It's Doubt Week!

It’s Doubt Week! 

What, you don’t believe me? 

GOOD!  You’re getting into it already.  But since you so wisely doubt that this is Doubt Week, here’s my evidence.  The Revised Common Lectionary is used, believe it or not, by all Catholic and many Protestant churches to walk their congregations through the richest Scripture on a three year cycle.  Each of these years follows the life of Christ from Advent (the coming of Christ) through his birth, public life, crucifixion and death, and rising from the dead (now) and showing up repeatedly until he physically ascends to the Father, leaving us the Spirit.  

The Lectionary guides us through this one-year cycle three different ways, with three different sets of readings (Hebrew Scriptures & Psalms, New Testament letters and Gospels) to give us varying angles on the same basic truth and issues. 

But Doubt Week is celebrated best during Year A (the first if those three cycles) because this year we use John’s Gospel, which is more poetic, long on imagination and short on detail.  And the particular Gospel reading for Easter morning is one that ends, well, let’s say inconclusively.  It’s kind of like a teaser for a mystery show – just enough to make you wonder, to disquiet you and make you want to find out.  John 20:1-9   leaves us lots of room for doubt.

The doubt – what happened to the body, did Jesus really rise, as the Scriptures promised – is put to rest in this coming Sunday’s Gospel  when Jesus shows up in dramatic fashion, appearing to his hiding disciples, and returning later for “Doubting Thomas”. 

Didn’t you feel a bit like Thomas?  Don’t you?  The fact that this week exists, allowing us to stew in our doubt, is for me a validation of doubt as an appropriate Christian response, soil broken and barren and waiting for seed to be planted.  If we hide from our doubt, our attempts at faith will be a sham.

Take time today to sit with your doubt.  It’s a gift.

Entertaining Doubt

Waddyathink?  Did Jesus rise from the dead?  Too flippant a way of asking the question?  How dare one even ask; people have been burned at the stake for even speaking of such…DOUBT.

Some walk right past the tomb, never entering.  Mystery has a way of troubling us, so most of our society doesn’t even spend time thinking about this.  For them, Easter is about clothing sales and candy.  But those of us who have listened to the story of the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth from the tomb, I think of three ways of living with it.

Faith

Some consider it true and live believing, considering the resurrection a tenet of their faith, something that makes them who they are.  I can’t write much about this without study; I’m not one of these.  I think of the Crusades, of the holocaust, of ways this kind of certainty can decompose into dehumanizing exclusiveness and elitism.  The image above of Meryl Steep in the Film Doubt reminds us of this example of the devil in certainty.  

Hope

I suspect that many apparently untroubled by doubt might more honestly rely on hope.  Accepting unknowing and uncertainty, a lot of us, if we were to speak honestly, consider the resurrection a possibility, and perhaps even long for it to be true.  Or we might long for what seems to us to be an untroubled, unquestioning faith.

Love

Some who have entered the tomb have walked so far away from it or are so wearied by considering its truth choose not even to spend time thinking about it.  The pious believers might consider them heathens.  But these, and I know so many of them, who spend no time considering the validity of such dogma, occupy their lime by simply loving.

Struggling with Dogma and Doubt can distract us from loving lives lived in real moments.  On the other hand, letting in the twilight of mystery can guide us in uncertain steps of toddlers’ feet to the truth that resides in our humanity, in our deepest center of meaning.

I pray not that we invite Jesus into our hearts these days after Easter, but that we entertain doubt.  

It’s in season.  All that Jesus does in Scripture these next weeks helps us to respect the truth of this so that we may step beyond it in a direction toward our truth, our best reckoning of Truth that is God.  And that God is Love.

Dogma Or Mystery...YOU Decide.

Does He really rise?  Was He even really the Son of God?  During this week, I hope we all face this, this unknowing.  As soon as I had typed these two questions, I heard in my mind the howls of dogmatic Catholics calling me an infidel for even questioning these beliefs.  But in asking the question, I show the very faith they might argue against.

Faith is belief in the thing not known.  We don’t have faith that all points on a circle are equidistant from the center; we know (at least those of us who know geometry.)  We don’t have faith that two plus two equals four; we know.

But the gift of this mystery of the death and rising of the Son of God is something that, like love, we can fall into, something that we can allow to submerge us, to embrace us, a cloud into which we can enter.  Karen Armstrong says that the gift of mystery (like the Trinity – three persons in one God) is that it does not make sense, and so it calls us to abandon thinking.  To sit with mystery is difficult, because we want to figure it out.  Figuring things out is important to us.  We figure out what is good to eat, what is safe to give our kids, how to get to work safely, all so that we survive.  To stop and not think is contrary to our learned survival instincts.

How do we handle mystery (or more accurately, how do we let mystery handle us?)  Armstrong suggests three things: prayer, ritual, and charitable acts. 

• Prayer is the practice of the presence of God.  It is not logical or didactic.  It does not make sense.  Like meditation and contemplation, it slows us down, allows us to let go of our attachments, and our body responds with what we call peace but is perhaps a homecoming, and arrival at the place that gave us birth.
• Ritual – it’s really over the top during Holy Week, appropriate to the over-the-top mystery that we’re encountered by, the death and resurrection of the Son of God.  “Smells and Bells”.  Watch kids at a parade.  They’re all eyes and ears.  They’re taking it all in.  They are unaware of hunger, of cold, and even the presence of their parents.  They are taken by the spectacle.  So fancy vestments and clouds of incense and extra-melodic song and the repetition of verse and litany and jeweled monstrance…help us to forget taxes and mortgages and even pains and worries.  While we find it hard to stop, ritual replaces all that we do, and all of it stops.
• Charitable acts bring us to another place that makes no sense – another human face.  Isn’t every person honestly encountered a mystery?  Doesn’t the “homeless person” become so much more when we stand and really look at him…and so much more like us?  Thomas Merton’s encounter with the “bag lady” on the streets of Cincinnati changed his life, and all of us in the circle of his light.

Prayer, ritual, and charitable acts take us outside ourselves, beyond the constraints we put on ourselves.  We are like the Samaritan Woman understanding, the blind man seeing, and Lazarus walking out of his tomb.