junkmail for blankets

part of why i doubt

I have an essay due in six hours. I had six hours last night to work on it, but I convinced myself that I needed to watch Monday Night Football and the Thanksgiving edition of Fear Factor and the season finale of The $25 Million Dollar Hoax, despite the fact that I hadn’t seen any of the episodes leading up to the finale. During Fear Factor, a good friend called me, wanting to discuss something important, and I shortchanged the conversation so that I could pay attention to who would eat the most worms. There is something terribly wrong with me, something fundamentally flawed.

I could compose a list of witnesses to and victims of my fundamental flawedness. This list would be long, and, due to my moral myopia, would surely not be long enough. For the sake of making it manageable enough for you to digest in one sitting, I might pare it down to former girlfriends. And even then, I could probably achieve the same effect by narrowing it down to one of those former girlfriends, Ginger. I broke up with Ginger because she was a bad speller.

Despite her huge heart, her gentleness, her expressed adoration of me, and her youthful good looks, I left Ginger because she would leave, on my car windshield, notes filled with inexcusably misspelled words. I didn’t say anything after the first note, trying to give her the benefit of the doubt, trying to convince myself that she had been in a hurry. After the second note, I considered the possibility of confronting her, in the hopes that she were just being careless. After the third note, which included the line “I am more desparate then you know to see you,” I stopped ignoring reality, realized it just wouldn’t work, and broke up with her. This was in college.

I could attempt to explain this sociologically or politico-economically or even higher-critically, but, as I said, I am flawed at a more fundamental level, far deeper than any of these systems could fathom. Some real, essential part of me is broken, is not the way it’s supposed to be. I have become increasingly aware of this over the course of my life. Do not mistake this with becoming increasingly flawed—I have always been flawed. It’s just that I’ve become more and more conscious of how real and how desperate my condition is, more desperate than even I know.

Before I get too heavy-handed here, I realize that some people may find this all amusing—maybe even Ginger gets a good laugh out of it now. I know that my family finds it funny. Every holiday gathering ultimately degenerates to telling stories about my childhood exploits: Remember the time when Jeremy was five and stood on top of the lunch table at First Assembly Christian School and took off all his clothes; remember that same year when he set the display couch on fire at Haverty’s Fine Furniture; or what about that time he stole a pig. There’s a thrift store out there somewhere selling a shirt I wore in 4th grade. The shirt says, in bold block letters, “I’M ONLY VISITING THIS PLANET.” I remember that shirt more than any other shirt I wore during my childhood. I remember that shirt, I think, because I wore it during the 4th grade, and I remember the 4th grade well. It was during the 1983-84 school year that I first became aware of my brokenness, first considered that maybe there were something alien inside me, something not normal, something I could do nothing about.

My older sister, Shanon, was in the 6th grade at the time. We had taken IQ tests years before, and I had beaten her by one point. This did not convince her of my intellectual superiority. But the 1984 Altruria Elementary School Spelling Bee, I thought, would. I had coasted through both the classroom and the grade-level trials, as had my sister. The days leading up to the bee, she carried with her a book of hard-to-spell words, would sit in the lunchroom with her friend Amna Khan, whereupon they would take turns testing each other. I, on the other hand, didn’t want any help.

I don’t remember much of what happened in the first eight or nine rounds of the spelling bee, but I must have felt pretty good about things. I was one of only six students left, and the youngest at that. Shanon and her study-mate Amna were still around, as were my parents and most of the parents of the losers. Mrs. Jordan, my 3rd-grade teacher, who caught me trying to illegally walk home from school one day, was in the crowd. So were Kelly Burns, my first girlfriend, Cindy Rush, my second, and Robert Felts, the boy I sucker-punched in the spine to impress Cindy. We contestants were on an elevated, wooden stage in the cafeteria, where I had once catapulted English peas into the back of the assistant principal’s head. I was thinking about that when I was called back up to the microphone.

“Jeremy,” the bee-master said, “your word is ‘paprika.’” I looked toward my mom, probably to let her know not to worry. I wasn’t sure what paprika was, but I was sure of myself. I thought, and I remember this clearly, “They know how smart I am, and they’re trying to trick me. I won’t let them trick me.” I was sure that they were trying to give me a word that sounded easy but wasn’t as easy as everyone thought. I looked over at the judges’ table, smiled, and began: “Paprika: P-A-P-R-I . . . QUA. Paprika.”

Though I was asked to have a seat, I stayed at the microphone, waiting for someone to say “just kidding,” but I heard only “very good job” a few times until I finally took my seat off-stage. After the bee was finished (my sister came in 2nd, but she missed the word “alcohol,” which mistake I held onto as clear evidence of my continuing intellectual superiority), I ran to my mom and asked her to spell “paprika.” “Yes, honey, it’s ‘k,’ not ‘qu,’” she said. I ran then, fists clenched, to Mrs. Budlong, my teacher, and asked her. “I’m so proud of you,” she said, “and I really thought you were gonna get that one, but it is ‘k,’ not ‘qu’”—et tu, Mrs. Budlong?

I kept to myself the entire ride home, growing both increasingly angry and increasingly sure of my spelling. When we arrived, I ran upstairs to our library and pulled out a dictionary, prepared to prove to my mom and my sister and, at school the next week, Mrs. Budlong and Cindy Rush and the judges, that I had been right all along. After checking the dictionary, somehow I was only more convinced, in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary, that I was right.

For years, my family would continue to chalk that episode up to my only visiting this planet. I, on the other hand, knew, even as it was happening, that something was wrong with me, knew even then that I was convincing myself of a lie, not sure how I could be the only one so certain of myself, how I could fail to believe anyone but myself, but I didn’t give it much more thought than that until my early twenties, when I began seminary studies. In a class on the Gospels of the New Testament, some students and I were discussing religious doubt, looking case-by-case at the most prominent doubters, namely John the Baptist and Thomas. Several students were baffled by “doubting Thomas,” who had spent years with Jesus, had seen him raise the dead, give sight to the blind, feed the thousands, all by the speaking of a word or two. They found his inability to believe that Jesus was raised from the dead completely incorrigible. I felt sorry for Thomas—no, even beyond that, I empathized with him.

The other disciples—the ones who stood by and watched as Thomas said that he wouldn’t believe unless he could actually see Jesus stand before him, and unless, then, he could touch him—these disciples had already heard about the empty tomb, had seen Jesus before that moment. Thomas, on the other hand, was just now hearing about all this—the guy loved Jesus, and he had been crushed emotionally when Jesus died. Of course he would be hesitant to believe, hesitant to risk that pain all over again. But even more than that, I empathized with Thomas because of the 4th-grade spelling bee. I knew his secret, that there is some part of us that, against all evidence—all the teachers and dictionaries and resurrection bodies in the world—refuses to believe. I knew that the same thing that was broken in him is broken in me; and that this broken part is what keeps me from acknowledging the truth; and whatever it is in me that’s broken makes it harder and harder, in the face of mounting evidence, to accept the truth.

I hear people say, “If I could just see Jesus, then I would really believe, would be a true believer. If he would just give me a sign, something to show me that all that stuff is true, I would never doubt him.” But I read, in those Gospel accounts, about Jesus’ followers, like Peter, who one moment, believing Jesus, stepped out of his boat toward him in the water and the next moment stopped believing and sank; those who claimed absolute loyalty and devotion one moment and left him cold-turkey the next; those who called him Messiah one day and called for his execution the next. So those, too, it seems, who witnessed this most obvious, objective evidence, shared this fundamental flaw. This is both encouraging and interesting to me, but what interests me the most about this is the way that Jesus responds to doubters.

John the Baptist, Jesus’ own cousin, spent years out in the desert wearing itchy clothes, eating bugs, and trying to convince people that this guy Jesus, who was coming soon, was the promised Messiah, God in the flesh. And after Jesus appeared on the scene, John continued to talk about him, point people in his direction. Years later, John was imprisoned for his affiliation with Jesus. While in prison, awaiting his beheading, probably scared shitless, John sent a messenger out to find Jesus, to deliver this question: Are you really who you say you are, or did I make a mistake? Rather than send the messenger back to John with “Why, you ungrateful, cowardly idiot,” Jesus sent the messenger back to John with words of comfort and reassurance.

Then, later, Thomas. Rather than laugh incredulously at his doubt, give him hell for his stupidity, Jesus offered him a moment of intimacy, of physical tenderness, allowing Thomas to physically place his hand inside Jesus’ flesh, to run his fingers along his ribcage, to touch God-in-the-flesh.

Somewhere along the line, I got out of touch with reality. My theology tells me that it happened at the beginning of my physical line, with Adam and Eve. That my instinct to trust myself first is a learned behavior, learned from the first people to trust themselves instead of God. In this sense, it’s not so much that “I doubt, therefore I am” as it is that “I am, therefore I doubt.” This is only theology—take it or leave it. What I care more about right now is that somewhere along the line, I got the idea that it’s impossible to simultaneously have faith in God and doubt God, that I can’t have my doubts and my faith, too. Some of us have been too hard on John the Baptist, on doubting Thomas—much harder than Jesus was—and, thus, too hard on ourselves. Jesus, apparently, understood that broken part of us much better than we do, was more in touch with reality than we are.

“To doubt”: from the Latin dubitare, from the Aryan word denoting “two.” To doubt is to be double-minded, to be “in two minds,” wavering between belief and unbelief simultaneously. In Chinese, the same person “has a foot in two boats”; the Navajo Indians in the southwest U.S. refer to doubting as “that which is two with him.” In the Gospel accounts, the only people Jesus’ outrightly condemns are those who assuredly and single-mindedly refuse to believe that what he says is true, those who would rather keep a foot in their own boat, who have closed themselves off to the option that Jesus may be trusted, after all.

Despite what Ginger or Mrs. Budlong might say, I don’t wish to play word games with anyone. In the last sentence of the last paragraph, I switched over from “belief” to “trust” because, ultimately, doubt is a personal issue, a matter of trustworthiness. The value of anyone’s faith in anything rests ultimately in the personal object of that faith: I don’t ask whether I can trust a dictionary, ultimately, but whether I can trust the people who wrote the dictionary; not the diagnosis, but the doctor who ordered me to begin exercising daily, because I’d really rather not; not love as a concept, but can I trust a person to love me the way I want to be loved, though past experience tells me that’s unlikely. Doubtful.

In this sense, doubt is never a purely intellectual issue, though one may have rational reasons for hesitation. Rather, at the heart of belief in anything is the issue of whether I can trust the person on the other end of my belief. If the object on the other end of my trust is an impersonal one, a vague force or power, then what I’m left trusting is myself. I need only paprika or Ginger to remind me that this is not a good idea: I do not trust myself entirely: There is something fundamentally broken in me that keeps me from being trustworthy.
Not only is it possible, but, because of my fundamental flawedness, it’s inevitable that my faith in God will never be doubt-free, never without hesitation. And to label my doubt as “unbelief” would be to fail to take seriously this fundamental flaw; would be to place tighter strictures on myself than Jesus would; would be unrealistic.

I can look at the pain I’ve caused a grotesquely long list of people, at the pain and suffering of billions of people the world over, and reasonably question a God who would allow this to happen. At the same time, because my belief in God involves trust, the question I ultimately have to answer is this: Though I don’t understand God in this situation, do I understand why I can trust God anyway? I may not be able to explain, but I do not have the prerogative to explain something away, because this would be, ultimately, to trust my understanding, to trust myself, my fundamentally broken, flawed self, on the matter. Though I’m not able to comprehend how a loving God could allow so much suffering, I am able to suspend my judgment on the issue, to be in two minds, to doubt and at the same time believe in God. Though I cannot live with absurdity (the opposite of rationality), I can live with mystery. I can live with the knowledge that part of me is so broken that I still want to spell “paprika” with a “qu” years later; that I’m capable of breaking a girl’s heart for a few spelling miscues; that despite the evidence, I will doubt my faith in God—not God, the object of my faith, but broken me, the subject of my faith—and that this God is fully aware of my problem, of my desperate brokenness, of the fact that I’m not the way I’m supposed to be, that there’s nothing I can do about it, so rather than require me to fix myself, this God asks only that I admit my brokenness, quit trusting myself, and entrust myself to him instead.

*a few of the phrasings in here were taken or paraphrased from Os Guinness' book God in the Dark. i just realized that when i transferred it from Word to Movable type the footnotes didn't transfer with it. i'll try and correct it soon.

Posted by ghetto monk at November 23, 2004 04:06 PM | TrackBack