Doubt from the Inside Out Pt.4

The Dislocation of Positional Doubt

**This post is part of an ongoing (and slightly disrupted) series on doubt, but can be read as a ‘stand alone’.

I had a dream that I was waking at the burning edge of dawn
And I could finally believe the king had loved me all along.

- Andrew Peterson

Early in my work as a pastor, I had the privilege of regularly visiting with an elderly woman deep in the Irish countryside (for the purposes of this article, we will call her Sarah). Her home and her way of life represented a vital link between the past and the present, the weathering hard work of the rural economy, the earthy common sense of country people, the refusal to ‘catch up’ with town, city and progress. On one such visit - the sighing, ticking range warming the large room that served as a kitchen and sitting room combined, her farmer son’s socks hung across the space - our conversation struck the golden seam of talking about our spiritual lives.

In ‘Casualty’, Seamus Heaney writes about how his conversations with the poem’s subject, Louis O’Neill, required the poet to be ‘politic, shy of condescension’, and something of this posture was required when private, humble, naturally quiet country people felt ready to speak about their faith. Sarah took the lead in opening up about her Christianity, and at the heart of it all was the nagging reality of positional doubt. Having heard about Jesus since she was a young girl, having trusted that the gospel was true in its precepts and promises, she had, nevertheless, lived a considerable part of her long life feeling unsure about whether she was truly a believer. Her candour about this crucial area of struggle allowed our conversation to develop into an encounter I will never forget.

Positional doubt is different from the corporal and circumstantial experiences described in this series so far, although it can be related to them in profound ways. Positional doubt does not necessarily take issue with what God is doing in our lives, nor with the impact that Christian institutions can have on us, for better or worse. A person enduring positional doubt can affirm every tenet of the gospel, and they might still have full faith in the Christian communities they have encountered, but they cannot finally affirm that God accepts them in Christ.

It is hard to pin down why positional doubt afflicts some and passes others by. Much about this experience is undoubtedly tied up in the mystery of our own personalities and experiences, and cannot in any way be explained or solved, even by our closest friends. What I offer below by way of finding where positional doubt can rest in our hearts and minds is suggestive and tentative, as are my hesitant prompts about how we can relate to ourselves and to others when this affliction strikes.

The expectation of non-acceptance

When I was a teenager, a friend gave me a postcard with a picture of a pensive-looking middle-aged man on its cover. The caption was a little lost on me in my youth, but I have come to understand it better in later life: ‘I am eagerly awaiting my next disappointment.’

There is, undoubtedly, much that is comedic in this statement, but at its core is a conviction many of us can carry that life is a network of defaults, a continuum of broken trust and forfeited promises. Without donning the guise of an amateur psychologist, it seems logical to me that this can spring from our upbringing, or it can be rooted in our later experiences of life. To be profoundly let down by those on whom we believed we could lean, to live with the passive or active disapproval of those best placed to nurture us, to be ghosted and forsaken by those with whom we once knew sweet communion is an experience that pushes into every area of our lives - including our faith.

It is all too easy to impute the dismissive glance of an embittered sibling, the withheld affection of a father or mother, or the howling space left by a deserting friend against the character and faithfulness of God as our Father. This is logical and understandable, even if it is paralysing to a steady sense of acceptance in Christ.

Ingrown humility

Another factor that can underlie positional doubt is a pathological form of humility, which is not merely self-effacing but self-defacing. In societies like the one I grew up in, and in church communities that I have belonged to, humility is rightly lauded as a virtue, as a signal of good character and judgment. ‘Getting ideas about yourself’ was close to a cardinal sin in the Northern Ireland of my upbringing.

While this is endearing and, in some respects, correct, it can grow inwards in sensitive souls. The worm-language which can be woven into evangelical discourse, the entertainment of a constantly low view of oneself, can descend into a form of self-hatred which persuades us that we are utterly unlovable, even by a good and gracious God. Humility seeps from a proper view of one’s personality and place in the world, into the subsoil of our sense of self-worth, and we end up believing ourselves to be beneath God’s contempt, let alone his compassion. As adrift from reality as such language might sound to some, ingrown humility can be the soul malady of many - especially if that humility has been weaponised or exploited by others.

Stubborn sin and slow holiness

For people belonging to a certain subsection of the church, coming to faith can be disappointing in terms of personal change. High on the promises of a new life, enchanted by stories from others of addictions snapped in two by Jesus, and expectant that we ourselves will be caught up in a whirlwind of transformation, we are brought to earth with a bump by the banal ways in which we have to daily face into our ongoing weakness and sin.

We listen to the major key praise of our church community, we swallow hard on words of victory, sermons on deliverance, and return to the inane round of seeing some behaviours mortified while others will not be readily tamed. A hot temper, a quick tongue, old dependencies return to our door each day like wolves scenting the air, and we wonder how we could belong to God truly, if we do not know his power fully like others.

Living in this way places us in a constant posture of conflict and tension, not doubting that the gospel is powerful but that it is personal to us, that Jesus has really taken up residence in our lives.

The slow war of surrender and imagination

Given the varied causes for positional doubt and the way in which it is interlinked with our personalities, our backgrounds, and our spiritual experiences, seeking to positively address it feels tantamount to folly. In place of being able to catch and capture every vagrant thought that leads us to doubt God’s love, I want to focus on the idea of fighting by surrender, and of waging war on this doubt by exercising imagination.

Sarah, in her remote farmhouse all those years ago, did not simply tell me of her private wrestling with uncertainty, but about its resolution. The moment in which the spell of positional doubt was broken came at the most unlikely time and place. Embroiled in the hard graft of dairy farming, Sarah found herself alone in the milking parlour one morning, going through the daily labour that had been part of her family line for generations. As she stood on a Spring morning among the heaving mass and stench of cattle a love letter from God landed in her heart. Sarah explained that she felt a new and overwhelming sense that the Lord loved her, and that his Spirit was witnessing to her spirit that she belonged to him. Sarah could offer no rationale for this moment, but it was life-changing. In spite of all of her wrestling and unknowing, something happened in that moment by God’s power to convince her soul. She surrendered to this and, although afflicted by later bouts of positional doubt, this experience became a bedrock of Sarah’s identity.

In a sense, this is Sarah’s story, and hers alone. But there is also a possibility that for you and me assurance won’t come by us endlessly trying to untie the knot of whether we belong but by God cutting this flimsy link we have cultivated with him and flooding us with the sheer beauty and power of his love for us. It is certainly worth praying that we might wage war on doubt by this kind of surrender, should God visit us in this way. It is entirely like God to bypass the tangle of our cerebral wrestling with the undeniable and inexplicable reality of who he is and how he loves us. I’m praying for you now, dear reader, that Sarah’s experience might also be yours.

In the absence of that kind of milking-parlour epiphany, we can exercise our imagination, a faculty that isn’t as prone to ensnarement as our bare intellect. In the Andrew Peterson song quoted at the beginning of this post, we are invited out to the ‘burning edge of dawn’ when Jesus appear again. We are brought in on the singer’s view of the fields of glory and resonances of the sower’s song, and in that moment when time relapses into eternity, Peterson is swept into the assurance he has always sought - ‘the King had loved me all along’.

I have taken these words on my lips when positional doubt has been at its strongest, I have tried to imagine the sweet kiss of the darkling horizon and the inevitable sunrise on the Final Day, and the torrent of divine love and assurance that will follow it. This exercise of imagination has not quite lifted me out of doubt, but it has allowed me to at least entertain that such sentiments are temporary and that the Lord’s love for me might be true after all. For however long this lasts, it is a blessed relief from the mental rats’ maze of positional doubt.

This post carries no real conclusion, because I am not expecting that all who read this will find that their positional doubt will necessarily have any finale before Christ appears. But sharing about this experience, allowing ourselves to believe that either in time or eternity we will be able to fully lean into the Lord’s love might allow some light in for a while, and that is something in itself.

If you have wrestled with positional doubt, I would love to learn from your experiences as well. How has this affected you? How have you handled this as part of your experience of faith and God?