Praying for Doubt

I have been God’s defender and his prosecutor, and neither was a role that was required. I am only now beginning to understand what that means.

For most of my life I was certain. That’s a simple statement but it was not simple to live. Certainty has a way of filling every nook and cranny in a man until there is no distinction between what he believes and what he is, and when that happens the beliefs become identity, and you cannot question them without questioning whether you will still be standing when the questioning is done. So you don’t question. You defend. You defend with the intensity of a man who is not protecting an idea but protecting himself from what he might find if the idea were to fall away. And I defended for decades, in churches, in arguments, in the privacy of my own thinking where I would rehearse my positions the way a man rehearses what he will say in a fight he hopes will never come.

Then something wore through. I don’t know a better way to say it than that. Nothing that would make a good sermon. Something simply wore through the way fabric wears through when it has been asked to cover more than it was made to cover, and what I saw through the thinning was not darkness. It was just the world, the beautifully imperfect way it actually is, without the story I had laid over it.

And I did what a man like me does when the defending stops working. I switched sides. I became the prosecutor. Same energy, different direction. I went after the institution with the same intensity I had used to protect it, and I told myself this was progress, that I had graduated from blind faith to clear-eyed critique, that I was doing the necessary work of tearing down what was false.

But prosecution is still a role. It still assumes you have standing, that the case is yours to try, that you are qualified to sit in judgment over the thing you cannot describe. And I could not describe it. That is what I kept running into. I could describe what was wrong with the church. I could describe what was wrong with the theology. I could describe in great detail what had been done to me and to others in the service of doctrines that were smaller than the people they were applied to. But I could not describe the thing itself, the thing underneath all of it, the thing I had been reaching for since I was young enough to reach without knowing what I was reaching for.

I went looking for God and found my own fingerprints on the altar. The God I defended was one I had built, and the God I prosecuted was also one I had built, and both of them were limited to my understanding, which should have told me everything I needed to know. Because God isn’t even God. The word is a container and we have been fighting for centuries over what to put in it while the thing the word was trying to point toward has been right here, the whole time, too large for the container, indifferent to the argument, uninterested in my defense or my prosecution, present in a way that does not require me or my comprehension or my verdict.

I am fifty-six years old and I have spent more of those years performing than I care to think about. Performing faith, then performing the departure from faith, and both performances required an audience and both performances required me to know what I was doing and I did not know what I was doing. I do not know what I am doing now. The difference is that I have stopped pretending otherwise, and the stopping is the first honest thing I have done in quite a long time.

The only voice that ever answered my prayers was the one I spent my life trying to silence. My own. Not the voice of rebellion or doubt or backsliding or any of the words the church uses for people who begin to think for themselves. Just the quiet, persistent knowing that preceded every doctrine I was given and outlasted every doctrine I threw away. It was there before the church and it was there during the church and it was there after I walked away from the church. It did not care about my beliefs. It just kept saying, with a patience I did not deserve, stop. Stop defending. Stop prosecuting. Stop treating the mystery like something that needs you to resolve it.

Just be in it. See what happens.

I asked for mercy and received a mirror. Myself, without the roles. Without the armor of certainty or the weapon of critique. Just the face of a man who had run out of performances and was sitting with what was left, which was not nothing but was also not anything I had been trained to recognize, because the church trains you to recognize God in approved forms and the military trains you to recognize threat in approved forms and neither one trains you to sit with the unrecognizable and let it be what it is without classifying it.

If there is judgment it begins with what I tolerate in myself. The years of defending things I had not examined. The years of prosecuting things I had not fully understood. The silence I kept where I should have spoken and the volume I brought to conversations where I should have listened. I have not been good for quite some time, and I am not going to dress that up in transformation or growth or any of the words people use to make their failures sound intentional.

I failed. I failed at faith and I failed at the leaving of faith and I failed at every subsequent creation of myself that tried to have a definitive position on something that refuses to be defined.

And if there is holy in this world it begins where the excuses end. Mine ended in the middle of a life that had simply run out of the energy required to keep pretending. And what began there, in that unremarkable moment, I do not have a word for yet. I am not in a hurry to find one. The hurry to label things is how I lost them. The rush to be certain is how I buried what was real.

I am praying for doubt. Not to anything. Just the act of it, the way you breathe, because the body does it whether you have a theory about air or not. I am praying for the willingness to be wrong about everything I was taught to be right about. For the nerve to sit in the silence without filling it with defense or prosecution or any of the roles I have used to avoid the unbearable simplicity of just being here, alive, uncertain, reaching for something I will never get my hands around. That was the only truly honest thing I ever did.

What’s left now is the ground. And the decision to walk it, or not.

Holy Hell:The Bastard Saint's Indictment