Considering Faith and Doubt

"We either feed fear or love."
- Iyanla Vanzant

---

"The opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty. Certainty is missing the point entirely. Faith includes noticing the mess, the emptiness and discomfort, and letting it be there until some light returns. Faith also means reaching deeply within, for the sense one was born with, the sense, for example, to go for a walk.”

- Anne Lamott, Plan B:  Further Thoughts on Faith

---

"When he started out his ministry, Jesus proclaimed eight beatitudes, blessed are the patient, blessed are the merciful, blessed are the peacemakers, and so on.  And now, at the end of his earthly ministry, Jesus proclaims a last beatitude, blessed are those who haven’t seen, and believe all the same.  Because of Thomas’ doubt Jesus appeared a second time in the upper room. Thomas should have capitulated to the account of his companions.  He had been a firsthand witness to Jesus’ life, teachings and miracles of healing.   Yet … some pride, some willful obstinacy, some chagrin, perhaps, at having been left out of an experience granted to the rest, Thomas withheld his assent until he could verify for himself.
 
Jesus doesn’t complain or find fault … he looks toward the future and the centuries of people who would have no opportunity to see for themselves, but still believed.  Jesus was fond of paradox.  Jesus knew that seekers must find their own way … through all their own idiosyncrasies."

- Ronald Knox, Benedictine Office of Readings

---

“Invariably the failure of organized religions, by which they cut themselves off from mystery and therefore from sanctity, lies in the absolute division between faith and doubt, to make belief perform as knowledge; when they forbid their prophets to go into the wilderness, they lose the possibility of renewal.  And the most dangerous tendency in modern society, now rapidly emerging as a scientific-industrial ambition, is the tendency toward encapsulation of human order – the severance, once and for all, of the umbilical cord fastening us to the wilderness or the Creation.  The threat is not only in the totalitarian desire for absolute control.  It lies in the willingness to ignore an essential paradox:  the natural forces that so threaten us are the same forces that preserve and renew us.”

- Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace

---

“These two cognitive twins (right-brain and left-brain) are not equal.  Language is extremely powerful, and the left hemisphere does not easily share its dominance with its silent partner.  The left hemisphere deals with an explicit world, where things are named and counted, where time is kept, and step-by-step plans remove uncertainty from the future.  The right hemisphere exists in the moment, in a timeless, implicit world, where things are buried in context, and complicated outlooks are constantly changing.  Impatient with the right hemisphere’s view of the complex whole, the competitive left hemisphere tends to jump quickly into a task, bringing language to bear, even though it may be unsuited to that particular task.”

-Betty Edward, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain