REFLECTIONS ON FAITH & LIFE FOR THE YEARS OF WINTER 

FAILING AT DOUBTING [R, 11-17-22]

 Going through old papers, I came across this page, handwritten, from 4-8-03. I think I was rather perceptive, considering how young I was. [66]

 I tried to doubt this morning, to sit at my end of the sofa and look out the window at the unpainted fence and the gray sky and the leafless tree and say, “There is no God.” It didn’t work. I ended up giggling; it just seemed so silly.

 The wellspring of doubt is not the absence of God but the absence of me. It is when I have become hidden under layers of isolation and addiction and busyness and selfishness and self-pity that I am able to doubt, because there is no me to believe. When there is so much ME there is no room for me.

 It is my existence that is really in question, not God’s. Jesus said that the one unforgivable sin is the sin against the Holy Spirit. That’s because when I refuse the Spirit, I refuse my own existence, for it’s the Spirit that gives life. And, like everyone else, I am a soul that has a body, not a body that has a soul.       

I spent the first part of my career preaching to doubts. Perhaps that was because I was on college campuses, where there is so much ME that there is no room for me, no one left to do faith. Later I began to realize I needed to preach to people’s faith, not their doubts. Preaching to doubt encourages us to believe that our spiritual life is about believing instead of faithing. I can be a believer, conquer doubts, but still have no me to do faith. Belief and faith are not the same thing.

When John Wesley expressed to Peter Bohler his inability to preach faith, because he had none, Bohler told him, “Preach faith until you have it.”

It is important for preachers to preach faith, in order to have it, but it is important for the rest of us to hear faith, in order to have it.

The less Me there is, the more me there is, to do faith.

John Robert McFarland