Doubt from the Inside Out Pt.2

The Pain of Circumstantial Doubt

White knuckles on the home hospital bed rail. The plunging paradox of praying for the passing of a loved one you can’t bear to lose. Is God listening? Is he even there?

A young man is concluding his midweek sermon in the stuffy, centrally heated prayer room of the church, which is his first pastoral charge. He has become accustomed to the pattern of how this service works: a thirty-five-minute message and a thirty-minute prayer time. His sermon has been on David and Goliath, and, deep in context, pointing to Christ, he has assured everyone in the room that even when we can’t see God at work, even when all seems at a loss, he is there and his purpose is ever sure. Two hours later, while the prayer room radiators are clicking cool in the empty dark building, the young preacher will find himself (dizzy with incredulity) at his father’s deathbed, wrestling with the suffocating nearness of God’s absence. His sermon seems like it was preached a lifetime ago, and it echoes in his ears like a ‘tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing’.

A reckoning among the ashheaps

That’s the way it is with circumstantial doubt; all of the certainties that your life has settled on can be taken away, the easy assumptions of an untried faith evaporate, and you feel totally lost, alone, unsure. The peace of what we believe about the world, about our souls, about the Saviour can be shattered by our ringtone, by an abandoned marriage, an ill child, a sudden loss, financial ruin, a chronic or terminal diagnosis, or some terrible deception that makes all that we have trusted seem untrue.

There is a redemptive reflex in us that longs for this kind of language to give way to renewed faith quickly, but sometimes circumstances lead us into a lingering experience of dislocation and disillusionment, which can take a long time to shake.

If that’s where you are right now, let’s sit in this space together for a while. There is no rush to fix you; there is no impetus here to get immediate answers. You don’t need to shore up your suffering so that you’re not a burden. Sometimes our lives break suddenly, sometimes they are bent for so long by circumstance that their structure gets warped, sometimes hope becomes dozed like an old rubber band that has held itself in tension for far too long. This is what it’s like for you and me in this wasteland world at times.

You’re not letting anyone down by admitting this is so; you’re not failing at something or showing a lack of character. Your life has changed, changed utterly, and because faith has been woven so tightly into the fabric of how you’ve lived, it feels different too. Such times are a trial we must endure, but they’re not a test we are expected to ace. Making our way through this kind of doubt is messy; it is staccato. In the process, we might lose some things we can’t regain. Our lives are complex, and so is our grieving doubt. The wrench of changed circumstances throws all of our coordinates and what is trusted and what is true can become obscured by the swell.

I falter where I firmly trod

The Victorian poet, Alfred Lord Tennyson, was shaken by circumstantial doubt when he lost his friend Arthur Henry Hallam. Hallam was just twenty-two years old when he suffered a fatal brain haemorrhage in 1833. Tennyson recorded his experience of sudden and sharp grief in the long poem ‘In Memoriam’, in which he candidly converses with himself about the viability of belief in God, given his loss. The circumstance of losing Hallam opens the floodgates for Tennyson on misgivings he has long harboured about holding on to the idea of God, particularly with the developments in science and knowledge that his generation witnessed.

For those facing sudden or protracted circumstantial change, reading the entirety of this long poem could be a tonic, if for no other reason than the fact that Tennyson puts word and concept to the terror of having our faith thrown by hard things. His language, although framed by strict tetrameter, is immediate, earthy and, above all, devastatingly honest. Hallam’s death has bereaved the poet of a favourite person but also of the firm position he once enjoyed as a believer,

I falter where I firmly trod,
And falling with my weight of cares
Upon the great world's altar-stairs
That slope through darkness up to God

It is hard to think of a single line in the English language that more adequately summarises the sentiment and reality of circumstantial doubt than ‘I falter where I firmly trod’. The old, almost unthinkable, sense of certainty that was once companion to our faith abandons us, and even our addresses to God feel jaundiced by spiritual weariness and intellectual wariness. In this space, our grief is compounded by our slackening grip and where we have perhaps read of heroes who held fast through even fierier trials than ours, we realise we are not one of those hallowed names.

Almost everything is affected by this. Our sleep no longer finds the pillow of personal peace it once knew, our relationships feel like they are in flux if faith has informed them, and our experience of gathered worship in our local church can feel as though we are the only discordant voice in an anthem of shared assurance. Those who take the time to read all of ‘In Memoriam’ will find that this gutting angst, this bone-crushing, spirit-quenching collapse of our spiritual world, is a common experience for those whose life conditions are sharply shattered or gradually eroded.

Out of the depths

Sometimes we don’t want a conversation that seeks to address our doubts; it feels like enough to simply describe it and to let it breathe. If this is the case for you, dear reader, it is entirely honourable to pause here and perhaps come back on another occasion when your heart feels ready to seek some kind of counsel. It is also worth noting that no other mere human can still the fluctuations of your heart and mind, any more than they can reverse tragic circumstances. Writing about doubt is, then, a tentative art that humbly owns its own potential impotence.

But there are things that can be brought as balm to a broken, doubting soul. The first is to normalise your experience. Normalising is not the same as absolutising (where we insist that all Christians in crisis should doubt) nor is it the same as generalising (as though your grief does not have its own face and fingerprints). To normalise doubt is to say that it is a common condition of those whose worlds are fractured. The chart of your circumstances is individual to you, but the roiling sea of uncertainty that you are on is traversed by other sailors, too. You may feel alone, but none of this is unique.

This normalisation is not confined to anecdote and the experience of others, but is recorded for us in Scripture itself. The tear-stained Psalms, the pain-wracked prophets, the suffering Saviour, the destitute apostles all parse the grammar of grief and decentralised certainty. The truth that Scripture carries is not pristine and factory packed, but is weathered by lashing winds, bleached white with the sea salt of storm and tide, pocked and flecked by the pain that human existence carries. Out of these depths there emerges a harmony of voices that say the hard things while singing God’s praise, who itemise what they are facing and confess their concerns about where God is, even if God is. The most profound of these cries comes from the cracked, parched lips of Jesus himself, with a ‘why?’ wrenched from his soul as he suffers on the cross. This fact can be a true north when all of our other bearings have been lost: the Jesus we trust is the Jesus similarly troubled in the midst of his own crisis experience.

All of the above implicitly carries a quiet injunction to articulate your experience. Tennyson could have kept his troubles to himself, but the writing down of his turmoil, his forcing it into the confines of meter and rhyme, eventually brought him to a stronger sense of resolve. The Psalms, the candid personal statements of Paul, and the wrestling of Jeremiah all suggest that giving words to circumstantial doubt is a beneficial act.

This can take many forms. Articulating our experience to friends can be difficult, particularly if our empathy towards them makes us fear that our doubt might be contagious. But finding people with broad enough shoulders and healing hearts of their own can be a true relief, especially if their reflex is to listen rather than to solve.

This articulation can also be in the form of prayer. I hesitate before expressing this, because for the doubting soul, prayer is vexed and can aggravate things more. But prayer can take the form of complaint letters to God, written with emotional candour and honest complaint. Prayer can be the words immortalised by Jeremiah, who, in the midst of social and personal disintegration, simply used four words, ‘O Lord, you know’. Prayer can be a quiet calling to mind that whatever other answers there are, Jesus is full of empathy for us, having suffered in the same way. Prayer under these terms can be a simple act of delegating our failing powers to say our sorrow and doubt to him, resting in his intercession.

In my own deep experiences of circumstantial doubt, all of these means of articulating my experience to God have been helpful in their own way. The key thing is not to see prayer as a work, as a prerequisite to God being with us in our circumstantial doubt, but as a way of reminding ourselves of the steadfast commitment of God to be with us, even when we are unsure if he’s there. In Christ, God is not waiting for you to clamber out of the pit - he is with you in it.

One final measure is worth mentioning here, and that is that we must respect our experience. Circumstantial doubt is not an inherent weakness in us, but it is a normal mechanism of how our souls process trauma and disappointment. Of course, to indulge this kind of doubt, to make it a kind of ‘free pass’ for reneging on faith commitments or pursuing behaviours we know to be wrong, is never for our welfare or God’s glory. In its true experience, however, this kind of doubt sometimes just needs space and time, room to serve as a processor for the problems and pain that brought it into being. God is gracious enough, the gospel is big enough, Jesus is compassionate enough to let us sit Job-like in the ashes and to allow resolve and renewed trust to emerge in unforced and lasting ways. In the meantime, we may need to go easy on ourselves, and not further seize our spiritual and cognitive engine by trying incessantly to think or spiritualise our way out of trouble more quickly than is possible.

I’ve got you surrounded

The young preacher plunged into doubt at the beginning of this piece is, of course, me. I’m not sure that I can say that the doubts that entered in those moments were ever fully exorcised, and I’m equally unsure if they ever should have been. Over the years, I have come to see that this kind of circumstantial doubt is not necessarily a contaminant that damages my life of faith, so much as a kind of leaven that is now worked into who I am and that can act as an agent for faith’s rising as well as its falling. What I am certain of is that this earliest hard experience of circumstantial doubt has left its mark on me, rendered my heart open to all who likewise suffer, and has, paradoxically, brought me closer to God over time.

A few days after losing my Dad, a dear friend simply texted me ‘Psalm 125:2’. When I looked the passage up in my Bible I was greeted with,

As the mountains surround Jerusalem,
so the Lord surrounds his people,
from this time forth and for evermore. 

For some reason, these words embedded themselves in my soul, simple as they are. God wasn’t censuring me while I languished in the depths; he wasn’t solving me as a kind of conundrum - he was surrounding me, constantly, steadfastly. This made all the difference. I didn’t journey back to God out of my circumstantial doubt, but found him in it, eschewing any easy-answer opt out, simply with me, loving me, holding me, waiting with me and for me while my soul settled into a new way of walking with him.

Dear reader, I pray the same thing might be known by you as well.