Doubt: “Pregnant again with th’old twins Fear and Hope.” - Lenten Reflection #2 (2012)
Well, last week we were thinking together about how sinful patterns can hinder our response to God’s love. I spoke about my struggle with pride, and what I thought to be the real meaning of Ash Wednesday. Tonight I want to go a bit further with those thoughts and think about “doubt”.
Since Lent is a season of soul-searching reflection and of repentance, then surely we must come face to face with our doubts at this time.
Indeed, I have recently been troubled with doubts and Ihave had a few long conversations with Rebecca about them.
My doubts don’t typically bring into question the deep, visceral awareness I have around the existence of God. They more frequently have to do with all the stuff in between “I believe in one God…” and “…the life of a world to come.” They often have to do with what my place is in what I claim to believe.
I certainly have doubts when bad things happen to good people. A couple of weeks ago we read about Noah and the great flood. The assurance we have in the rainbow must seem little consolation to those whose lifeless loved ones floated dead down the rivers in New Orleans. Surely I have great doubts when I hear of great and deadly earthquakes and tsunami.
For some reason I find myself able to accept not knowing how this can happen with a loving God. These are not the doubts I struggle with most.
I think my really troubling doubts really arise from my fears – in the very least, they result in fear; fear of disappointment, of falling short, of not having a place in what I claim to believe.
Like many people, I find myself wondering “who am I?” and “what am I supposed to do about it?” These are common enough questions, certainly existential, but they have an important operational dimensiontoo. Another way to frame a question around this might be to ask, “How should I respond to the profound reality of God in my world?”
This is just Spirituality, for me, by the way. Both encounter with and response to Mystery - the experience of transcendent and immanent reality and the indefatigable urge to respond.
Both are integral, encounter and response, spirituality is at once experiential and volitional.
When someone tells me they are spiritual but not religious, I want to ask them what they do instead.
But back to my doubts.
I never really lose sight of the importance of goodness, or truth, or love; it’s justthat the details come into constant question as I reflect on what is meaningful life from where I stand.
And, as I get older, my doubts are amplified by a sense of proximal mortality.
And I find myself feeling guilty for having these doubts. (Guilt seems to come easy for me as I was raised Roman Catholic.
Are these doubts I have a bad thing, I wonder?
Do they represent patterns of sin that keep me from responding as generously as I should to God’s love?
And if doubts are not sin, how else can I make meaning of them?
John Donne was a 17th Century poet, Anglican priest, lawyer, and Member of Parliament. He is known as the pre-eminent representative of the “Metaphysical Poets,” and offered another perspective to this question of doubt and sin in a poem called “Satyre III. He said:
To adore, or scorn an image, or protest,
May all be bad; doubt wisely; in strange way
To stand inquiring right, is not to stray;
To sleep, or run wrong, is. On a huge hill,
Cragged and steep, Truth stands, and he that will
Reach her, about must and about must go,
And what the hill's suddenness resists, win so.
Yet strive so that before age, death's twilight,
Thy soul rest, for none can work in that night.
If it is so, if he is right, if doubting wisely is not sin but rather right inquiry, then how can we mount the hill where truth resides, how can we resist its suddenness?
What can stand for us over against doubt?
When I doubt, I feel like a fraud.
A fraud because I continue to proclaim what I doubt, I continue to teach my students what I question, and I continue to act though I don’t always feel as though I were “a very member incorporate in the mystical body of Thy Son”, one of the blessed company of all faithful people.
Even tonight, I am feeling uncertain of my right to share these thoughts with you.
Theafter-communion thanksgiving prayer (there must be a more proper name for this prayer) may contain an answer to my question.
After claiming that “we are very members incorporate in the mystical body of Thy Son…,” the prayer continues with our saying, “we are also heirs through hope of Thine Everlasting Kingdom...”
Hope! Hope can stand for us over against doubt!
Hope is how we ground ourselves in doubt, just as knowledge is how we ground ourselves in certainty.
We say we are heirs through hope, not through knowledge or certainty. Heirs to the very Kingdom of God!
[This prayer always reminds me of my grandfather on my mother’s side. As a child, he was given over to millwork. He became a lacemaker. Hewas never educated, and learned the language of the blue-collar workers of the midlands of England. Healways dropped his “haches.” He inevitably put them back in where they didn’t belong, by the way, so that he turned a department store near my home named Anne & Hope into “Hanne and‘Ope.” If you stand near me in church someday you might catch me affecting his accent and claiming to be a“hares thru ‘ope of Thine everlasting Kingdom”, “‘oping to continue in that ‘oly fellowship.”]
Well if doubt is really just fear or insecurity, then John Donne again offers us help in his poem “To M[R]. T.W.”, where he says:
Pregnant again with th' old twins, [H]ope and Fear,
Oft have I asked for thee, both how and where
Thou wert ; and what my hopes of letters were ;
As in our streets sly beggars narrowly
Watch motions of the giver's hand or eye,
And evermore conceive some hope thereby.
And now thy alms is given, thy letter's read,
The body risen again, the which was dead,
And thy poor starveling bountifully fed.
After this banquet my soul doth say grace,
And praise thee for 't, and zealously embrace
Thy love, though I think thy love in this case
To be as gluttons, which say 'midst their meat,
They love that best of which they most do eat.
I love the first line “Pregnant again with th’ old twins, ope and fear?
I seem to give birth often to these cerebral siblings.
Maybe my doubts can be dismissed as right inquiry, but they are more likely the result of my turning away from God in fear, of trying to escape the consequences of the terrible contingency which is God’s sure and unfailing love for me.
At first I stand in awe of it.
Then my heart attempts to respond feebly with a loveof my own.
Pretty quickly, however,my head catches up with my heart and I contemplate the impossibilityof it, the absurdity of a Perfect God in His Majestic Glory loving a poor, naked, wretch like me.
Then I cower from it.
I get ashamed and I do what every other trembling fool would do, I try to flee.
Listen to some of Francis Thompson’s poem “The Hound of Heaven” and see if you don’t see a bit of yourself in it:
I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears
I hid from him, and under running laughter.
Up vistaed hopes I sped;
And shot, precipitated
Adown Titanic glooms of chasmed fears,
From those strong feet that followed, followed after.
But with unhurrying chase,
And unperturbed pace,
Deliberate speed, majestic instancy,
They beat – and a Voice beat
More instant than the Feet –
‘All things betray thee, who betrayestMe’.
I seem unable to situate myself comfortably within creation and the Creator when I doubt – I can’t seem to claim my seat, so I run away.
The super-abundant love for me manifested in God’s creation blinds me to my own place in creation rather than turning me to say (like the kids now say way too much!) – Oh my God!
Well, as always, and thanks to God, the story does not end with my defeat. As in “The Hound of Heaven,” the faster I flee, the faster are the Feet and the Voice behind me.
As Thomson continues in “The Hound of Heaven:”
Strange, piteous, futile thing!
wherefore should any set thee love apart?
Seeing none but I makes much of naught’ (He said),
‘And human love needs human meriting:
How hast thou merited-
Of all man’s clotted clay the dingiest clot?
Alack, thou knowest not
How little worthy of any love thou art!
Whom wilt thou find to love ignoble thee,
Save Me, save only Me?
And finally:
Halts by me that footfall:
Is my gloom, after all,
Shade of His hand, outstretched caressingly?
‘Ah, fondest, blindest, weakest,
I am He Whom thou sleekest!
Thou dravest love from thee, who dravestMe’
So doubt is seen as seeking by Thompson and as right inquiry by Donne.
Can they be right?
Is it really only my serial flight from doubt that is thesinful pattern hindering me from responding with appropriate intensity to God’s love?
It takes some kind of courage and commitment to continue to proclaim good news in the face of doubt, to continue to teach what we question, and to continue acting as though we were “very members incorporate in the mystical body of Thy Son, the blessed company of all faithful people,” even when we don’t feel so.
We are not frauds when we doubt. And we don’t sin when we question. Only when we shrink from the tensionthat questioning and doubt creates.
Only when we allow doubt to prevent us from finishing the thanksgiving prayer – from “humbly beseeching our Heavenly Father so to assist us with His Grace” - that we sin.
Certain knowledge, yes, but also hopeful commitment in the presence of doubt,are hallmarks of a faithful Christian.
Maybe I am entitled to be here tonightafterall, not in spite of my uncertainty, but because of it.
Maybe we have all earned our seats here tonight by virtue of that most human experience – doubt!