by the Rev. Tom Disrud

A sermon given July 27, 2008
First Unitarian Church
Portland, Oregon

I’m not sure exactly how old I was, probably 11 or 12.  I was sitting at a table at church with my minister and several others my age.  We were talking about the importance of believing in Jesus if we were to be saved—and this meant for everyone, all over the world.  This was likely an ordinary enough scene for a young Lutheran to be in.  Being saved, after all, was an important part of one’s faith.

But as I recall it now, there were questions coming up in my young mind.  There was some disquiet.  And I found myself asking my minister what was going to happen to all those people in China—all those people who maybe hadn’t even heard of Jesus.  Will they not be saved?

I don’t exactly remember what the response was from my minister.  I have a memory of a general sense of dis-ease there.  Let’s just say that it was a cultural norm in Wisconsin where I grew up to not make a fuss.  And asking questions could sometimes make a fuss. Anyway, I don’t really remember what is answer was, truthfully.  But the one thing was clear was that I had broken some unspoken rule by asking the question and expressing a doubt.

As I look back on my own story, I’ve come to see that as one of those moments that seemed to point to the future.  I eventually left that church of my childhood.  There were many reasons for this, but I can see that a seed began to sprout that day that would eventually lead me to call myself a Unitarian Universalist.

Different faith traditions deal with doubt in different ways.  It can sometimes be viewed as the opposite of faith—an expression of a lack of faith.  But in our tradition, more likely, it is almost asked of us.  We are asked to question what we believe and what it means for how we live.  We are asked to look critically at the world and discern.  That’s the part about the free and responsible search for truth and meaning.  Faith and doubt go hand in hand.

We might look to the Apostle Thomas.  According to the legend, he was the one who wanted proof when Jesus returned from the dead.  He was the one who wanted to touch and see if it was real.  He was not just willing to hear the story and believe.

I think it is natural to want to know and to ask questions.  When I am around children I am aware of the curiosity we are born with and what a gift this is.  They, like all us, are trying to figure things out, to get to the bottom of it.  And I know that can be frustrating when you are a parent and the question from your child begins with the word “why”…

And yet to be human is to question and to seek out answers.  And no matter what our age it is important to be open to revelation, to ways that our beliefs might change and grow. What I believe today may not be what I believe tomorrow or ten years from now.  Our lives and our beliefs are changing, evolving things.  Doubt is an important part of that.

So living with doubt is important.  But we also have to be aware that it can be a trap.  Sometimes it is in the cherishing of doubt that we can get stuck.  Sometimes we can make an idol of doubt and it can become an end in itself.  We doubt, but maybe that is all we do.  The end of our doubt is not simply to doubt, but to bring us to a deeper engagement with life, to bring us more in touch with what is most important.  To ask us to be present with the world in ways we have not been before.

My doubts ask me to look deeper and discern what is most important in my life, and always to walk with my eyes wide open.  Thomas Merton, the Christian contemplative, said “What matters is being spontaneously open to the reality of God.”

Sometimes in our reasoning, in our wanting proof, we might miss the larger reality of all that we can’t know.  All that might come down to mystery, the unknown.  We need to be able to step back and behold all that we know—and all that we don’t know.  It is in these moments that we are asked to walk with a good deal of humility.

A group of rabbis were arguing over the right interpretation of a text in scripture.  Rabbi Eleazar, who had interpreted the text one way, was one of the authorities cited, as was Rabbi Yochanan, who had interpreted it differently.  The rabbis could not agree.  In the group there was also a mystic, Rabbi Amaitai.  He said that it was possible for him to enter into an ecstasy that would take him directly before the throne of the Almighty; he offered to do so and to ask God himself to give the correct interpretation.  The group agreed, whereupon the mystic took off in his ecstasy, stood before the throne and addressed God: “King of the Universe, we cannot agree on this text.  Can you give us the correct interpretation?”

God, who of course was himself occupied in the study of Torah, shuffled his papers, shook his head, and finally replied:  “Well, Rabbi Eleazar says so-and-so, but Rabbi Yochanan says so-and-so, and then there is Rabbi Amitai who says so-and-so...”

We live in times when it seems we are able to get more and more answers.  About how the world works—nature and science.  About how our bodies and our minds work and why this happens or that happens.  There is so much we know that we didn’t know just a generation or two ago.

And yet there’s a paradox.  For all the questions we have answers for, there seem to be so many questions that we can’t answer.  For all the things we know, we are all the more aware of the things that we may never be able to know.  These are the things that come down to mystery.  The reason why we are alive, why there is so much brokenness. Why there is so much greed in the world.  Why so many people suffer so much.  Why peace seems to very very difficult to achieve; almost impossible, in fact.

And so we are faced with as many questions as answers.  And we come down to living with what we know and what we don’t know.

Writer Kathleen Norris asks us to live in a place she calls sacred ambiguity.  We don’t have the answers, but we trust we will find them as we need to.  We trust others will be there for us and that the answers, in time, will come, and that we will have faith to accept those things we can’t know.  She describes faith as a relationship that never has all the answers, but that you trust in the fact that they will be revealed.  You enter, not knowing exactly how it will all work out, but you come, willing to stay with it and to be open to where it may lead.  In the process, you do lots of questioning, but you agree to walk on a path together.

Doubt, she says, is merely a sign that faith is ready to grow, it is like a seed waiting to sprout.  Its presence is a kind of signal, a kind of opening, that says pay attention to what is percolating here.  To find the answers that we need to find.  It may not be terribly logical, but we instinctively know it is where we need to be.

In a discourse, the Buddha addresses a group of villagers confused by the varied presentations of so many teachers, saying:  “You should decide not by what you have heard, not by following convention, not by relying on the texts… and certainly not out of respect for a teacher.  When you know for yourselves that “these things are unhealthy, these incline toward harm and suffering,” then you should abandon them.  When you know for yourselves that “these things are healthy, these incline toward welfare and happiness,” then having come upon them, you should stay with them.”

Doubt is not an end in itself, but something that leads us to greater insight about what we value, into what we are called to do in the world.  How we might live with integrity and purpose.

Several years after she died, it was revealed that Mother Teresa had lived with great doubt and depression most of her life.  This person so many called a saint had, in fact, struggled with the existence of God and what she felt was the absence of God in her life. It was something that lasted for decades and was only known to those who were closest to her.

Mother Teresa was 36 years old when she discerned a call to the work she would become known for.  In 1946 she was hard at work in a girls school in Calcutta when she fell ill. On a train ride en route to some rest in Darjeeling, she had heard what she would later call a “voice” asking her to work with the poorest of the poor, and experienced a profound sense of God’s presence.  A few years later, however, after founding the Missionaries of Charity and beginning her work with the poor, darkness descended on her inner life.  In 1957, she wrote to the archbishop of Calcutta about her struggles, saying, “I find no words to express the depths of the darkness.”

“In my soul I feel just that terrible pain of loss,” she wrote in 1959, “of God not wanting me—of God not being God—of God not existing.”  This inner turmoil lasted for decades until her death in 1997.  It was during this time that she was doing the work that brought her acclaim from all over the world.

With the aid of the priest who acted as her spiritual director, Mother Teresa came to see that these painful experiences could help her identify not only with the abandonment that Jesus felt during the crucifixion, but also with the abandonment that the poor faced daily. In this way she hoped to enter, in her words, the “dark holes” of the lives of the people with whom she worked. 

At first it seemed shocking that this woman so many call a saint had lived with such doubt.  It seemed that a saint should be above all that.  And yet it may have been that doubt, that struggle that asked her to go deeper, to live in that place of questioning and often despair.  It may have been that struggle that allowed her to stay with this work for so many years.

Most of us are not Mother Teresa.  And that’s good, because being a saint seems like it would be a big responsibility.  But we all have our struggles, we all strive to be present with all of life.  We are responsible for tending to the spirit in our lives, to be open to the lessons around us, to learning and growing, to be open to how we are asked to be compassionate and loving.  And to be present with the despair of the world.

The spiritual path is usually not easy.  It asks us to live in a complex world and to discern our place in the family of things.  It asks us to look at who we are and the ways that we don’t always live up to our own ideals.  It asks us to live with our knowing and with our doubt.

But the spirit also reminds us that we do not walk alone, that in our struggles we do not walk alone and that even when we might least be aware of it the spirit is with us, that we are not just isolated beings but connected to something much greater.  That’s the good news that keeps revealing itself over and over again in our lives, whether we are aware of its presence or not.

We are asked to live with the complexity of the world around us.  We go from this place, to that place, and maybe back to this place.  We see things in different ways.  A question asks us to reconsider.  It asks us to be open.  It asks us to proceed with our eyes wide open and to live faithfully.

Writer Anne Lamott says that for her, faith did not start with a leap but rather with a series of staggers.  She writes: “Like lily pads, round and green, these places summoned and then held me up while I grew.  Each prepared me for the next leaf on which I would land, and in this way I moved across the swamp of doubt and fear.  When I look back at some of these early resting places--the boisterous home of the Catholics, the soft armchair of the Christian Science mom, adoption by ardent Jews--I can see how flimsy and indirect a path they made.  Yet each step brought me closer to the verdant pad of faith on which I somehow stay afloat today.”

I’m not sure what keeps us afloat sometimes.  Each one of us is the result of millions and millions of years of evolution.  We are the result influences good and bad, known and unknown, miraculous and haphazard.  We are the results of life events that call us to question and cry, that ask us to give thanks and to ponder.

Life in these times asks us to live with our hearts open, to live with our minds open, to be present with the darkness around us and to walk with humility.

Words of Yehuda Amichai:

From the place where we are right
Flowers will never grow
In the spring.
The place where we are right
Is hard and trampled
Like a yard.
But doubts and loves
Dig up the world
Like a mole, a plow.

And a whisper will be heard in the place
Where the ruined
House once stood.

Being with the world as it is asks us to look deeper for what is real.  For what is right.  It asks us to get past all the distractions that call us away from the workings of the spirit.  It asks us to live faithfully.

Doubt is just a seed of that faith, a sign that we are alive and growing.  The spirit asks us to pay attention to those questions, to where they might be leading us.  That is not always the easiest path. But it is the path.  And to be human is to walk that path.

The good news is that we are all on this path together.  We are all held together by something, whether we call it community, whether we call it the love of God, whether we call it great mystery.  Doubt and faith live there side by side.  Our job, every morning, is to welcome them in.  Amen.

PRAYER
Let us pray: Spirit of life, be with us in all of our days.  Be with us in our belief and in our unbelief.  Help us to live life deliberately, faithfully, always open to where your spirit might open us to understanding.  May we build a community of faith that calls us forth to service.  In that service, may we grow in love.  Amen.

BENEDICTION
Live faithfully, good people.  Cherish your doubts.  Celebrate all that is possible.  Go in love.  Go in peace.  Amen.

Copyright 2008, Thomas Disrud. All rights reserved.