What if I Can’t Believe?

28 05 2012

A few years ago, The Washington Post ran an interview with evangelical mega-church pastor Rick Warren where Warren was asked the following question: “How come some people ‘get’ to believe and others do not? ” Why does God “allow” some, like Rick Warren, to believe but not others? After all, many people would really like to believe—perhaps they would like the comfort provided by religion but for whatever reason just can’t bring themselves to do so.  What if we just can’t believe?

In response, Warren says a few things about how the Bible promises that who seek God will find him, but he doesn’t challenge the root assumption of the question: God’s primary interest is that we set aside our rational objections and “believe in him.”

I think that most people who are honest about their belief or disbelief in God would admit that they are pulled in both directions at different points in their lives (or even at different points of the day!). There are times when God’s existence seems self-evident and there are times when it seems utterly impossible.  Frederick Buechner has memorably stated that “there is doubt hard on the heels of every faith, fear hard on the heels of every hope”; I would say that the opposite is also true—that the persistence of hope hounds even the most hardened skeptic. Belief and unbelief are both plausible ways of “reading” the ambiguous world we live in.

So what do we do? Just passively accept whichever way we happen to be inclined and not give the matter another thought? Try to “force” ourselves to believe or attempt to perform the necessary exercises to convince God to gift us with this ability? Or might we perhaps use the ambiguity which makes the matter so difficult to consider a different understanding of what God might be after.

What if God’s primary interest wasn’t in getting us to “believe” certain facts about the cosmos? What if he was willing to take whatever faith we could muster and use it in the promotion of his intentions for the world? What if God has created the world in such a way that living authentically human lives involves things like trust, commitment, uncertainty, and risk; what if part of what God is after is a recognition of our dependent and creaturely status and a willingness to accept and live within the parameters (cognitive and otherwise) that this entails?

The seventeenth century mathematician/philosopher Blaise Pascal is mostly known for his famous “wager” where he tells the skeptic, in a sense, that he ought to “bet “on the existence of God because the potential gains far outweigh the potential losses of choosing incorrectly.  In the same passage from Pensées that contains “the wager,” Pascal addresses a variation of the question posed to Rick Warren above: “What if I just can’t believe?” Pascal’s answer (very loosely paraphrased) goes like this: live as if it were true and see what happens. Rather than thinking yourself into belief, try living yourself into it? If loving (or even believing in) God is difficult at the moment, start with loving your neighbour.

I don’t think that the ultimate standard by which God will judge us is the degree of certainty about his existence that we manage to conjure up before we die. I cannot imagine God asking, on judgment day, “did you manage to preserve your belief in me, despite living in a world where my existence wasn’t always obvious?” I can imagine him asking: “Did you act according to what light you were given? Did you seek me with your entire being? Did you refuse to let pride and fear overcome hope in the possibility of a future of justice and peace? Did you nourish and make the most of what faith you had or complain that it wasn’t stronger?”

Whatever might be said about these questions, they at least seem to avoid the implication that human beings are little more than proposition affirmers/deniers. At the end of the day, nobody really benefits from a bunch of people “believing” in God if “belief” is understood as something like “cognitive acceptance of the existence of a supernatural being.” It’s hard to imagine how God benefits from a bunch of people nodding their heads when asked “do you believe in God?” just as it’s hard to imagine how it changes much for human beings.

But if God has intentions for the world that go beyond individual human brains and what they find rationally plausible, and if the realization of these intentions depends, in part, on what we do not just what we think, then maybe we ought to expect a deep and indissoluble connection between beliefs and behaviour. Perhaps if we busy ourselves with doing what we’re reasonably sure God wants us to do, the “belief” in him that we struggle to maintain or discover may be closer than we think.

Ryan Dueck


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The Texture of Reality

9 04 2012

A touch. A fingertip feeling pulsing muscles and skin – the same fingertip that had felt the temperature of a glass of milk, that had flowed through curtains and childrens’ hair – is the fingertip Caravaggio uses for the climax of the Christian epic: Thomas finally settles his doubts and touches Jesus’ crucifixion marks. When the women and the other ten apostles told Thomas Jesus had appeared to them after his death, he could not believe it. But this touch…

The apostles did not believe it either when they first heard from the women – but then they saw him, and the unexpected became true. Still, Thomas could not believe it. And who can judge him? Even if his closest companions attested that they had seen Jesus alive after his death, Thomas could still hear the nails being driven into his hands, smell the blood flowing from his wounds, see the dust floating across the light beams as they placed Jesus’ body in a tomb. He had seen a dead body, lifeless, cold, still. And only undeniable proof could change Thomas’ mind: “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.” [1]

For Thomas, the days between the news of the resurrection and his own encounter with Jesus must have been anguished. He wanted to believe, of course; he wanted to see his old friend back to life, to see death defeated before his eyes. But the texture of reality around him breathed a different spirit: cold, earthly, indifferent, often cruel. Thomas saw the world turning gray on that Friday afternoon, his friend crucified on a cross and his hope crucified within. The touch of Jesus’ cold body must have lingered on his fingers, the touch of incarnated goodness now reduced to a static corpse, violated and beaten.

But then Jesus appears to him, seemingly beyond logic, and Thomas’ finger is warmed by life and blood. Hard bone, pulsing flesh, the sound of heartbeat; a live breathing body, not the lifeless corpse he had touched before. Caravaggio amplifies the drama of this encounter with a technique called chiaroscuro, which he had learned from Leonardo da Vinci: the background is dark, and light is poured on Jesus’ body. To Thomas this scene is more concrete and physical than anything around them. In fact, this moment will illuminate his life from now on: it will be the clarity which makes sense of this dark world, the understanding that will reshape his fears and hopes and loves and desires.

Thomas’ reality is changed. The light of this moment, the warmth of this touch will stay on with him. His finger will carry this warmth as he touches faces or mud or spears, as he grabs a hard stone or as he touches his brides’ arm. He won’t even be able to eat the essential elements of the Mediterranean cuisine – bread, wine, water, oil – without remembering the resurrected Christ. Thomas’ senses are impregnated; his sight and smell and touch and taste and ears carry the ring of the resurrection. The texture of reality now breathes and pulses with life, even as he ventures later into the dark cold background.

René Breuel

[1] John 24:25


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Categories : Spirituality for the Rest of Us, The Heart of Faith

Taking Offense

2 04 2012

 A major stumbling block for those who reject Christianity is those parts of the Bible which seem to justify actions that we consider to be culturally backward, confusing, and irrelevant or, even worse, immoral. And I think that most Christians, if they’re honest, will agree that there are parts of the Bible that they find baffling, frustrating, or, possibly, just plain offensive.

Interestingly, characters within the Bible exhibit similar sentiments with respect to the self-disclosure of God.  Moses, for example, boldly interceded to God on behalf of his people when God was on the verge of wiping them out for their idolatry. Moses repeatedly calls on God to remember what he promised, to consider what the other nations would think, to turn away from his anger and show mercy to his people (Ex. 32:9-14; 33:12-17).  Surprisingly, God relents. Moses’ courage and boldness appear to earn him God’s favour.  We see similar themes in the book of Job, where Job protests bluntly and bitterly to God about his suffering.  Although God has some harsh words for Job at the end of the book,  he also declares that Job and not his friends with their neat and tidy religious formulas explaining human suffering, had spoken rightly of him (Job 42:7-10).

In both cases, confusion, ambiguity, and outrage were presented to God honestly and unapologetically. In both cases, it seems that God was less interested in human beings pretending that God’s actions and intentions were perfectly obvious, transparent, and morally praiseworthy than he was in an honest acknowledgment of the confusion and even offense that walking with him can and does cause.

In The Reason for God, Timothy Keller has this to say about what to think when we come across a passage in Scripture that we find outrageous:

To stay away from Christianity because part of the Bible’s teaching is offensive to you assumes that if there is a God he wouldn’t have any views that upset you…. Now, what happens if you eliminate anything from the Bible that offends your sensibility and crosses your will? If you pick and choose what you want to believe and reject the rest, how will you ever have a God who can contradict you? … Only if your God can say things that outrage you and make you struggle (as in a real friendship or marriage!) will you know that you have gotten hold of a real God and not a figment of your imagination.

In other words, one skeptical assumption worth challenging is that if God exists and chooses to reveal himself to human beings, he is obliged to do so in a way that will simply confirm and validate our (profoundly historically and culturally conditioned) conceptions of what is good, admirable, and admissible.  If we take seriously the fact that human beings are finite and fallen creatures, whose only access to reality is profoundly shaped (in positive and negative ways) by a whole host of historical, cultural, and psychological factors, then it makes sense to say that our moral conceptions might not represent the last or best word on the question of what God is like.

In one of my university philosophy classes, a professor told the story of a friend of his who was a committed Christian and a celibate homosexual. When my professor asked his friend if he agreed with the Bible’s teaching on homosexuality, his friend said he did not. This, my professor found truly baffling. How could his friend possibly choose to commit to a religious tradition when he was in such obvious disagreement with it on a matter as important as his sexual identity?

His friend said that Christianity made sense of enough important elements of his experience, and that God had proven faithful enough over the years that he had learned to trust and yield to him when it came to matters that he disagreed with. His confusion and disagreement with God were preserved within the context of faith, and with the understanding that it is at least possible that human conceptions of what is right and wrong, permissible and impermissible might require modification or correction.

My professor obviously found this pretty difficult to stomach. What, after all, could be more important than being true to one’s own beliefs? If anything is sacred in our post-Christian Western culture it is the individual’s freedom to decide what is true and meaningful for themselves.

But perhaps facing the implications of the inherent limitation of the human condition—even when it comes to our moral intuitions—can be seen as liberating in a strange sort of way. We don’t have to pretend that we love everything in the Bible, nor do we have to pretend that God’s way of acting in the world always makes obvious sense and demands nothing but our reflexive and unthinking praise. Whatever else may be going on in the stories of how Moses and Job related to God, it seems that one important lesson is that God is not put off by human doubt, anger—even offense—in response to their understanding of his work in the world.

Ryan Dueck


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Categories : Tough Questions

“What if you’re wrong?”

19 03 2012

A girl asked atheist Richard Dawkins one day, “What if you’re wrong?” In typical deprecating  fashion, Dawkins turned the question back to the girl, “But what if you are wrong?” [i]

The argument in Dawkins’ response, if you think about it, is essentially relativism. The reason we believe what we believe – in flying spaghettis, Zeus, or the Christian God – is because we were brought in a particular culture and nurtured in those beliefs. Had we been brought up somewhere else, our religious outlook would be different. As Dawkins has expressed in writing, “No doubt soaring cathedrals, stirring music, moving stories and parables, help a bit. But by far the most important variable determining your religion is the accident of birth.”[ii]

The assumption behind this assertion is significant: geographical determination. None of us can pretend to Truth, because our belief is socially determined. If we would believe in Thor had we been born a Viking, how can we pretend that our belief in God could be true? Atheists like Dawkins conclude that the diversity of human belief across history is the definite proof against God. If we see humans inventing objects of worship so creatively and so pervasively – sacred cows, the sun, Mother Earth, or God – surely the monotheistic God is just another invention, maybe more complex and civilized than the others, but a human creation nonetheless.

But let’s turn the table again: “Yes, sure, but what if you are wrong?” By the same logic, the only reason someone like Dawkins believes in relativism is because he was brought up in contemporary Britain. His belief is also socially determined, so how can he assert that his view is right and every other religious view is wrong? How come every other view is relativized but his relativism remains absolute? Relativism is not only arrogant toward others, but thoroughly inconsistent with itself.

Still, the argument of religious diversity is an eloquent one. Humans are intrinsically religious, and will find something to worship no matter how strange the god or goddess may be. On what basis can we assert that one specific belief is true while so many others are wrong? Doesn’t religious diversity lead us to conclude that religion is essentially a human creation?

For me the evidence points precisely in the opposite direction. Humans are intrinsically religious because there is a real God who created us, and who we are searching for. We have this innate hunger because there is true satisfaction for our divine longing out there, just like our physical hunger demonstrates that there is real food that meets our needs. The fact that people eat the most bizarre objects – serpents, leafs, eggs of fish – is not proof that our physical hunger is a projection, but a precise proof of our need for food. Similarly, the diversity of belief across history is not proof that our soul hunger is a projection, but a precise proof that we have a craving for the divine, and will search for God even in the most unlikely of places.

But the skeptic may still rightly ask, “Ok, but on what basis do you claim that people search for God while adoring nature, and not, let’s say, search for the true goddess Aphrodite while worshipping the monotheistic God?” This is a great question, and could be dealt adequately only with another article. Yet atheism gives us a telling hint: if there were no God there would be no God to deny. “If there were no God, there would be no Atheists,” quipped G. K. Chesterton. Has there ever been an articulated, sustained movement like atheism against sacred cows or Aphrodite? Our very denial – of an eternal, omnipotent Father – assumes the form of what exists objectively. Our doubt mirrors our faith: we would not have to deny the existence of God if there was really no God to deny.

Belief in God could still be wrong, of course. But the diversity of human belief does not discredit faith, but rather, shows how forcefully we crave to worship something. If people are ready to adore even built statues at times, this shows us how urgent and true our spiritual hunger is. Religious diversity does not discourage robust faith, but is actually a compelling motivation to lead us to search, and discern, and surrender to, what is it that pulls our spirits so strongly toward worship.

René Breuel

[i] This video clip is actually the most seen Dawkins video on Youtube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mmskXXetcg

[ii] Richard Dawkins, as quoted in his own website, http://richarddawkins.net/quotes/10.


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Grow Up?

2 03 2012

When our kids were in kindergarten, one of the moms from their class approached me on the playground one day for some “religious” advice about how to deal with what was for her son, the traumatic discovery that everybody dies (this discovery came via the film Charlotte’s Web). I fumbled and mumbled my way through some explanation of how we try to teach our kids that God is ultimately going to reclaim and redeem the world of our present experience, validating all that is good and true, and that the Christian conviction is that death is not the end.

My response may or may not have been adequate, but the playground conversation got me thinking about children’s need to make sense of the world and the problem of death.  It reminded of some of the questions that arose when our kids encountered death for the first time. One of their preschool friends was tragically killed in a traffic accident a few years ago, and I remember being surprised by their bewilderment—even outrage—that such a thing as death should occur.

Since then, I’ve wondered about what (if anything) this intuitive child-like sense of the lack of fit between death and the world says about us as human beings. It seems to me that there are, broadly speaking, two approaches one can take to the problem of death and what, if anything, this might say about us and the world.  For me, two books illustrate these approaches well.

The first is articulated by the famous evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in his best-seller The God Delusion.  For Dawkins, religious belief in general, and certainly any belief that there is a reality beyond death, is a “mind-virus” which involuntarily infects people through the cultural transmission of “memes.”  Dawkins admits that children seem to be hard-wired to be, if not religious, then at least inclined toward a form of dualism which accepts the existence of non-physical entities and realities, however these beliefs do not point to anything real about the world; rather, they indicate that such beliefs must have provided some adaptive value in our distant evolutionary past. Dawkins is clear that the beliefs that seem to come naturally to children—tooth fairies, Santa Claus, flying spaghetti monsters, heaven, God—represent a stage in human development to be grown out of.

Another perspective on what the natural inclinations of children might point to is set forth in Susan Neiman’s Evil in Modern Thought. Neiman, a moral philosopher who directs the Einstein Forum in Postdam, Germany, takes a position quite different from Dawkins. For her, the questions that come naturally to children are more plausibly interpreted as pointing to real existential problems and needs. Neiman argues that the “childish” desire that every question—including the question of what comes after death—ought to have a sufficient answer is at the heart of reason itself:

Children display it more often than adults because they have been disappointed less often. They will continue to ask questions even after hearing the impatient answer—because that’s the way the world is. Most children remain adamant. But why is the world like that, exactly? The only answer that will truly satisfy is this one: Because it’s the best one. We stop asking when everything is as it should be… In the child’s refusal to accept a world that makes no sense lies all the hope that ever makes us start anew.

There is obviously a striking contrast between the views represented by Dawkins and Neiman regarding the significance of children’s intuitions. The former sees childish tendencies as something to be outgrown (although, interestingly, mainly those that tend towards belief in God or religion—Dawkins obviously wishes to encourage children to ask questions, just not to arrive at the “wrong” conclusions). The latter sees the “childish” demand that the world conform to intuitive senses of justice, meaning, and goodness as being at the very heart of reason itself, and providing the impetus that drives philosophy:

But the child may also be a figure of promise. She approaches the world in wonder as well as in fear. Her innocence can be a source of strength… The urge to greet every answer with another question is one we find in children not because it’s childish but because it’s natural.

When I think of a little boy’s virtual outrage that there should be such a thing as death (in Charlotte’s Web or anywhere else), and our own kids’ reaction to the death of their friend (Why? But we’ll see him again, right?), I think we ought to at least entertain the possibility that these questions and concerns might actually make contact with what is real and true about the world, and reflect some element of what they were created to be. Perhaps there are some questions and some possibilities that we are not meant to outgrow.

Ryan Dueck


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Is Doubt the Enemy of Faith?

25 01 2012

Doubt gets a bad rap. We live in a world where we are not supposed to doubt, it is unhealthy—bad. Doubts, though, are like confrontations, which also have a bad rap. However, it is in confrontations that change can happen. Sometimes my wife needs to confront me, and at that point there is a back and forth until eventually one of us realizes our error (or often we both do) and we change. Today—we are so afraid of confrontations—we don’t have them. In a Facebook generation we just unfriend, ignore or avoid—but then we are depriving ourselves and others of possibly growing.

Doubts are the same way. We often are afraid of them—or we don’t deal with them—but then we never grow. In fact they may actually help. How do I know? Look at the famous, but often misunderstood biblical story of Doubting Thomas often used to illustrate how it is wrong to doubt. It can be found at the end of the Book of John.

What does Jesus do when he approaches Thomas here? Two things: First, he calls him out for doubting clear evidence—the other apostles eyewitness accounts. Most people highlight this aspect of the story. However, the second thing Jesus does is actually gives into the demands of Thomas! Thomas demands to see Jesus, his pierced hands and side, and then Jesus—after rebuking Thomas, actually gives him exactly what he demands. Why would he do that?

Jesus is trying to keep Thomas, as well as the listener from falling into one of two camps prevalent in ancient and modern culture. The first camp can be called the blind faith camp.  This group of people thinks doubts are the enemy of faith. That blind faith camp never questions their faith, never ask hard questions, and never seeks answers for when doubts rise up. They say that the definition of faith, is you don’t know, so stop trying to ask questions and just believe. There is almost a fear if that if you do ask questions then you will lose your faith.

The second camp out there is what I call the persistent cynicism camp.  These are individuals who try to poke holes in everything and mock all truth statements, and undermine all claims of purpose. I know these people exist because I was one of them. Whose to say what is true? What is true for you is true for you, but what is true for me is true for me. In some respects these people are committed to the belief that there is no belief—there is nothing else out there.

Through his actions, Jesus wants to avoid both extremes. Notice he rebukes Thomas not for doubting in general—but for doubting clear evidence from his friends. In other words, he was in the
persistent cynicism camp. He was not seeking or trying to find answers, he made a blanket statement and he was not going to budge. However, on the other hand—Jesus actually gives into his demands, and validates and even answers Thomas’ demands. So it seems, from a fresh reading of the passage, doubts are not necessarily the enemy of faith, only if they stay in a persistent state of cynicism.

In fact, they may actually boost a faith/trust paradigm. How does Thomas respond after Jesus shows him the evidence? All the gospels have Jesus trying to show others who he really is, but the one person who confesses Jesus’ full nature is Thomas!  No other human being had a higher view of Jesus than Thomas. In verse 28 he says, “My Lord and My God.” This is a personal expression of intimate relationship that is accomplished through processing doubts. So use them, search them, and build off them.

Michael Keller


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Categories : Spirituality for the Rest of Us

A Beautiful Life

28 11 2011

What if I’m wrong?

Whatever space we happen to inhabit on the worldview continuum, this is a question that is bound to occur to all of us.  As human beings we simply do not and cannot know as much as we would like prior to deciding upon ultimate matters.  And I suspect that the “what if this is all a colossal mistake?” question occasionally occurs to even the most settled of minds.

At the end of Miroslav Volf’s Free of Charge there is a brief chapter entitled “Postlude: A Conversation with a Skeptic.”  After coming to agreement that the life of Jesus was good, beautiful, and worthy of emulation, Volf records the following hypothetical exchange around what would he do if he found out that the whole notion of a generous God who gives and forgives and who expects us to do the same, was nothing but an enormous lie:

Skeptic: “What if your dark thoughts at night—and my sober observations!—are true? What if you are waking up to a dream?”

Volf: “Well what?”

Skeptic: “You’d be wrong.”

Volf: “And I would have lived the right kind of life, the life you called beautiful.”

Skeptic: And have lived a false beautiful life! Wouldn’t that matter to you? Can a false life ever be good?”

Can a false life ever be beautiful? Can it be good?  And what, if anything, does our answer to this question have to say about the worldviews we adopt?

Some would suggest that our worldviews are simply the result of the culture we happen to have been raised in.  We are all socialized into and inhabit a particular “plausibility structure”—a taken-for-granted way of thinking about and living in the world which privileges certain kinds of answers to certain kinds of questions. At its most extreme, this view sets forth a kind of sociological determinism where our cognitive and behavioural options are completely determined by our social environment. Is it even possible to just accept a different way of looking at and living in the world given what we know about the nature of belief formation and the myriad sociological and psychological factors that contribute to the process?

Obviously it is.  People do, after all, change their minds about matters of faith.  But when they do, it seems that more often than not it is the quality of someone’s life that proves most compelling, as opposed to the comprehensiveness of their facts or the logical rigour of their argumentation. People respond to well-lived lives—to “beautiful” examples of forgiveness, grace, compassion, kindness, patience, and joy. The beauty and goodness of human lives can and do lead people to the conclusion that the foundation upon which such lives are based just might be true.

What is the connection between truth and beauty? However we answer this question, I think that the fact that we seem to be hard-wired to expect, even demand that the two be linked is suggestive. Is it possible that a genuinely good and beautiful life would have no connection to what is ultimately true about the world? If so, what would we be claiming about the nature of the world? About human beings? About God?

Sociologist Peter Berger has said that “to have faith is to bet on the ultimate validity of joy.” I think that it is also to bet on a deep and permanent connection between truth and beauty—between our deepest aspirations and intuitions and the way the world “really is” and will one day be.


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Categories : Bar Conversations and Cheap Advice

Adventures in Doubt

4 05 2011

It’s rather fashionable to be agnostic nowadays. The modern project of finding indubitable certitudes on which to base my life is said to have collapsed; Descartes’ adventures in doubt, however, are still all the rage, albeit devolved to dubito, ergo cogito, ergo sum: “I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am.” And what do I doubt? Well, a whole range of things. In this upside down world, I’m like the Queen of Heart’s antithesis: sometimes I’ve doubted as many as six highly plausible things before breakfast. It just takes practice.

I doubt whether the Royal wedding, telecast to millions, represents “true love”—after eight years waiting, Kate must have some qualms about her balding prince. I also doubt the idiot box on which it was telecast, with all those inane ads. Will that latest shampoo really regrow hair on my own bald-spot? They can’t fool me—I’m too suspicious for that. (Though I did buy the product, just in case, of course.)

On a different front, I doubt whether PJP2 deserves beatification in a world where science has surely debunked miracles. But I’m also pontificating over whether scientists and their threats of global warming can be trusted—the Himalayas may be hot, but Brisbane just had its coolest and wettest summer on record.

The wavering cascades like a waterfall. Was Obama really born in the USA? (The certificate could be forged.) Is Trump seriously running for President? Did the moon landing even happen? Does religion have anything meaningful to say? Is every kilometre over the speed limit really a killer? Do my parents really love me? Can I trust my spouse?

I doubt it. I doubt everything, right?

Well, perhaps not.  I mean, to be truly sceptical, I must believe something solid on which to base my doubt. I doubt Trump because I believe his whole life is implausible. I doubt miracles because I trust a materialistic scientific method. I doubt global warming because it lies under the shadow of my local cooling.

Closer to home, I doubt the speed signs because I’m confident in my driving skills. And, if I’m honest, I waver over parental love and spousal honesty because I’m safeguarding myself against disappointment from abused trust. I believe that I am worth protecting. Doubt functions like a universal acid to dissolve any claim that threatens to control me.

Perhaps, then, my adventure in doubt hasn’t gone far enough? My totalizing deconstruction preserves one indubitable certainty: Me. For at the root of it all, I believe in me. My hermeneutic of suspicion extends to everyone and everything that threatens my autonomy or demands my allegiance. Religion has nothing worth listening to, as I am the only ultimate authority in this universe.

Okay, trying to be even handed, there seem to be at least two good reasons for doubting myself. One, I’m finite. How could I know it all? Surely I could be mistaken—on politics, religion, love? A bit of humility wouldn’t hurt. I guess that Professor had a point:

“If you’re going to be a doubter, be sure to doubt your doubts as well as your beliefs. We’re taught in our culture to think that a person who doubts is essentially smarter than the person who believes. But you can be as dumb as a cabbage and still say ‘why?’.”[1]

So I could be wrong. But there’s a second good reason for doubting myself. Not only am I finite; I’m also fallen. I’m limited, and biased. Contrary to the evidence, I think I’m normal and everyone else is weird and mistaken. But taken to the extreme, this blind trust in self—from which “flames the fixed star of certainty and success”—is tantamount to tyrannous insanity. As G. K. Chesterton mused, “The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums.”[2]

Touché. So where does this leave this doubting doubter?

Perhaps it leaves me blogging with my friend Mitch, trying to escape ‘Descartes’ Watchhouse’, “detained in an imaginary cell by my own epistemic impotence.”[3] I must squarely face my deep seated trust issues. Perhaps it leaves me with Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver, facing up to my own identity as a backward yahoo in a world more complex and beautiful than I had heretofore perceived. Perhaps it leaves me, like the early church father, Origen, realizing that I only truly know that which I truly love. Love is risky business that dethrones my own superiority and leaves me open to being deceived; but is there a better path to traverse?

Wherever it leaves me, this genuinely ‘Wondering Fair’ article should leave me searching for anything, or anyone, worth trusting. For if I could find one who is trustworthy, then maybe I could set out on the greatest adventure of all: the adventure of faithful and courageous commitment.

Dave Benson

[2] Orthodoxy (Peabody, Massachusetts: Hendrickson Christian Classics, 2006), 9.


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Categories : On Anything and Everything, Spirituality for the Rest of Us, Tough Questions

Hearing the Silence

15 04 2011

Despite all our highly rational arguments for or against God’s existence, a lot of the time, the issues are far simpler – more an experience than a theory. That experience is simply this: God doesn’t walk into my living room, sit down on the couch and talk to me.

Of course, this absence, or silence, is cause for a rational argument against God. God seems to only “reveal” Himself in highly ambiguous ways: “a still small voice”, interesting coincidences, an ancient book (full of stories of a time in the ancient past where He supposedly did come to humans more tangibly). It’s all so vicarious. If He does exist, why can’t God just be direct, come out, and show Himself, now? The logical answer is, because He doesn’t exist.

But truly, those rational arguments aren’t the real problem surrounding the Silence of God. It’s an experience. It’s the experience of people telling you there’s a God that loves you, you looking around for Him, and not being able to find Him. That hurts. Amidst all the arguments, it comes down to the heart – “He doesn’t talk to me, so I won’t talk to Him.”

Actually, Christians sometimes face that silence, too. When it comes, we question if He was ever there at all. I go through times like that. In one of those times, I found this quote from a Cistercian monk: “Silence is the very Presence of God – always there. But activity hides it. We need to leave activity long enough to discover the Presence – then we can return to activity with it.”[1]

Silence is always around you, it does not leave. It is merely hidden. Ironically, silence is muffled by sound. It does not disappear. It merely waits. It waits for you to stop the noise, and to listen.

Out of all the people in history, we today are the worst at finding silence. I’m terrible at it. I have music, TV, work, cars, my friends, my wife, my kid, always going in my ears. And the few times I could have silence, my mind is noisy – all those things leave a mental “echo”, as my brain recalls song lyrics, conversations. Perhaps my mind sees the silence as an opportunity to get more done. But I suspect sometimes my mind keeps destroying silence, because I’m afraid of it. Silence is so strange, so alien to my life. And it is scary, because if I am not all those things, am I anything at all? I fear silence is a suffocating vacuum.

And what of God? Could God be like the School Teacher, standing silently at the front of the classroom, waiting until the class “settles down” before beginning the lesson? I resent His silence, but is it really there not because He is silent, but because I refuse to relinquish my nice, familiar noises?

There are two solutions for this problem in the Christian tradition. One is the Cistercian monk’s solution. It is to slowly drive the noise away, and wait for the Presence, hovering hopefully,  terrifyingly in the Silence. Not long after the previous quote, the monk says: “… I went out on the balcony… The Lord came in power. My whole being longed to be dissolved and be in complete union…. I finally went to bed and continued in the Presence. How I wish my every moment could be in this painful, sweet state.”[2]

That seems to work for him. But it’s very hard for most of us to get there. The other solution is to use things that God has traditionally given people as a “megaphone”, to “amplify” His Presence and drown out the noise. These things include the Bible, worship in Christian community, and good books – the Cistercian’s book has been one of those for me.

The point is, the Presence is there, always there. He is merely waiting for you to hear Him in the Silence. Face the fear of losing all the noise, and enter that Silence.

Matt Gray

[1]    Basil Pennington OCSO, The Monks of Mount Athos: A Western Monks Extraordinary Spiritual Journey on Eastern Holy Ground (Woodstock, VM: Skylight Paths, 2003)

[2]    Ibid.


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Categories : Spirituality for the Rest of Us

The Crystalline Mountain

15 09 2010

I grew up in the land of the shadows,
Where nobody ever saw light
In the fields or the glades or the meadows,
Nor on the highest height
But there was a story we told
Of a glassy and crystalline mountain,
Where courageous pilgrims of old
Saw the sun sparkle down like a fountain
And atop that mysterious hill
Lived the glorious Infinite One
Whose ultimate, glorious will
Was for all to encounter the sun.

A wonderful wives’ tale indeed
But could it be possibly true?
Such questions did nothing but feed
My need for a hint or a clue.

And so I decided one morn
That since I was so fully torn
I’d welcome man’s praise or man’s scorn
By seeking the truth, come what may.

Two factions in my land there were
Who felt so completely cock-sure
That they could correctly infer
The truth of this legend of Day.

The Jeevers were believers who claimed to believe
That belief in the Mount was the way to achieve
The meaning of life and a life full of meaning,
Existence devoid of this darkness deceiving
And filled with the splendor of light.
But though they claimed to put trust
In the road as an absolute must,
They never were moving, they always were staying,
Fearful of doing, fearful of straying,
Filled with no faith and much fright.

The Jinkers were thinkers – bright, intellectual.
They sat and they thought – being quite ineffectual.
Their only activity would pass for passivity –
They’d sit and they’d ponder how a Jeever could squander
His life on the road without end.
I went first to the Jeevers, the house of belief,
Hoping believers could offer relief
And I asked…

“What do you know of this Infinite One?
How do you know he exists?
What do you know of this dazzling sun?
Can you tell me of what it consists?
And what do you know of this mountain of glass
That no one has seen with their eyes?
Can one really ascend, can one truly pass
From this darkness and into the skies?”

And they answered…

“Well, um, gee, gosh, mister, gee, I don’t know,
No one has asked how we know what we know.
But we know it, we know it, we know it, we do –
We always have known that our story is true.
The best way to believe is to murder your doubt,
Do this first and then you will soon figure out
That the Infinite One surely reigns in his glory –
Just doubt all your doubt and believe in our story.”

Their answer didn’t satisfy,
In fact it sounded like a lie!
How could I in vain deny
The power of my doubt?

So there I stood my mind confused,
And as I stood, my mind, it mused,
Maybe the Jinkers so enthused
About doubt could help me out.

So I went to the Jinkers, the house of doubt,
Where thoughtful old thinkers were milling about
And I asked…

“Why don’t you believe in the Infinite One?
Is it true that he doesn’t exist?
If it’s dumb to believe in a dazzling sun,
Then why do such thoughts still persist?
All skills and all notions are at your command,
You claim that by knowledge you’re powered,
Yet you always dismiss what you can’t understand –
Doesn’t that make one a coward?”

And they answered…
“Well, um, gee, gosh, mister, gee, I don’t know,
No one has asked how we know what we know.
But we know it, we know it, we know it, we do –
We always have known that our story is true.
Believe in your doubt and doubt your belief,
I’m sure you will find it a welcome relief
To know that your life is a meaningless hole –
You no longer need to pretend there’s a soul.”

I stumbled away in grave melancholy,
Refusing to say that my life was mere folly.
I was tired and weary of looking for truth,
Existence was dreary, all notions lacked proof.
In light of this doleful and dismal analysis
Both mind and heart were trapped in paralysis –
Neither a Jinker, nor a true Jeever!
Neither a thinker, nor a believer!
So by the end of this spiritual squall
I sadly believed in nothing at all!

But just as I made this dreadful decision,
My focus beheld a magnificent vision –
A man who was dressed in traveling gear
Saw my distress and kindly drew near.
His eyes wisely twinkled like flames in the night,
His face, nicely wrinkled, was beaming with light.
His eyes pierced right through me, I felt understood,
He knew me as only a traveler could.

“Where are you going?” the climber inquired.
“Oh, I’m not going,” said I.
“Well, everyone goes, it’s the way that we’re wired,
You choose but the path you will try.”

“I’m glad that you’ve found the great mountain,” said I,
But that path will not do for me, sir,
For I’ve seen way too much to ever deny,
But too little to ever be sure.
Don’t bother to preach about faith and belief,
Why don’t you just move along,
For I’ve found a nice way to conquer this grief –
By not choosing, I cannot go wrong.”

“A choice not to choose is a choice in itself,
Just look at the Jinkers and Jeevers!
Their lives are deprived of a traveling health,
They’re nothing but vain self-deceivers!”

“I will not commit, I simply refuse!
I will not submit to a choice I could choose,
For a choice is a risk, a decision for strife,
To journey this mountain would cost me my life!”

A fire in my head, a war in my brain,
I couldn’t discern what was sane or insane.
Then the man spoke with a storm in his eyes –
His words held the hope of the infinite rise.

“So you’d forfeit your life to stay where you are,
Where the land is dismal and dreary,
And yet won’t consider the mountain afar
As more than an unfounded theory?
Faith is required at either extreme,
It’s a risk either way, my dear friend.
As badly repulsive as that thought may seem,
It’s still what is true in the end.
So why not bear this load with me
And see what it’s all about?
Why not take this road with me,
Where faith isn’t threatened by doubt,
And belief is more than pompous opinion
Fostered by ignorant fears,
And doubt has a voice, but never dominion
Over volitional spheres?”

That was the day my decision was made,
Reluctant, recalcitrant mule.
That was the way, though distraught and dismayed,
I became a spectacular fool.

At times I see this mountain,
And sometimes I cannot.
And sometimes this crystalline mountain
Moves from its mystical spot.
But always it supports me,
This glass beneath my feet,
Whether or not I’m allowed to see
A visible mountainous street.
And so I keep on plodding
One step at a time,
And still my feet keep trodding
On this treacherous, tremulous climb,
Until my eyes behold him
On the day my race is done,
Bathed in the sunlight golden
Of the glorious Infinite One.

Matt Mattoon


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