Rev. David J. Wood, Glencoe Union Church
I love the fact that Writers Theatre is performing a play in our church building. The intrinsic connection between spirituality and the arts has a long and important history.
We here at Glencoe Union Church feel privileged to play our part. That the play being performed is Doubt: A Parable is all the more gratifying.
For too long, over too many church doors, it was as if a sign had been hung saying (to adapt Dante), “Abandon doubt all ye who enter here.” However, these days it’s almost impossible to enter any mainline Protestant congregation (the faith community I am most familiar with) and not hear doubt affirmed, if not celebrated. At a minimum, doubt is acknowledged as natural to the human condition and not, in and of itself, injurious to faith or belief. As one popular Christian writer quipped, “Doubts are the ants in the pants of faith. They keep it awake and moving.”
One of the icons of the life of faith in the 20th Century was Mother Teresa of Calcultta. To the surprise of many and to the comfort of many more, her journals published after her death revealed a life of struggle with her faith in God — a struggle in which doubts were real and enduring. I know of no more solid proof that the presence of doubt need not undermine one’s courage or convictions.
Another of my favorite authors in recent years is the poet, Christian Wiman — former editor of the Chicago-based Poetry magazine. In his wonderful book, My Bright Abyss: Meditations of a Modern Believer, he writes about “honest doubt.” “Honest doubt, what I would call devotional doubt, is marked, it seems to me, by three qualities: humility, which makes one’s attitude impossible to celebrate; insufficiency, which makes it impossible to rest; and mystery, which continues to tug you upward — or at least outward — even in your lowest moments.”
I think Wiman gets it just right.
The play is titled Doubt: A Parable. According to the Bible, Jesus spoke often in parables. In one of his briefer parables, he spoke of faith as being the size of a tiny mustard seed. Perhaps doubt is not the negation of faith but the soil in which it is cultivated. ■
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