Growing up in faith communities, even those that eventually suffocate, can still bring good things. Tim Winton echoed much of my own experience when he wrote in The Boy Behind the Curtain about growing up in a fundamentalist evangelical community, where he initially found joy. He loved singing the rousing hymns — ‘a rowling mawl of choruses that salved the troubled spirit, like a musical rubdown’ — the stories of scripture that were his ‘imaginative bread and butter’, the immediate power of metaphor, the days spent crunching ‘ethical and cosmic dilemmas’, the fascination with some of the lyrical talks that ‘featured tales of degradation and courage [and] moments of searing illumination’.
Church was his ‘introduction to conscious living’: ‘Nowhere else was I exposed to the kind of self-examination and reflective discipline that the faith of my childhood required. I’d be surprised if anyone at my boyhood church had even read a page of Tolstoy, but it seems to me that the question that ate at him so late in his life was the central issue for us too. What then must we do? . . . We were reaching beyond the ordinary.’ That’s what I believed, too.
Winton learnt what a civil life was, how to cultivate disinterest and eschew tribalism in what was a coherent, close-knit, energetic community. They were ‘doers’, he says. ‘If we stood for anything it was “love with its sleeves rolled up”.’ But, over time, those who questioned were shunned and ousted, and, as it was with me, teenagers, bursting with thought and questions and ripeness, were told to only receive, not dissect, knowledge. Many conservative churches are polluted with a pervasive siege mentality that can lead to a stifling anti-intellectualism and, as Winton puts it, a belief that ‘a spirit of inquiry was a threat to moral hygiene’.
A certain sturdiness can, however, come from spending years developing a daily practice of quiet and prayer, of meditating on how to love, how to forgive, how to be stronger and calmer, how to interpret ancient writings in a modern world, and respecting that that there is a spiritual dimension to life, which I see so clearly now in our yearning for awe and an understanding of our own smallness.
At the Brisbane Writers Festival in 2012, Germaine Greer dismissed the Bible as a ‘silly’ book, a ‘grand delusion’, but added that as literature it was a testament to yearning — if you didn’t read it you would ‘not know how strong human yearning is for God, social justice, peace and transcendence’.
FAITH CAN BE AN enormous comfort, and prayer a buttress of calm. Researchers have found that a wide array of health benefits result from belonging to faith communities. Even if you don’t fit in, or don’t want to, hopefully there will always be pockets of the world, and various communities, where you can find kindred spirits with whom you can discuss the ancient paths and what it means to ache when you look at thousands of undimmed stars, how to find grace, and if it is even possible to ‘be still and know that I am God’. (The shame is that it is much harder to find those communities if you are a woman or if you are LGBTQI, something the church will need to reckon with in decades to come given the pain this can cause.)
Theology is much like space traveclass="underline" a wondering about the infinite. The British priest and columnist Giles Fraser once told The Guardian: ‘I think what you have with Christianity is a sense that there is something more, something still to be discovered.’ Fraser went on to say, adopting the words of Thomas Merton, that theology is about ‘“making raids on the unspeakable”. Poetry does it, great music does it, and I think theology is of that order. It’s not an attempt to describe the world in a scientific way. It’s puzzling over the nature of things.’ This sums it up so well for me: a puzzling over the nature of things, and a love of nature itself, which is where God is best found. Sometimes the only place. In the sea, the stones, the silence.
Faith is raiding the unspeakable. Grace is forgiving the undeserving. It’s a kind of unfathomable magic. And despite everything, if you can somehow try to let your life be your witness to whatever it is you believe, grace will always leak through the cracks.
Chapter 22
Embracing Doubt
CERTAINTY IS SO OFTEN OVERRATED. This is especially the case when it comes to faith, or other imponderables.
When the Most Reverend Justin Welby, the archbishop of Canterbury, said recently that at times he questioned if God was really there, much of the reaction was predictably juvenile: even God’s earthly emissary isn’t sure if the whole thing is a fiction! The International Business Times called it ‘the doubt of the century’; Archbishop Welby’s admission had not just ‘raised a few eyebrows’, it declared, but ‘sparked concerns if the leader of the Church of England would one day renounce Christianity or spirituality as a whole’. Another journalist wrote excitedly, ‘Atheism is on the rise and it appears as though even those at the top of the church are beginning to have doubts.’
Despite the alarm, the archbishop’s remarks were in fact rather tame. He’d told an audience at Bristol Cathedral that there were moments when he wondered, ‘Is there a God? Where is God?’ Then, asked specifically if he harboured doubts, he responded, ‘It is a really good question . . . The other day I was praying over something as I was running, and I ended up saying to God, “Look, this is all very well, but isn’t it about time you did something, if you’re there?” Which is probably not what the archbishop of Canterbury should say.’
Nevertheless, the London-based Muslim scholar Mufti Abdur-Rahman went straight to Twitter: ‘I cannot believe this.’ Australian atheist columnist — and my dear friend — Peter FitzSimons tweeted, ‘VICTORY!’ The Daily Show account joked, ‘Archbishop of Canterbury admits doubts about existence of God. Adds: “But atheism doesn’t pay them bills, sooo . . .”’
But Archbishop Welby’s candour only makes him human. He may lead 80 million Anglicans worldwide, but he is also a man who knows anguish, rage, incomprehension and the cold bareness of grief. He lost his firstborn child, Johanna, in a car accident in 1983 when she was just seven months old, and suffered ‘utter agony’. As a teenager he cared for an alcoholic father. When explaining his thoughts on doubt, he referred to the mournful Psalm 88, which describes the despair of a man who has lost all of his friends and cries out, ‘Why, Lord, do you reject me and hide your face from me?’ The psalm also states bleakly: ‘Darkness is my closest friend.’
Faith cannot block out darkness, or doubt. When on the cross, Jesus did not cry out ‘Here I come!’ but ‘My God, why have you forsaken me?’ His disciples brimmed with doubts and misgivings.
Just as courage is persisting in the face of fear, so faith is persisting in the presence of doubt. Faith then becomes a commitment, a practice and a pact that is usually sustained by belief. But doubt is not just a roiling, or a vulnerability; it can also be a strength. Doubt acknowledges our own limitations and confirms — or challenges — fundamental beliefs; it is not a detractor from belief but a crucial part of it.