Thomas Jefferson Memorial
Church-Unitarian Universalist
Faith and Doubt”
Rev. Leslie Takahashi Morris
December 10, 2006
Responsive
Socrates said that some beliefs are worth risking.
In the act is the question.
The Psalmist asked, “Why are you so far from saving me, so far from my groaning?”
In the question is an answer.
Maimonides said, “A man should never cast reason behind him, for the eyes are set in front, not in back.”
In each answer is a new question.
Jesus cried, “My god, my god why did you forsake me?”
In each question is a doubt.
The Zen master Takusai says, “Only doubt more and more deeply, gathering together in yourself all the strength that is in you, without aiming at anything or expecting anything in advance, without intending to be enlightened.”
In each doubt is a new path.
Moses Mendelssohn says: Among all the prescriptions and ordinances of the Mosaic law, there is not a single one which says: ‘You shall believe or not believe. They all say, you should do or not do.’”
In each new path is a new possibility of faith.
Meditation:
Meditation
Spirit of life, God of many names, we come into this season full of many cares and woes. We come, almost literally, feeling the weight of the world and our place in it. We come too knowledgeable of the many forms of brokenness that cannot be masked by twinkling lights and sweet carols. We come knowing the complexities of our own lives, aware of loved ones not at our side this holiday, of others gripped by illness in mind and body, and we come a bit tattered by the mundane and day-to-day. We come with doubt in our hearts that grip us, with questions in our minds that steer us away from the easy answers others find in this season, and fear that will further isolate us in this time of faith and frolic.
In this time, we may truly question what where we are and how we are held by something larger than ourselves. In the silence that follows, let us take a moment to reassure ourselves that we are good, that we are loved. Let us take time as well to honor our right to doubt and question and to seek a truth that defies easy creeds. Let us use this sacred shared silence to reflect on this truth.
Sermon:
As a child, I passed an eternity of Christmas Eves staring at the amber glass of the nightlight that formed the base of the old lamp in my room. I listened hard for magical sounds in the night, was alert for unusual flashes of light. The very air seemed charged with anticipation and promise. Yet it made no sense. Why was I waiting and for what? Not a miraculous occurrence for I was raised outside of formal religion and in a strict, rational tradition. Not a wise person bearing presents, though each was always treasured in our frugal life. Not some saviour Jesus. I knew nothing about him except that his eyes seemed very sad and his bloodied head and hands scary. And yet I waited for some guest, for some arrival. Who or what was it I hoped for? Reindeer hooves and sleigh bells–probably not. Angels who would offer me good tidings—unlikely. Prophets hawking peace on earth—not really. And yet, against reason, against the values that governed my day-to-day, I longed for something, something larger and more magical, less factual and more truthful. It was a time of year when I wanted to believe in a visitor beside the half-hearted Santa Claus who was my family’s begrudging, anti-rational concession—some other guest—and yet, as I grew older, who most often knocked at the door was doubt.
In this time of tinsel and garlands, miracle stories and kings of kings, we ask again and again, do I have the right to question, do I have the right to doubt? Does my doubt negate my ability to believe, to take the promise of a faithful life this dark, reflective season? In this sanctuary this morning, some of us are experiencing this as a first holiday after the death of a beloved one. Someone remembers this not as the commemoration of a saviour’s birth, but as the anniversary of a frightening, painful event. Some of us lack financial resources and feel resentful at the consumerist debauchery. Some of us are far away from or estranged from our family or at this or our other communities and feel particularly unconnected. Someone else has experienced something diminishing at the hands of someone who calls themselves a Christian—or a Jew or a Pagan and cannot join full-hearted into celebrations of Christmas, Hanukkah or Yule. For these folks and for others who find doubt a higher part of the measure than faith in this moment, this season can be hard. The bar seems always to be set by believers and not by doubters.
In this season of faith, doubt may be a very unwelcome and unsavory guest who comes bearing messy questions instead of riches. How do we do celebrate traditions of culture rather than belief without hypocrisy? How do we allow magic in our children’s lives without imprisoning them in cramped, cultural myths? Why do we thinking creatures still somehow yearn to touch those mysteries we sense and cannot explain? And with all these doubts, what is a faithful life, anyway?
Our society paints doubt as the lurker in the shadows and
belief as the one awaited and anointed.
Yet Jennifer Hecht, who has written an extensive history of the concept
of doubt itself, suggests that far from being distanced, faith and doubt are
kissing cousins. In more than 500 pages,
she traces the intricate relationship between doubt and belief, doubt and
faith. Hecht’s history begins over 2600
years ago which, she points out, “makes doubt older than most faiths.” The philosophical doubt of the ancient Greeks
that made them question the pantheon of all-too-human gods and rulers-made-Gods
that marked their time. The Jews, such
as Jesus of Nazareth who questioned
When men and women take on a quest for inner transformation, they become engaged in grappling with doubt. That is true whether they struggle against doubt or strive for complete doubt: in both cases, the spiritual quest is conceived as an aggressive confrontation with one’s ambivalence.
On my second airplane on the trip across country last week,
I experienced an aggressive confrontation with ambivalence. The man nearest me struck up a conversation
by asking me what I was reading. As it
happened, I was on page 300-and-something of Hecht’s book, Doubt. When I showed him the
title, he said, “Oh, you must be married.” Then, in a different tone, he asked me what I
do and while I have been warned by my colleagues never to speak this truth in
the air, I was preoccupied and I slipped.
“Oh, a minister,” he said, and his eyes widened the way a cat does when
a fine, fat mouse walks across her path.
“I can tell you what I tell the Mormons and the Jehovah’s Witnesses and
the Catholics and the Jews when they knock at my door—“ “The Catholics and the Jews knock on your
door?” I asked. “Yeah, in
“I’m glad that works for you,” I said. And then he bragged about his next date…and his children and his work as a military flight instructor, though he conceded that that was hard at times. He asked me about my religion: “But what do you believe? Every religion has those things you have to believe.”
He was pretty incredulous about the individual search and the right to question: “Are you sure that’s a religion?” —and then he told me about flying body bags in after the tidal waves struck Thailand last year. About how huge it was to realize he had flown only a single mission and in his mission dropping off body bags. Each weighed only a few pounds and he had dropped off 20,000 pounds of them. That was big, bigger than Keithism, I suspect. “I wish we weren’t almost landing, I could show you the pictures of the waves.” For a moment, we connected across banter and bravado. “What is the name of your religion again?”
Yes, we are a religion, though doubt has knocked on the door of many of our religious ancestors. Religion in the sense that William James once defined it: “the feelings, acts and experiences of individual[s] in their solitude so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they consider divine.” A. Powell Davies, one of our great preaching ministers, once put it this way: “Belief is many things and so is disbelief. But religion is something that happens to you when you open your mind to truth, your conscience to justice, and your heart to love.” I interpret that as when we reach for something larger than ourselves—a star, a hope, a dream, a connection, a doubt which forms a small crack to open a great mystery. Ours is what the poet Emily Dickinson meant when she wrote of “that religion/That doubts as fervently as it believes.”
Doubt is creative, generative, giving rise to innovation (something one of our religious ancestors was literally once tried for, convicted of and martyred for) and opens new ways of embracing a life of higher purpose. So when you sing or listen to the traditional words of the carols, be intrigued rather than dismayed or inflamed by the doubts that arise in you. What do these questions tell you about your ties to a people long ago, what yearning lies behind their stories, what hopes do they suggest for you?
Which is not to say that all doubt is good. Jennifer Hecht divides doubt into two categories: doubt that is about tearing down and doubt which helps form the basis of something new. Some doubts do eliminate traditional beliefs in God or gods or something outside the natural world. And yet those too can yield what she calls “graceful life philosophies”—a doorway not to another world but to better living in this one. Hecht points out that this second kind of doubt allows us to get closer to mysteries, which unlike problems, cannot be solved and thus cannot be addressed by simple doctrines. “Doubt has been just as vibrant in its prescription for a good life and just as passionate for the truth,” she writes.
“Doubt is always an inherent part of faith,” says theologian Paul Razor who sees it especially so in liberal religion. Answers come from questions. That is why the world has the spectrum of philosophical and religious beliefs it does. And while belief in a literal sense may never knock at some of our doors, still we can long for faith.
Perhaps I awaited faith those long nights staring at the flawed glass of my nightlight. Faith, who is not so much a guest knocking as the doorway itself, a doorway to a larger and redeeming connection, a sign of being loved and not alone. Not a belief but a way of being. For many, this is the promise of new hope born in the story of the birth of Jesus, the pledge embodied in the oil that burned for eight nights against expectation, the relief kindled by light in darkness . It is the ability to touch the unknowable, to voice the largest questions of human existence: who am I? why am I here? what does this life connect me to? It’s not just about knowing what we believe—it is about knowing what we question and what actions those questions lead us into. Connections embodied, as in the amazing gifts of hospitality our members of all ages showed to our PACEM guests these last two weeks. Connections formed when we reconnect with family despite disappointments or redefine what family means to us if this is not possible or healthy. Connections with our common humanity such as the one Keith shared with me which allow us for a moment to catch a fleeting glimpse of why a hope for “peace on earth” is not merely foolish idealism.
If we did not doubt, would we find our own meaning in the patterns of darkness and light in this time of the year when earth stands hard as iron, water like a stone. Though in any Unitarian Universalist crowd, one should never say never, I presume that most of us are not wanting to find a literal boar’s head on our holiday table, not will we spend the latter weeks of this month scanning the skies for cherubim. We might be looking for the brightness of stars or the gift of seeing one arc to the earth which makes us feel a connection to those impervious celestial lights. We might be hoping for a miracle of connection or dreaming of a possibility of peace on earth.
In the bleak midwinter, on a star-filled clear and cold night, when doubt knocks, let us not be afraid to move with her through the doorway of faith. Doubt can be a companion in a graceful or faithful life, the dodging dancer that leads one in a new swirl of discovery. We who are passionate for truth can embrace our inheritance of questioning and doubt and place it beside the beliefs and values are the gifts from our ancestral wise people. May we have the courage to believe, the courage to doubt and the courage to reach for the elusive promise of a better world in this life. Our inn has room for questions and doubts both.
Our doubt might be the gift we bear this season. Our very questions may be as valuable as myrrh. May ours be the faith, the doorway, to make it so.
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