Meditation Monday - Is Your Faith Riddled with Doubt?
This morning I am looking out my window on a beautiful sunny spring day. Like most people, I love sunshine and relish the long cloudless days that are often part of spring and summer here in the Pacific Northwest. Even our cloudy and rainy days, at this season, are often graced with the sun radiating through the clouds. Sometimes we are blessed with spectacular rainbow coloured sunsets because of the ways the sun’s rays hit the clouds.
For some reason thinking about the interplay of sun and clouds reminded me of the post I wrote at Easter about doubt and the fact that all of Jesus’ disciples experienced it in and around those last events recorded in the gospels. I suspect they continued to experience doubt throughout their lives, just as we do. And that reminded me of a comment made by one of my Facebook followers:
Some days I am not sure if my faith is riddled with doubt, or whether, graciously, my doubt is riddled with faith.
Doubt has played a very important place in my faith. Without doubt I would never have questioned the assumptions of my early faith and been challenged to get out of my comfort zones and explore the new possibilities God was presenting me with. Without doubt my faith would have stagnated and become stunted.
Doubt encourages us to be patient, with eyes and ears open to what God is saying and doing…. outside our comfort zones. So often when I have struggled with doubts and not been sure of whether I had any faith left, it has begun to sprout again and suddenly it seems, has shone through like sunlight through the clouds, illuminating everything in my life with a breathtaking radiance that only God can create.
Give reign to doubt. It is so often the voice of the Holy Spirit, prompting us to ask questions about life and faith that we have never thought of or been desperate enough to ask before. Often doubt is the doorway to another growth spurt in our lives. It doesn’t provide us with answers but does raise questions and I am increasingly convinced that the questions we ask are far more important than the answers we get. The times when faith seems hidden or dead, when we don’t know how to voice what is in our hearts, is the time that new seeds are germinating beneath the ground. Soon, out of doubt doesn’t come certainty but new life.
Ann Lamott says: “The opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty. Certainty misses the point entirely. Faith includes noticing the mess, the confusion, the disappointment and letting it be there until some light returns.” I think that certainty is one of the biggest barriers to a growing faith we can face. When we think we understand all that God is saying and doing we easily close our eyes and ears to what God really wants to say, especially if those Holy Spirit nudges are moving us outside our comfort zones.
At Easter I quoted Thomas Merton: “You cannot be a person of faith unless you know how to doubt. You cannot believe in God unless you are capable of questioning the authority of prejudice, even though that prejudice may seem to be religious.”
And so as you think about that this morning I thought a little more Thomas Merton wisdom would help. you may like to listen to this video which I first posted several years ago, of Thomas Merton speaking about doubt in his life.
And here is a wonderful one of his prayers to contemplate as we consider the doubts in our own lives:
“My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going, I do not see the road ahead of me, I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it. Therefore, I will trust you always, though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.” Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1976)
There is a kind of light only the doubting see… a slanted grace that filters through the clouded days, not flattening the world into certainty, but transfiguring it. What you’ve reflected on here is what the mystics knew: doubt is not the enemy of faith, but its dark womb.
Teresa walked for years without light. Merton trusted without knowing the road. Faith, in its purest form, is not clarity. It is communion in the dark. Certainty hardens. Doubt humbles. It cracks open the brittle shell of the ego and invites the Spirit to move again, like breath across deep water.
Thank you for reminding us that the cloud-covered days may be the ones God has most tenderly veiled with His presence!