Faith After Doubt

thinking, it turns out, is a social act, and to think freely, to think differently, to think independently, you sometimes need to escape from the herd. If you can’t get physical distance from your clan, tribe, herd or hive, you’ll at least need to create some emotional distance, perhaps by retreating into a book (as you’re now doing). This need for withdrawal helps explain at least in part why contemplatives and other mystics have always upheld the value – no, the necessity – of solitude as a spiritual practice.

‘It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it’,

saw how often money reigns, even in the so-called kingdom of God. Speaking of money, I saw how much of it is expended (along with time and effort) for relatively little personal and social transformation.

May we face [the future] with the steady serenity of a tree—that supreme lover of light, always reaching both higher and deeper, rooted in a network of kinship and ringed by a more patient view of time. – Maria Popova, Brain Pickings

Acknowledging how little we know is, I think, at the core of mature faith. What we boast of as great faith may merely be a boatload of indoctrination and overconfidence.

According to Jonathan Haidt and other teachers of moral foundations theory, whatever our religion or politics, we all use the same six basic lines of moral reasoning to defend our beliefs and opinions: justice, compassion, purity, loyalty, authority and liberty.

To be a human being among people and to remain one forever, no matter in what circumstances, not to grow despondent and not to lose heart—that’s what life is about, that’s its task. – Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Letters

Similarly, before I entered Perplexity, the book of Ecclesiastes troubled me: ‘Why is this even in the Bible?’ I wondered. But in Perplexity, the book became a source of great comfort. I remember reading ‘With much wisdom comes much sorrow’ (1:18) and feeling that truer words had never been spoken. The fact that there was room in the Bible for a book of questions and doubts meant that there should be room in the community of faith for people like me, full of our own questions and doubts.

But as C. S. Lewis said, those most willing to suffer and die for their faith may also be those most willing to harm and kill for it.

But belief, the act of holding a set or system of beliefs, is not the same thing as faith, even though we often use the words imprecisely and interchangeably.

consider the insight of Alan Watts, a twentieth-century philosopher of Eastern religions who tried to capture the difference between faith and belief like this: We must here make a clear distinction between belief and faith, because, in general practice, belief has come to mean a state of mind which is almost the opposite of faith. Belief, as I use the word here, is the insistence that the truth is what one would ‘lief’ or wish it to be. The believer will open his mind to the truth on the condition that it fits in with his preconceived ideas and wishes. Faith, on the other hand, is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be. Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown. Belief clings, but faith lets go. In this sense of the word, faith is the essential virtue of science, and likewise of any religion that is not self-deception.1

I recall what Greta says about our looming environmental catastrophe: ‘I don’t want you to be hopeful,’ she says. ‘I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day, and then I want you to act. I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if our house is on fire. Because it is.’

First, there was love for my neighbour, love with no exceptions and no discrimination: theist or atheist, Muslim or Jew, liberal or conservative, male or female or nonbinary, gay, straight or other. Interestingly, this new centre involved not only love for my neighbour, but also love from my neighbour, because love, like electricity and light, is a flow, an alternating current of connection and mutuality.

The art of loving each other well is letting people be where they are and not trying to convince them to be where I am. – Kathy Escobar, Faith Shift

It’s ridiculous to think that children are like empty bowls, and if we pour into them a recipe of Bible stories, doctrinal knowledge, songs, lectures and other religious activities, then stir and bake, we will magically help them become loving people. Deep personal formation of the next generation depends on close-at-hand mentors and models who authentically embody the way of life we hope the children will ‘catch’ through imitation. The loving hearts of parents, teachers and other significant adult models in a child’s life are the primary sacred texts from which the child will learn faith expressing itself in love.

No: it has largely devoted itself to other things, including 1) keeping 384,000 buildings staffed, repaired and open;9 2) training pastors and priests to teach required beliefs and perform required liturgy in those buildings; and 3) raising money to do 1 and 2.

‘Contemplation is an entirely different way of knowing reality that has the power to move us beyond mere ideology and dualistic thinking

Our conventional faith communities in Simplicity and Complexity produce adherents to beliefs, many of whom are indistinguishable from religious customers who make transactions with religious professionals to receive an array of religious goods and services.

Dr King, ‘We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late. This is no time for apathy or complacency. This is a time for vigorous and positive action.’

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was right when he said, ‘There is something afoot in the universe, something that looks like gestation and birth.’ ‘Above all,’ he said, trust in the slow work of God. We are quite naturally impatient in everything to reach the end without delay. We would like to skip the intermediate stages. We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new. And yet, it is the law of all progress that it is made by passing through some stages of instability—and that it may take a very long time.

Good Christians (and, I’m sure, good people of other religions) were expected, quickly and privately, to mend their doubts like an embarrassing tear in their trousers and, failing that, to silence and suppress their doubts, to fake confidence and certainty in desperate hope that the next sermon, hymn, praise song, conference, book or prayer would be the silver bullet that would vanquish doubt forever.