From Senior Minister, Jay Leach: [The Second Sunday topic for the month of November is “doubt.” Because of a special service on that day, this topic will not be addressed in a service. So, I am opting to reflect on it here.] A small Wurlitzer electronic organ sat facing one wall of my grandparents’ knotty-pine paneled den. With some prodding, I could coax my grandmother to take her place on its padded bench and play for me. I especially liked hearing two songs. The first was the lilting waltz known on her sheet music as “Over the Waves” originally titled “Sobre las Olas” by the Mexican composer Juventino Rosas. The other was a selection from the Baptist Hymnal, that familiar collection of hymns from which we sang in the services of my childhood and adolescence. I would ask my grandmother to turn to hymn #260—“Trust and Obey.” I’m not sure what it says about me as a young boy that I loved to hear and sing along with a hymn with a familiar chorus declaring: Trust and obey, for there’s no other way, to be happy in Jesus, but to trust and obey. I recall from a fairly young age being struck by the fact that the same religious community offering trusting obeisance as the essential pathway to happiness, also called that very message into question. Alongside grand exemplars of faith, they offered me the rascal Jacob and his conniving schemes, much maligned Job who fell into a nihilistic funk, a running series of reluctant, recalcitrant prophets, disciples who frequently seemed completely clueless, and even Jesus who came down to the end and begged to be relieved of his fate. For each story of trusting confidence, there seemed to be another reflecting skepticism and doubt. I grew to understand what a young Henry David Thoreau also realized: “Faith keeps many doubts in her pay. If I could not doubt, I should not believe.” Thoreau, writing in his journal as a young man, already understood that faith and doubt are not antonyms but, rather, live alongside one another as complementary attitudes toward life. If there is to be “belief” in his life, Thoreau recognizes that it will, in part, be because of his capacity to engage in doubt. Both my experience in evangelical Christianity and Thoreau’s reflections as he was leaving behind the liberal Christianity of his local Unitarian congregation echo the conclusions of writer Jennifer Michael Hecht. A few years ago she authored a hefty volume with the succinct title “Doubt: A History.” In tracing the long lineage of doubt’s trail through time, she observes: “doubt has inspired religion in every age.” She recognizes that “the great religious texts are all a terrific jumble of affirmation and denial . . .” Hecht’s deep exploration reveals that wherever there is faith of any kind, doubt is inevitably present. We participate in a religious tradition that understands this connection. Doubt does not signal weakness or suggest some deficit among us. So, we sing in one of our hymns: From honest doubt we shall not flee, Nor fetter the inquiring mind, For where the hearts of all are free, A truer faith we there shall find. What does it mean to openly accept “honest doubt?” I don’t think “honest doubt” has to do simply with “disbelieving” what other people claim to “believe.” Not a little of what I hear associated with certain forms of skepticism seems to entail first fashioning a simplistic straw person—an obvious exemplar of something pitiably naïve—and then crediting oneself with being too adept in the capacity to think critically to fall for what “most people” “believe.” That seems more like self-righteous derision than “honest doubt.” Doesn’t “honest doubt” require me to have courage, the willingness to actively scrutinize something that really matters to me but that also isn’t absolutely certain? Isn’t it related to humility, the admission that I could be mistaken in a position I hold or an action I am taking? Curiously, even paradoxically, doesn’t “honest doubt” also include a sense of confidence that what is should be called into question because of the prospect for something better, that insight and wisdom are evolving still? I have my . . . well . . . doubts that we’ll find a pathway into spiritual depths simply by calling into question what other people “believe.” There’s so little at stake in scrutinizing their core convictions. If we want to discover an ever deeper sense of meaning, we have to find some authentic ways to hold faith and doubt together. Maybe it takes the form of being willing to say, with confidence “To this I am giving my heart,” while being open to the possibility that there just might be another, more meaning-filled discovery yet to be made. Peace, Jay Rev. James C. (Jay) Leach Senior Minister Unitarian Universalist Church of Charlotte 234 North Sharon Amity Road Charlotte, North Carolina 28211 704.366.8623 x 223
Posted on: Wed, 06 Nov 2013 17:43:03 +0000
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