Joel describes the process he uses when flooded with doubt. He draws a distinction between the experience of doubt and the choice to see beyond it by taking loving actions in spite of his emotions and thoughts. This essay was first published in Beacon, the Bryn Athyn College newspaper. Joel's contribution wraps up our themed series on doubt. You can find the lead essay in the series here. -Editor.
Doubt is a topic that has always been important to me. I think this is because I have a very skeptical personality. I like to disbelieve things until they have been absolutely proven to me. This is a problem, as I also strive to have a strong faith in the Lord. This conflict has led me to try to understand what faith really is, and what place doubt has in the context of faith. Often I am confronted by the question, “How can I have faith when I am experiencing such strong doubt?”
First of all, it is important to have an idea of what faith is. On one level, it is all those things that I think are correct. So for example, I think that there is a God, that He is omnipotent, and that He is the Lord. There are deeper levels to my faith as well. I believe that the Lord is good, that He wants us to love each other, and that He is the one who inspires all of our good thoughts and actions. On the deepest level of faith is trust. I trust that the Lord is guiding my life at all times to a good end, that He is providing everything I need for salvation, and that if I am willing to love and act from Him, He will lead me into heaven.
Doubt assaults me at each level of faith. It sometimes seems absurd to my rational mind that there is a personified supernatural being watching over the universe, that being good really does make a difference, and that the Lord is truly guiding my life. Now, these doubts can show up as thoughts that occur to me that I can quickly dismiss, but this is not the kind of doubt I want to address. I want to address the doubt that turns into a flood that threatens to overwhelm me, and it becomes impossible to hold on to my faith. I’ll give some examples of what I mean. There are times when changing who I am is so daunting that I think it is impossible for me to improve. There are times when things look so bleak that I cannot see how they can lead to a good end. There are times when something so good has passed that I can’t believe that anything in life can replace it. At the heart of all of these is the doubt that I can trust that the Lord is actually doing His part, or that there is really even a god at all.
In these situations, I want to have faith, but it is beyond my grasp, as if I have no choice in the matter. If I try to think of all the reasons to have faith, my mind counters every point with a reason to not have faith. If I try to make myself feel faith so strongly that I have no choice but to believe, it seems fake. What are we to do when we find ourselves in these situations, when faith does not even look like an option? First, I acknowledge that the Lord gets it. Swedenborg writes about how spiritual struggles can become so intense that God seems absent, so much so that it seems like God does not exist at all, even though God is more fully present than we can possibly believe (Arcana Caelestia 840). The Lord gets it that I don’t believe in Him, but He’s still right there with me. This may seem strange, but it is possible to find a vast amount of freedom during doubt through what we can acknowledge.
Everything that I am feeling may be telling me there is no God, there is no point, just give up, but I still have the freedom to speak and think what I want. In this I have the freedom to pray to God, to acknowledge before Him that I do not believe in Him, and then ask for help to get through the doubt. This does not remove my doubt or solve my problem. What it does do is allow me to look beyond my doubt, to persevere until a time when I can again fully experience the Lord’s presence.
Having acknowledged my doubts, the next step is to move towards faith. It is easy to see faith as something that is for other people, and which I just cannot have. Swedenborg addresses the despair of those who question whether they can ever achieve true faith: “I will tell him how he may have it: Shun evils as sins, and approach the Lord, and you will have as much as you desire” (Doctrine of Faith 12).
Notice he does not say that I can have faith if I figure out how to prove it, or if I convince myself that I should. It is by what I choose to do that I can have faith. If I put aside my selfish thoughts and actions, and do as the Lord directs, I will have faith. This is an amazing claim, and yet I have experienced it to be true. When I have put aside my inclination to ignore or mistreat people in those times of immense doubt, and then gone out of my way to serve them as the Lord wants, I have experienced faith in God that transcends my doubts. I am not saying it removes the feeling of doubt. But in those moments, I am free from doubt; it no longer controls me. Everything that I feel and think is telling me to not trust the Lord, yet I still freely choose to love the Lord above all else and to see the world around me with faith in Him. This choice can be painful, since it requires me to put aside what I want and to truly choose, without any proof, something higher than myself. Yet this choice also leads to a faith that can remain even in the worst of temptations and allow me to see the Lord’s love at all times. No doubt is so bad that it can remove our freedom.