Beetles and Bibles:
Journeying Toward a Destination in Faith

After the last of our Lenten soup suppers, about a dozen of us sat down to discuss something  that seldom gets discussed in church, ours or others.  The topic: doubt, and its role in shaping belief.  It has certainly shaped mine, and I offer what follows in the hope that others will be willing to share their own experiences.
    I was raised a Roman Catholic, and in the Catholicism of that time there was no room for doubt.  Indeed, it was judged a defect that had to be corrected or the doubter was headed for the Bad Place.  This was first brought home to me by grim-lipped nuns on Wednesday afternoons, when we little papist public schoolers in the New York City system were packed off for a couple of hours of Religious Instruction.  The protestant kids didn’t have to go, which was all to the benefit of Protestantism.
    The God we learned about was a harsh and punishing God, a God of rules so numerous we could barely get our young minds around their expanse.  We not only had to contend with the ten commandments and the beatitudes, which seemed to me enough to cover pretty much all eventualities, but we also had to master the vast encrustations of doctrine and dogma that after nineteen centuries or so had weighed  down the church as a load of barnacles weigh down a ship.
    I wasn’t sure even then that I believed a lot of what I was told, and felt secretive and guilty about this doubt; I could not share it.  I knew only that I did believe, unshakably, in the great God of creation.  I didn’t get this from the nuns.  I got it from watching a Japanese beetle crawling around on a peony bud.
    This beetle, a pest back east, is a gorgeous insect, arrayed in black and white and burnished bronze.  I thought such beauty wonderful.  As I looked closely around me I saw more and more of it.  I saw how all of creation fit together in a vast harmony, and I knew in my child's heart that this was all too grand and intricate and marvelous to be an accident. Those who argue the existence of God in this way are pursuing what theologians call the Argument From Design.  It is an argument I still find utterly persuasive.
    Beyond the creator God, though, was a fog bank of doubt and uncertainty that in some way I still felt embarrassed to harbor.  I left the church as a young man and got married to Gay, a Methodist at the time.  We both wanted to join a church, I because it was the upright and respectable thing to do for a family man, and we gave the Episcopal Church a try.
    At our recent Wednesday night discussion, we were told about the stages of faith laid out by the Christian thinker and writer John Westerhoff.  The first stage, he
says, is the corporate. We are comfortable following along with the herd and not questioning much.  We may be active in the church, we may say all the right words, but our belief is a relatively shallow and untested one.  This is where I was at the time.
    Then, Westerhoff says, may come doubt, and a time of testing.  After this struggle, the participant emerges with what Westerhoff calls an “owned” faith.  The believer may not believe in everything those around him believe in.  He or she may even disbelieve some of it and remain uncertain about still more.  But what they do believe has been made rock solid by the testing, and they have learned that to be uncertain about other things is not only all right, but a normal condition.
    I am at this stage now, and at the age of seventy I figure to be in it for the rest of my life.  I have been in the church nearly fifty years, I’ve read the Harper Study Bible through, I’ve been to retreats and cursillos, I’ve wrestled with all sorts of questions of faith, and I still have many doubts and uncertainties.  The only difference now is that they are fewer than they used to be, and that I don’t expect to find all the answers emanating from the institutional church.
    If I have learned anything it is that the church is a thoroughly human institutions, with its eyes on the stars and its feet in the mud.  It can help in our struggle with doubt (though it often shies away from doing so), but it can never do the work for us.  That work is personal—though it certainly helps a to do some of it with a handful of others, in the parish hall of a little country church where it’s all right to say you have your doubts, you are uncertain.
            ~Bill Blundell