My narrative today is to comment on sections from my poem, “Prayer of Doubt,” as a way to wonder about the mysteries of doubt and of religious faith. For those enduring doubt, you are not alone, not “terminally unique.” Doubt is in some ways an aspect of faith. Doubt can be the introduction to faith, the impetus and grounding for faith. All very strange and ironic and paradoxical, as are most things in the spiritual or mystical life.
God,
the ritual of thinking about you, fighting
over and with ideas of you is the pattern
of blood and scribblings and passings
all my life; my doubts, denials, dejections,
disappointments, distractions, delusions
with you are the weaving myth of my story.
When I was a young man and thought if I might become a Catholic priest and monk, it was doubt that led me away from that path, and it was doubt that would become a long-time, frustrating companion in my life’s story.
You are my contradiction and my confusion;
you are the question that keeps asking.
I think of you and my mind is a circus, a carnival,
a charnel house of memories, a feeling in the gut;
I have doubted you, I have been doubt.
At times, doubt defined me and was the perpetual question that was like an addiction.
There was a self-surprising, really absurd,
dawning in the harrowing heart of any despair
while you harpooned me and I screamed.
Is doubt my cross? A thorn in my fleshly soul?
Could doubt be an absurd epiphany of sorts? A godly virtue of a bizarre kind? Was doubt my bloodless stigmata? A graced, ambiguous, disturbing participation in Christ’s Cross? Or something far less? Was I just soaking up the zeitgeist in my mind and soul? Did doubt lead anywhere, or was it its own dead end?
Doubt is the prayer, doubt the necessary nativity
for seeing the simplest thing; doubt is itself
the dying of doubt, the strange birth of faith
through the dark canal of doubt’s density where
new belief and old doubt are a lover’s quarrel.
Doubt can be an odd prayer, the seed of its own passage across the threshold of faith. Doubt is not to be denied or fled from like an enemy of the spirit. Doubt is to be my mirror in which I can long for going even deeper into the doubt in order to face all that it is regardless of the fear and pain. In “doubt’s density” is found what has been sought all along, the convergence of doubt and faith in a crucible of love. Doubt is a radical way to begin to believe.
God. You are my doubt and consume my doubt;
my doubt is everything, nothing and neither
for You absorb my doubt and absorb me
in my every act of pure or murky abandonment
to You, for You are my absolution and sole hope.
Amen.
In order to be faith, faith needs to contain the seed of doubt. Doubt is not a rejection of or comment about God for God knows my doubt as He knows me. Just as my existence and being contains some aspect of the nothingness out of which God created me, faith contains and is fertilized by doubt. I don’t have to escape doubt as if it were a killer of faith, but simply love God (and people) through the doubt and all the ego-drama of my life. God accepts me as a long-time pilgrim of doubt and welcomes me “in my every act of pure or murky abandonment” to Him.
Doubt has been a freaky friend over the years, one that has helped me seek the real God of Jesus Christ, not some idol or pathetic idea of a God. Without doubt, what and who would I be? It is integral to my story that God is telling me, an aspect of faith and hope.
The Doobie Brothers sang “Without love where would we be right now?” Without bearing and baring doubt through liminal and suffered passages, where would I be right now? The mirror of doubt can become a nascent window to the sacred. All very odd, consuming, and, essentially, wonderful.
[“Prayer of Doubt” was first published in Amethyst Review]