When Doubt is Your Spiritual Gift
For those of us unlearning and relearning religious beliefs, perhaps one of the thorniest topics is faith. There is no avoiding this central theme of religious life. In the Christian tradition, we have been told it can move mountains, enable a relationship with Jesus, and stamp our salvation-ticket to heaven.
In other words, it’s a big deal. And it’s tied to many of the problematic beliefs that have been weaponized and used to exclude and dehumanize.
One of the biggest breakthroughs of my reconstruction journey has been to reframe faith. This has also led me to re-evaluate (and appreciate) the role of doubt in my spiritual journey.
What is Faith?
If you’ll allow me to depart a little bit from the classic definition in Hebrews 11:1, I’ll share some of my recent thoughts on what faith actually is. I used to think of it as the strength of belief a person has in religious claims: the more strongly you believe that Jesus is the Son of God, the stronger your faith is. The more certain you feel that Jesus’ death paid a ransom for your sins, the more faith you have.
I have moved away from this sort of definition. Why?
It equates faith with intellectual assent and rational belief. It’s simply something you do with your cognitive faculties. What about your feelings, words, body, and actions? Don’t these have important roles to play in our experience of faith?
It points to something people have no control over. You cannot simply produce in yourself a stronger rational belief in invisible, unprovable things. And while people often talk about faith as a gift from God, they (including Jesus himself) tend to commend people for strong faith and reprove them for weak faith. But if this rational component is all there is to faith, and it is largely out of our hands in a way that ethnicity or height is, how can we commend people for it?
In light of these problems, I have now begun to understand faith as holistic. It is a decision to live according to the values of our faith tradition and to hope for the invisible, unknowable parts—even when we can’t summon a strong rational belief in them.
Some mornings when I wake up, I don’t really believe in most of the Christian doctrines. But a part of my faith life is, every morning, praying a body prayer that is based on the Lord’s prayer. I do these same motions with my arms and legs on the mornings when I feel certain there is a Triune God, and I do them on the mornings when I think the universe is a dark and lonely place. Every morning: “Hallowed be your name.” That practice, to me, is more in tune with faith than trying to convince myself over and over that Jesus was fully God and fully human.
What about Doubt?
On those days when the rational component of my faith is out of order, how do I process this deficiency in the rational-belief part of my faith—this doubt? In prior years, I would have felt immense guilt and rushed to somehow renew my lost sense of certainty. I no longer do this, both because guilt is unhealthy and because I don’t think I can do much to generate raw belief.
What I can do is turn to the parts of my faith I do control—my words and actions. In addition to practices like my morning body prayer, I can choose to practice my faith in the ways I love others.
If this is my orientation toward doubt, I can actually come to appreciate it. It also confers some other bonus perks:
It helps me embrace the uncertainty that resides in so many areas of life. When I was constantly pushing for certainty in my religious beliefs, it was not a far stretch to demand certainty in relationships, morality, politics, vocation, etc. Embracing uncertainty in religious beliefs can rob uncertainty of some of its negative power across the board.
It improves my ability to relate to (and love!) people of other faiths or no faith. When I viewed faith as only rational belief, it was a convenient boundary to separate the haves and have-nots, the believers and the non-believers. This made all non-Christians out to be the Other. But when I wake up some mornings unable to rationally believe, it creates a connection between me and the people who never experience that part of faith.
I’m not saying that doubt is always good or that rational belief in doctrines is bad. Part of me wishes I could wake up every morning with strong belief in all the things. But that’s simply not the world we live in. It’s not who I am. Accepting this about myself—and figuring out what my faith looks like in the face of doubt—is an important part of my journey.
To close, I invite you to reflect on this short passage from Luke’s Gospel:
Now Jesus’ mother and brothers came to see him, but they were not able to get near him because of the crowd. Someone told him, “Your mother and brothers are standing outside, wanting to see you.”
He replied, “My mother and brothers are those who hear God’s word and put it into practice.”
If you’re interested in a space where you can explore your own spiritual gift of doubt, consider signing up for our Thursday gatherings.
