Doubt

So I have been reading a very interesting book the last few days called, Jesus Girls.  It's basically a collection of essays on a very wide variety of evangelical experiences, and though I resonated with a lot of the authors, the one that seemed to stick closest to my heart was written on the topic of doubt.  I friend in my small group has lately struggled a lot with something like doubt, maybe it would be better defined as simple questioning and wrestling with the more complex ideas of faith and divinity, but still a form of doubt.  We all hate to be unsure of anything.  It's so...well scary, in the way that it makes us so painfully aware of our human limitations.  If you will bear with me, I'd like to share a section of this chapter that helps redeem our propensity to doubt by shedding some new light.

"Doubt is born from disappointment and disappointment is born from longing and longing is a mechanism of Imago Dei, the intention of God within us.  C.S. Lewis says in his preface to Pilgrims Regress, " The human soul was made to enjoy some object that is never fully given --nay, cannot even be imagined as given -- in our present mode of subjective and spatio-temporal experience."  If that is true, this too is true: My doubt was my desire, to touch the untouchable, to possess the presence of God...then my doubt is not a form of rebellion, but rather a strong, catalytic longing, a desire to broach the distance between a finite human being and an infinite God, and my faith is a form of homesickness, a burden of desire that effectively defeats me in the fight that says to me, there is more that what I see, more than what I know, more than what i am.  This is what the poet Czeslaw Milosz means when he says, "The sacred exists, and it is stronger than all our rebellions."  It puts doubt and faith in perspective.  They are two roots born of the same seed: a desire to dig down, to get my hands dirty, to reckon with the deep, subterranean truth of humanity's search for meaning.  

 How often have I feared that doubt is an enemy, a weakness to be shook off with deliberate fervor?  I have always felt that somehow, the presence of doubt in my heart pointed to a much more significant weakness, like a flawed faith, or a hardened heart.  But if my heart was hard, would the distance I have felt from God really bother me?  The angst of doubt can only be felt by those who are in tune with their God-given desire to commune with the divine, it is the sensitivity of the divine spark we all carry within us.  Doubt is the manifestation of the hiddeness of God, doubt alerts us to the incompleteness of our hearts, and of our understanding of God, but we assume that it may alert us to something more debilitating, namely the possibility that incompleteness is a characteristic of God rather than of ourselves.  But if we know who God is, we know that we are the ones who are incomplete, and searching for the answer to the longing in our hearts.  How bout a Robert Browning poem to round things out?  This is one of my favorites.

God, Thou Art Love

If I forget,
Yet God remembers! If these hands of mine
Cease from their clinging, yet the hands divine
Hold me so firmly that I cannot fall;
And if sometimes I am too tired to call
For Him to help me, then He reads the prayer
Unspoken in my heart, and lifts my care.

I dare not fear, since certainly I know
That I am in God’s keeping, shielded so
From all that else would harm, and in the hour
Of stern temptation strengthened by His power;
I tread no path in life to Him unknown;
I lift no burden, bear no pain, alone:
My soul a calm, sure hiding-place has found:
The everlasting arms my life surround.

God, Thou art love! I build my faith on that.
I know Thee who has kept my path, and made
Light for me in the darkness, tempering sorrow
So that it reached me like a solemn joy;
It were too strange that I should doubt Thy love.