The Certainty of Doubt
“What do you do when you’re not sure? That’s the topic of my sermon today. Last year when President Kennedy was assassinated, who among us did not experience the most profound disorientation? Despair? Which way? What now? What do I say to my kids? What do I tell myself? It was a time of people sitting together, bound together by a common feeling of hopelessness. But think of that! Your bond with your fellow being was your despair. It was a public experience. It was awful, but we were in it together.”
Perhaps this is a familiar opening to a sermon. Last year a feature film was made from a play that explores the depths of the psyche and relationship between doubt and faith under the title Doubt. If we had approximately 2 hours for chapel I would simply show the film because of how provocative the film is for not only matters of thought but of conversation. Since we don’t have that time, let it suffice for me to highly suggest that you find the time to watch this film if you have not already done so. In my opinion you won’t regret the time you spend doing so.
Father Flynn, played by Phillip Seymour Hoffman, opens the film preaching on doubt. After his opening refrain I have quoted he tells a story of a sailor lost at sea, coming slowly to the realization that he had set his course wrong and is utterly confused and without bearing, doubting his livelihood in the days to come. He concludes the sermon with these powerful sentences: “There are those of you in church today who know exactly the crisis of faith I describe. And I want to say to you: Doubt can be a bond as powerful and sustaining as certainty. When you are lost, you are not alone.”
“Doubt can be a bond as powerful and sustaining as certainty.” Let those words soak in. They are foreign to our way of life in the West. We still linger in the hangover of Modern thinking that prizes certainty, capital T proven Truth above all other things. If reason alone cannot explain our condition, we cannot yet fully understand our condition. But progress will lead us to that reason that will explain the cosmos, the understanding of the human condition, and the faith we profess. It sounds rigid, harsh, and fearfully complete. But Father Flynn wants to proclaim the truth of the mystery of God. That in doubt we can remain faithful. That doubt does not have to be an anathema or reason to abandon our faith.
Hannah had been the wife of Elkanah for some time. Her womb had been closed by God according to Elkanah and she was barren. Her husband’s other wife, Peninnah had several children, a male heir among them, and she tormented Hannah for one of the only things that reserved her place of power and standing in the culture. Despite her barrenness, Elkanah proclaims his love for his wife, Hannah. He asks her if his love for her is not more significant than the birth of ten sons. But Hannah’s dignity is hanging on her ability to produce children. She sees her inability to have children as an inability to be completely human. She sees it as a reason to doubt.
We are not told that Hannah has any doubt. The word “doubt” is not used in the Scripture, but I would like for us to consider the characteristics she shows in this short story of her life. Year after year she endures ridicule for her condition until one day she finds herself weeping and not eating. She is deeply distressed as she approaches God in prayer and weeps bitterly. She proclaims her misery to God. And she is led to a significant and radical decision in her offering of prayer.
Doubt is defined as calling something into question, mistrusting something or someone, or to waver in opinion. Hannah seems to call her wholeness as a being into question. She sees her inability to bare children as a sign of incompleteness. She has no favor with God, and this results in a loss of dignity, worth, or value. Doubt is expressed most often in our condition as humans through confusion, fear, unhappiness, and radical action.
Consider for a moment the Christian that grows up in a conservative home where they are told that the creation narrative as it is found in Genesis is literal. The world was created in six days and that evolution is heresy and evil of the world. This individual grows up and finds little reason to believe otherwise until they are confronted with the body of evidence suggesting that humans have evolved over time from other animals. It is at this point that if this body of evidence is taken seriously that the individual begins to wonder if the faith as they know it has any real validity if the foundational story of the God they knew is no longer to be understood as literal. They question the validity of the authority given to the Scripture this literal story comes from and radically turn away from the Christian faith as a whole. I have seen this version and many other versions of similar faith stories take shape. Often doubt in ourselves, the stories we are told, and in others leads to radical action. We turn away from those things wholesale, we find and accept new stories to take the place of the old completely without critically examining the new story, and we distance ourselves from other people going to great lengths to avoid them.
Hannah has a similar reaction only she moves toward God. Hannah goes to the temple and prays directly to God. This seems insignificant in our post-Protestant Reformation setting. For Hannah to approach the temple, much less, pray before Eli, the priest, was considered unacceptable. Elkanah should have been the one presenting these requests before the Lord if they were their requests as a family. Instead, Hannah supplicates herself and asks the Lord directly for a male child. To make this even more radical she offers this male child to the service of the Lord as a Nazirite. Samson is the best known Nazirite to us, but they are characterized as those who will abstain from drinking wine, cutting their hair, and they are separated from the rest of the people to focus on service to the Lord. So the child she longs so desperately for, she is willing to give up.
Hannah doubts her humanness. For her, being a mother, bearing children, and honoring God are what preserve her power and dignity in a culture that has marginalized her as a second wife unnecessary for anything but pleasure. But Hannah is empowered by this doubt and approaches the Lord and the Lord remembers her when she returns home and conceives a child with Elkanah.
Hannah, like Father Flynn, teaches us that our doubt is an appropriate expression of faith. That through our doubt we have a bond with one another that certainty does not provide. In our desperation we can claim hopefulness through radical action embracing the grace provided by God in expressing our doubt before God. In our doubt we can experience the mystery of who God is. And for me there is a paradoxical certainty in doubt. That certainty does not come in the form of resolution or cure as though doubt were an illness in us that needs fixing, it is in the abiding presence of God. A God who is not fully known or fully described. A God who cannot be described in words alone or by singular experience. A God whom our doubt does not destroy. The certainty of doubt is that as a form of despair we find a bond with one another as a place where God abides, and to whom we can remain thankful for a God who does not abandon us. As Father Flynn reminds us, “When we are lost, we are not alone.” Thanks be to God.
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