt with empathy. Paul speaks about “putting away childish things,” which we all need to do not only on the threshold of adulthood but several times more in our life-cycle. Rather than repressing developmental doubt we should provide a holding environment for it, letting neither the caustic agnosticism of our 12-year old, nor our mother’s ‘crisis of faith’ in her early 60s scandalize us. We should not panic when the bottom falls out of a certain way of being religious, and we are thrown into doubt. Our churches at their best provide the holding environment for our maturational crises.
Then there is doubt as visitation, a kind of spiritual crisis that comes as a bolt from the blue to jolt us through sudden deprivation into realizing that faith is not the same as believing religious stuff that we are supposed to take for granted. Faith is precarious. Faith is a vulnerable gift. Real belief is something to be “worked out in fear and trembling” and sometimes it takes an eclipse to awaken us to what it really means to be a believer.
There is mystical doubt, which in its acutest form contemplative teachers call the dark night of the soul. In this experience a believer is put through the test of losing her foothold in any and all religious imagery, entering a wilderness of nothing. I remember the spiritual director I had in my early 20s, a truly holy priest who had been a beloved missionary in India for four decades, telling me that once during that time he entirely lost his faith in God for almost two years, and had stumbled on with his life as a priest, praying in total spiritual darkness, blindly trusting he knew not what.
Then there are entirely different kinds of doubt, which instead of serving faith, are defense mechanisms against it. So in our congregations there are those who rely on doubt for keeping Christ at bay. We need to get better at detecting the emotional dynamic that is frequently at work under doubts that are often presented as purely rational problems or even badges of sophistication. There are those whose doubts about the resurrection, doubts about the real presence, doubts about Christ, function as rationalizations for a basic dread of intimacy with the divine. In these cases intellectual agnosticism shields one from the possibility that Christ might actually touch or enter us, making us utterly vulnerable to being loved, moved, led and changed. It is good to keep on setting out good arguments for the truth of basic Christian doctrines, but they won’t be effective unless we recognize the emotional dynamic of fear and resistance that may well be fuelling a person’s unbelief as they take up our offer of hospitality and inclusiveness.
Martin L. Smith is a well-known spiritual writer and priest. He is the senior associate rector at St. Columba’s, D.C.