Doubt

At the moment I am attending a series of discussion groups at church using the book Adventures In Missing The Point by Brian D. McLaren and Tony Campolo. This week we looked at the topic of doubt.

At first I thought it was going to be a pretty pointless discussion, I suspected that everyone would agree that yes it is OK to doubt and that would be it. I was unsurprised to find that everyone in our group did think that it was alright to doubt and we shouldn't be afraid of that, but I was pleasantly surprised by the level of discussion that came out of that.

One person asked whether as a community we were a place where it was acceptable to air doubt and that got me thinking. To tell the truth I don't think that I feel able to express doubt very often, and yet so often I feel plagued by it. There are occasions and places where I feel able to share a snippet of doubt but rarely do I feel able to say, "You know what, I just don't know what's true anymore." Yet for me doubt is something that I hold but I don't allow to take hold of me. It changes too, I don't always hold the same doubts, something that I held firmly before can become something that I don't understand anymore in the same way that something that I just don't get can become a bedrock of my faith.

In a rambly and badly quoting fashion I shared a poem from a children's anthology that I remember reading as a child myself and a story to go with it. With the wonderful aid of the internet, and a brain that hasn't been able to leave it alone all week I have been able to search out the poem and quote it properly here. The poem is When I Was Three by Richard Edwards:

When I was three, I had a friend
Who asked me why bananas bend,
I told him why, but now I'm four
I'm not so sure...

I remember thinking when I first read it that of course I knew why bananas bend and how could you not know that? I also remember a couple of years down the line reading it again and wondering why bananas did bend and wondering what reasoning I had first had that I no longer knew.

How much like faith is this wonderful four line children's poem. One year we can be so certain of why things are the way they are and yet another year down the line things can have changed so much that we're just not so sure anymore.