PENULTIMATE TRUTH Doubt as Spiritual Practice
James Ishmael Ford
11 June 2006

Text
Truth comes in small installments.
Seldom does it break forth in fullness
upon a darkened world.
Revelation is not a once-for-all disclosure:
it is the product of long,
laborious and often spurned discovery.
It is found by philosophers, scientists, home makers,
and just anyone who lives a thoughtful life.
Truths are ever building and built upon:
As fallen leaves form new soil,
truths of former seasons become
the compost that sprouts the new growth.
Truths make their way on an unmarked course
through the wilderness of ancient error.
Their encounter is with imposing authorities
and the hobgoblins of distrust and fear.
Dogmas of yesterday become the doubted
notions of today,
revered orthodoxies of the past the
rejected fables of the present.
We do well to cherish our meager wisdom,
and hopefully await a deeper
understanding.
For truth comes to earth in small installments.

Clinton Lee Scott’s “Revelation” in Promise of Spring

A half dozen years ago, well, truthfully a tad beyond that, while I was serving our UU congregation in Chandler, Arizona, I was, frankly, surprised when our Coming of Age youth, it was a beginning program and included anyone from High School who was interested, began their Sunday celebration at the end of the program by quoting a UU minister who claimed a cardinal mark of our liberal faith was that we can “believe anything we want.” Not only surprised, I was mildly offended as I consider this oft quoted assertion to be a misunderstanding. Nor, I felt, was it what we were teaching in our Religious Education program.

I was even more surprised when they went on to suggest that while our radical freedom, our non-creedalism might look like we’re saying anything goes, in fact it is about something else. Great kids. Today I want to explore that something else as we engage the beautiful, terrible, and frankly occasionally horrifying questions that rise out of relentless honesty, out of an authentically engaged spirituality – which is, I suggest, what we’re really about here.

I suspect just about everyone in this hall has heard the old joke that if a UU came upon a fork in the road with two signs pointing in the two directions, one reading “to Heaven” and the other “to a really good conversation about Heaven,” that a UU would just about always go for the conversation. I suggest one reason the joke has been told so often for so long is that it actually speaks to something about us. Today I want to explore a faith that is dynamic and open, that is predicated upon constant inquiry. A faith, I suggest, that we can know what we need to know to live wholesome lives. But, also, a faith that has few, perhaps no sealed revelations.

Our way is one of relentless inquiry. Our path demands we take the brains we were given and put them to good use. Our way, I assert, is about radical humility, about not-knowing, about constant opening to our own hearts and to the heart of the world. Today I want to throw all the facets of this form of inquiry – dynamic, open, humble, not-knowing - into one word “doubt,” and hold up that doubt as our cardinal spiritual tool, our principal spiritual practice.

Doubt isn’t given a lot of attention in Western spirituality. Of course it rises from time to time. One of my favorites in the Christian scriptures is where after Jesus’s death and apparent resurrection one of the apostles, Thomas, speaks of his need to actually sink his fingers into the wounds before he would believe. While the scriptural account uses this story to put Thomas into his place I have to admit I love that challenge to blind faith and consider Thomas as my spiritual ancestor, indeed as our liberal spiritual way’s particular saint. As an aside I am more than a little pleased Thomas is considered the founder of far, far Eastern Christianity, having by tradition traveled to India, and from there his disciples having introduced their version of the faith to ancient China as what was called there the “religion of the Lovely, or by preferred translation, the Beautiful God.”

Okay, back to our reflection about “doubt.” Today I want to consider the possibility of doubt as a cardinal spiritual mark; and beyond that, as a distinctive aspect of our shared Unitarian Universalist spirituality. One of my spiritual guides the poet Ranier Maria Rilke wrote “Try to love the questions themselves … Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them…. At present you need to live the question. (Do that and) Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer….”

Here I feel we find much of our, if not unique, certainly our uniquely expressed spiritual discipline. I want to take the remainder of our time together to unpack what this way of doubt might look like. In my experience whenever we take up a spiritual discipline among the first difficulties we encounter are what are called the “near enemies.” Near enemies are counterfeits, they look a little or even a lot like the genuine article, but are not. For instance, our path is predicated upon freedom. One near enemy of freedom is that assertion “you can believe anything you want.” Here everything about freedom drains away, the power inherent in knowing we have a choice in the matter dissipates into “whatever.”

Among the near enemies of doubt as a spiritual practice are credulity, relativism, cynicism and arrogance. Let me unpack these dead ends on the spiritual quest, just briefly. First credulity. I recall reading an historian of modern occultism who described an early twentieth century figure, an Anglican priest who was also a later-day alchemist. The historian said of the old priest how it appeared he would consider anything, so long as it was sufficiently unlikely. The world is full of assertions. The spiritual world is rife with them. Do you need to entertain all of them if you want to follow a path of honest inquiry? I suggest the answer to this is no.

It is possible to have your mind so open that your brain is in danger of falling out. Not only is it okay to make some preliminary sorts about one spiritual thing or another, it is imperative one do so. You can’t follow every path; at best we have a little more than a hundred years in a lifetime. I suggest we don’t waste that time. Questions such as ghosts or past lives might be interesting, but are they really about our deepest needs, our longing for healing and reconciliation? Do you need to know if there really was an Atlantis or if there is such a thing as telepathy to heal the heart to find who you really are? Perhaps such questions burn hot for you. If so then take them on as scientific inquiry but not as matters of spiritual quest.

I suspect the greatest danger on the spiritual path of doubt is relativism. Here is that “you can believe anything you want” as fool’s gold. Is every thought really equal to another? It seems unlikely. My standard riposte to a non-UU saying our religion is “you can believe anything you want” is no, that’s a statement about orthodox religions which require people by an act of will to believe amazingly unlikely assertions about reality. Something like that would, I suggest, be “believing anything you want.” Rather, in those moments of quasi or semi hostility I say what we’re about is questioning and questioning and coming to believe within that process, not what we want, but rather what we must. But in some sense that’s a polemic, a defensive measure.

The real deal isn’t that everything is equal, but rather we only can know so much. We’ve birthed into this cosmos with six amazing senses: we can touch, we can see, we can taste, we can smell, we can hear, and we can sort this information. These sources of information are limited. We know there are ranges beyond which our senses can detect in every one of these areas. But, it turns out they are enough for us to survive for up to a hundred years or so. And we die, not because our senses fail us, but because our bodies seem only to last so long. The good news is along this way our senses allow us to know enough to find that joy and healing which is the hallmark of an authentic spiritual way.

Similar to relativism, another false step is cynicism. This is just giving up. This is saying “so what?” Frankly, it’s an easy out. We look at the pain of the world, we know in some sense or another we can’t, any one of us, do a lot to turn the world from hurtful, frankly even evil actions. The falseness of this stance, I believe, is how it is a surrender to personal ego, to a shrunken view of the world as nothing more than my little, and relatively powerless, corner. The truth is we do not end at our skins. And as we pursue this path of questioning we come to know that in ever greater ways. To stop with a noticing that things are not right is to stifle the human spirit, and our own possibility.

I suspect of all the near enemies of doubt as a spiritual way, arrogance is the most dangerous. Institutionally it seems a fall-back stance for the religious liberal. “Those others are benighted, wallowing in foolishness.” But to really hold this position is to fall into the chasm of arrogance, of, if not exactly thinking it, feeling we’ve done our job while those others have not. Frankly, I think the general analysis of liberal religion is more accurate than that of the various orthodoxies. But to allow myself to stop there, or to not hear a lesson that may come from an unlikely source, is to cut myself off, from other people, from the world itself. This is so easy, and so deadly.

So, the question becomes how to avoid these traps, how do we make this way of doubt authentic and living? I suggest there are any number of marks of an authentic spirituality of this sort, our way of spiritual doubt. For the limited time we have left today, I’d like to briefly address four: agnosticism, humility, curiosity and love.

First agnosticism. It’s really interesting how this word has mutated in the last hundred and fifty years or so since it was coined by Thomas Huxley. Today it tends to mean “I don’t know and I don’t care.” But when Huxley coined it, it meant “I don’t know, and I care passionately.” Here we are invited to something powerful and potentially transformative for ourselves and the world.

But it takes humility. When we say “I don’t know,” we are making a deep assertion. We are suggesting not only that we don’t know, but that we want to, that we are on a path of discovery. Shunryu Suzuki advised us to follow a path of “beginner’s mind.” He suggested while for an expert there were few possibilities, for a beginner there were many, the world is wide open. This is the mind of humility, ready to learn, ready to be transformed. So, ultimately this path of doubt is a path of humility. If I don’t know, if you don’t know, then we need to be willing to learn. We need to open our hearts and minds, and let the world teach us.

Ultimately this is all about curiosity. I want to know. I suspect you do, too. This is why we come into a place like our Society here. We are on a sacred quest, to know and to heal to find the joy the wise tell us is our common inheritance. This is something precious and the great gift, I believe, of our human condition.

In the last analysis this is informed, I suspect, by our great human sense of love. Love, I believe, is about connection, about seeing we really don’t end at our skins. It is the great secret of the cosmos, and the possibility of joy and healing, that profound discovery at the heart of the way of doubt.

And that, my friends, is what I believe we’re really about here.

Amen.