Have faith in doubt

(Response to Madeline Bunting's 'Have faith in doubt" published April 7, 2012 in The Tablet)

I begin with a confusion: what does Ms. Bunting mean to say in her title “Have faith in doubt”? Odd expression at first reading, this terse opposition between faith and doubt, but wait, our customary dichotomy of faith and doubt is absent from the meaning.

A revisionist reading requires a paradigm shift away from the binary composition of a Baltimore catechism to the more fluid imperative: you doubtful, have faith.

She assures a post-enlightenment ‘age of doubt’ that the teachings of Christ are still emulated. A nun comes to symbolize that the Church is finding new ways of being in the world.

She speaks of her own doubt publically rather than in private, in the confessional. It is no longer the ‘grave error’ once thought to impede one’s relationship with Christ.

Kind, generous, caring for poor and oppressed, the bearer of a good news, she had a career in Africa and in solidarity with Occupy has lamented galactic disparity of wealth and so-called market prudence: unmasking a “regulated” market like Jesus turning tables in the temple.

Ms. Bunting has in mind a different kind of reason when she speaks of “faith in doubt”, one embodied by courageous women. This reason is unencumbered by the selfishness of autonomy and has conceived of the individual as a being whose powerlessness is powerful in community. Gone with the wind are the fastidious, patriarchal norms of private faith.

People of this age are a far cry from the school girls who feared hell when doubt came like the plague. Their innocence was lost on fundamentalist sermons poisoned with religious intolerance, xenophobia, white supremacy—of self-assurance and scientific method, of aromatherapy, this people came out again from the bondage of Egypt. This time the dangerous memory of Christ’s teaching is heard in AA meetings: our lives had become unmanageable. There was holocaust and our future in God dangled by a thread. This thread was the suspicion that reason was somehow broader and faith was more than merely verifiable. S

o we embraced a mystery; we chose humble human associations such as Occupy, Rotary, Rosary circles, became like Guadalupanos on pilgrimage in Mexico. We put creeds whenever possible into our own words, constructed harmony out of diverse notes, but also acquiesced. Discord was pervasive in our communities, rank injustices persisted; but there came a kind of doubt in our midst that made us suspicious and incomplacent.

A luxury we could afford was humility before God; a solace came that God too was crucified.

Our Gospel had dimensions in terms we came to know firsthand, the teachings of Christ like a daily handiwork. United in purpose, so many polyglots speaking at once, our discipleship made known for our neighbors the making of God. So many heard in their own tongue and in their own narrative this possiblility of living oriented to God that we missed the transitory Jesus, nostalgic as it were, for those times of abstract reasoning.

Hemming up our pants for work in the vineyard, we sighed plaintive but joyful, still like that rich young man not wanting to give our all to God. But the vision lay before us that all was irreversible now and since all our brothers and sisters had only to receive this message, we felt the joyful responsibility of knowing Christ. It of course was less a process of reasoning than being true in relating to our neighbors and not to quiz them but to point out what their dignity and courage could hasten, the end of war, poverty, prisons.

They balked, dissembled.

I shrugged my shoulders too and gave up seventy times seven and no, I cannot say now that the undertow of doubt ever took me to that longed-for oblivion. I stood in chains, behind cell doors still tasting the fruit of the Spirit. My humanity was woefully limited and nine times out of ten I failed to give thanks for the sight I had been given. The doubt felt as real as the prison walls and my isolation as invincible.

Ms. Bunting is right: “Have faith in doubt”. I did and it got me here to this seat as a graduate student of theology. I doubted that it was right for me to enter the ^^^^^^ weapon facility with the other ********* activists, but it was right to co-****** the statement. It took a via negativa to become the one who ^^^ped them off, a passenger of a ^^^ not my own. I chose in freedom, that is, to belong more firmly within a tradition, rather than advance by the hill and vale of civil resistance and incur again the instability of a prison.

My firm convictions are less subject to doubt here. Ms. Bunting is speaking for the firmness of doubt lived, for times of trial by error. She is allowing for much further theological specification, but her responsibility as journalist is not this. She has a story of a nun we can identify as representing a living, growing tradition ready for new interpretations of the Scriptures and just as ready for social transformation.

I think it is significant that the piece was published on Good Friday. The mystery of the crucifixion is dependent on belief not simply that Jesus died on a cross but that Jesus was God and taught us blessed are the persecuted.

The doubt of a nun makes a meaningful story to the extent one believes a nun must have faith. In fact, the article is attempting to do away with the oppositional framework of faith and doubt by presenting this nun not as symbol of faith but as one in whom faith and doubt are integrated in the Christian life of service.