Doubt — The Flip Side of Faith

(An excerpt from my Memoir “Out of Your Mind — Into Your Heart”)

In my early years, I was led to believe that doubt about the tenets and practices of my faith condemned me to be burned at the stake.

As I started to question the Evangelical dogma, Bruce, the church bouncer, was not required to toss me out — but only because, in my middle years, I left under my own steam with a growing conviction that doubt was not antithetical to faith.

In fact, I was beginning to trust that doubt was an integral part of listening to both the questions in my mind and the promptings of my inner self.

As I explored my doubt, I confronted many of the Tribe’s head-based arguments by asking questions that put the noses of the doctrinal divas out of joint.

What if original sin is a crock and we are actually created inherently good?

What if the Source looked upon creation, us included, and declared it all “very good”?

What if questions about life after death take us into the realm of pure mystery and therefore cannot be explained by simple formulas?

I asked these questions and more, but no one from the Tribe would answer.

Once, I expressed my curiosity about reincarnation to an Evangelical pastor who abruptly declared, “I believe in the resurrection.” I saw his mind snap shut like a mousetrap, and his clear message was “Don’t mess with my certainties!

Another time, I had a conversation with an Evangelical scholar who had just read a section of this memoir. “I was hoping your intellectual and spiritual pilgrimage had landed you in a place where you still intellectually affirmed what would generally be accepted as the historic doctrines of Christian orthodoxy,” he commented. He did add, however, perhaps to cheer me up, that he did not hold to the fact that I had “lost my salvation.” As I walked away, I thought, Oh well. At least I’ll make it into heaven — even if I am wearing a big dunce hat!

These reactions, and many more, from my former peers, made my head spin.

Amidst that whirl of mental conflict, I decided to join a Progressive Church. The rite of passage into this community was a confirmation class. About 30 of us at various stages on the journey of faith assembled. Given my rigid Evangelical background, I was struck by the diversity of age, religious background, racial mix, and reasons for being there that day. Some of us were outright agnostics whose hackles were raised at any thought of the transcendent. Others, like myself, were like reptiles shedding off the last vestiges of their Evangelical skin. Throw a few atheists into the mix, and one encounters what I called a Dogma Doubt Fest.

All of us class participants presented some version of show-and-tell about our personal spiritual journey. At first, I was reluctant to speak, but that reserve fizzled out as soon as the rector, the Reverend Dr. George Regas, began to talk. He was well known for raising hell, minus the fire and brimstone, in a loving way.

When my turn to share arrived, I piped in with a confession: “I can no longer recite the words in the Creed, including a belief in the virgin birth of Christ.” To me, it felt radical and somewhat dangerous to admit this.

Reverand Regas replied, “You don’t have to view those statements solely as literal truth to belong here. What you seek is not something handed to you by church authorities. It is something you intuit in your own heart. Trust that and not humanly constructed beliefs.” This took my breath away. Kicking the wheels of theology had been discouraged or forbidden in my Tribal past, but here it was accepted.

A bit later, a question was raised about the relationship of Christianity to other world religions. I squirmed a bit in my seat as I remembered how in my late teens I was an Evangelical missionary in South America. Our mission was to convert others, even Roman Catholics, to our brand of Evangelical Christianity. I was even a street preacher in various South American cities and towns. The sermons of this gangly, twenty-one-year-old, wet-behind-the-ears seminarian were even heard in a Pentecostal church in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where I sounded off in my broken Spanish to a Portuguese-speaking congregation. I gauged that I was a success by their frequent “amens.” I later realized these were about as useful to the Soul as “likes” on a blog. I could have intoned, “My black cat ate my hat” and they would have praised Jesus all the same.

That day in the confirmation class, though, embarrassed by my former ways, I wanted to keep my old proselytizing tricks under wraps, so I asked a question instead: “I’ve never seen All Saints try to convert others to Christianity. Why not?”

George’s face actually got red. “It’s the height of arrogance to think that we Christians have the only way to heaven. What happened to the millions who lived before Jesus? Could they not experience God?”

A chill ran down my spine. At last, I’d found a place that views religion as a universal quest — one that did not exclude other faith traditions.

It so happened that I had invited a friend, a senior leader in the church that I had pastored in South Africa from 1969–1973, to join me in the class. He and his wife were visiting us in California, though we had not seen each other in over a decade. We had been close family friends, but when we moved to the USA we lost touch. I knew it was risky for me to bring him to the class, but a part of me wanted him to see my religious metamorphosis.

I observed him closely as the class progressed. His brow was furrowed. He emitted occasional sighs and grunts when statements, often mine, questioned his cut-and-dried beliefs. In the car on the two-mile trip home from the church, he squirmed in his seat until what had been bottled up popped out in a torrent of emotion. In a “Get thee behind me, Satan” moment, he shouted, “How can you accept what the Rector tells you? You were so grounded in your beliefs. You’ve changed so much. What happened to you?”

Yes, what happened indeed?

How could I explain my shift away from blind loyalty to a dogma inherited from childhood?

How could my friend possibly understand someone who had made a mid-life religious pivot away from the Evangelical camp?

Predictably, my friend was deeply disturbed by my blatant discounting of our past beliefs. He had no way of appreciating that my questioning process had become a prelude to a new dimension of faith. No wonder then that the discussion I dragged him to hit his panic buttons.

I knew exactly how he felt as he yelled at me in the car that day.

I was him.

But not anymore.

My defensive outer shell was beginning to crack. I was on an inward journey so necessary for an effective journey outward. Throughout the first half of my life, I had very little direct access to my inner being or Spirit.

Now I’m on a journey toward a non-conceptual faith. One that arises from the seat of my soul. One characterized by faith