Over the next few weeks, writers Michael Lecy and Sarah Southern will collaborate and mutually share four essays reflecting on various aspect of spiritual deconstruction. We hope these contemplative and thoughtful pieces will encourage and resonate with our many readers across the deconstruction spectrum.
I was taught that doubt would be the death of me, and in the end…it’s the only reason I have any kind of spiritual life at all.
Like a slippery shadow of undoing and fear that would become the fist signs of my death, doubt was and is often treated like a cancer to the traditional christian/evangelical mind.
I want to propose to you the startling opposite.
What if not doubting was the actual death?
Here is the great secret….
Doubt is just another name for curiosity
Though these two things are barely ever correlated or connected, it is what I have found to be most true.
I am more curious than ever, and it is because I listened to what doubt had to tell me.
Perhaps doubt is the doorway or the threshold we must pass through to enter the unknown land where the river of curiosity flows.
A threshold that if we cross or are pushed through we may just find ourselves in the middle of the divine mystery… exactly the way we’ve always longed to be.
I have come to find this to be true;
Doubt is a journey that liberates us into the wild and beautiful terrain of curiosity and what many don’t realize is that a desperate need for certainty is often the thing that insidiously suffocates our spiritual lives and yet we are conditioned to believe we desperately need.
Its no fun when things don’t make sense and not having a good answer can be more than embarrassing in the 5th grade, it can spiral you to laying in bed for days with no hope for getting up anytime soon.
The observation I have made is that fear of doubt slides into our religious systems and communities through words like assurance and certainty.
Now let me be clear, I would never send anyone on a journey that generates insecurity but I would never want someone feeling falsely secure or tethered to a millstone that sinks them to the bottom of an ocean either.
Doubt is a doorway that you step through and breathe in the liberating and, albeit frightening, air of discovery.
Your compass has a north star not of knowing more, but swims in the comfort of not needing everything to fit inside a neat little box.
This discovery can be startling because in every way possible, at least for me, I have not found that I am more sure of anything other than love.
And there are times where I run feeling wild and free in this new wilderness, where I find that there's an abundance to discover. Not an abundance of answers or some sort of recognition of things that make life simpler, but my discovery puts me in a place where I feel more free to not know anything as certainly as I used to or need to.
I have also found that I am not always alone in this journey. But that the altars and markings on the wilderness I am in were left behind by the saints and mystics of spiritual traditions and especially the early and buried roots of the Christian faith.
You will find that they were keenly aware of the mystery of the Divine and our need to remove the shroud of being certain. Yet they each seemed so open to God being God and God-ing in ways that made even our early church mothers and fathers uncomfortable.
What held them in that tension of unknowing seemed to be an awareness of the mysterious ground that they placed their feet upon. It was Holy….
I want to be honest with you though, while you will have the ancestors of curiosity showing you the way, don’t be surprised if you end up often alone on most of the long stretches of curiosity land. This friendship with doubt often comes with a scarlet letter, not to other spiritual seekers… to them you carry a torch, but to those who hold their orthodox tightly around them like a scarf—your presence is the cutting cold wind they need protection against.
Your willingness to embrace the idea that maybe things don't make as much sense as everyone used to claim they did when you were younger or before you were wounded frightens most others who prefer to feel safe and certain.
They cling harder to their need to know and their frames of belief.
I think it's because you are offering them a liberation that they're not ready for.
The fight is to not succumb to being judgmental or frustrated, but to empathize and remember the days when you were like them too.
The knock at the door is not one they are quite able to answer and we must not blame them.
Like a character in a fairytale that transforms, when I first saw doubt, it frightened me too.
I told it I wasn’t home and had no plans to do anything but stay right where I was.
Gently though, and with a firm push like Gandalf, doubt did not stop until it was leading me out of my hobbit hole and onto a road of unknown adventure.
This journey is one I never knew I needed and has become a wild land I had no idea could sustain me as well as it does.
We are never given permission to step in and through doubt. So we go for years or even a lifetime without tasting the water of curiosity.
You are your own permission granter. You are the push through the threshold and the hand that must answer doubts that knock on your door.
Give yourself permission, invite the truth that you cannot be as certain as the familiar frames or religious institutions try to convince you we can be.
Come home to the childlike bliss of not needing the answers and not knowing them, of reintroducing yourself to the questions you used to ask all the time when you were four or five
Why or what?
What is this wild world we live in? Why is this confusing suffering here? Who is this God that so many people claim to understand?
That is what doubt offers you…. a journey back to a childlike wonder where you step into wardrobes, where you take off with no map and a compass that requires you to relearn your old instincts to interpret its odd markings.
Rest in the tension (which is meant to sound strange) that we don't know what we think we know and that we aren't as sure as we would like to believe.
Be free.
Michael Lecy is a storyteller and writer who loves to help others ask questions and discover life after harmful religious frameworks and systems. He is currently an LMFT in training and host of the “A Certain Wandering” Podcast.
This post was a medicine for me... So potent and rich. It speaks to what I've been mulling over lately, that sense of not needing to know and maybe the answers aren't meant to be found. Maybe the healing is in bravely asking the question. Thank you thank you thank you for sharing, it brought me to tears.