Spelling Out Faith

Hi Everyone,

“Once upon a time, there was a Wrghting Wrghle at Whithworth. Sarah was going to go. She was very exyed.” Thus begins one of the many stories I wrote in my second grade journal, which my parents recently unearthed. As you may be able to decipher, I have always been excited by writing. Spelling, however, is not my forte. (“But at least you knew Welsh at a very early age,” my brother said in response to my attempt at phonetic spelling.) My parents were rather puzzled at this apparent gap in my otherwise unwavering academic passion. I remember them sitting me down and telling me I really needed to work on my spelling. They toyed with the idea of setting up a reward system for improved orthographic ability and I regret to this day that I didn’t capitalize on it. But they and my teachers were patient and realized that if I just kept writing, the spelling would come. They continued to foster this interest even while I was busy penning words and phrases so obviously misspelled that they would later become part of my family’s personal argot. Rather than errpting into anger or saying they were nerves about my ability to ever write proper English, they encouraged me to work on my wrghting by journaling, making stories, and even by going to rallies at Whitworth.

The movie Doubt (Thank heavens they didn’t put me in charge of spelling that!) starring Philip Seymour Hoffman and Meryl Streep, deals brilliantly with the way doubt can be either a vehicle for discovering the truth or a sledgehammer to the truth you’ve already had. The climax of the movie comes when Meryl Streep’s character, who until that point has been adamantly suspicious of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s moral integrity, confides to her fellow sister, “I HAVE DOUBT!” In my opinion, the seriousness of the film breaks down for a moment here due to the suddenness and intensity of this revelation.

The other day, my brother and I were talking about times in our lives when we’ve been scared. My most terrifying time came after my family and I went on Semester at Sea when I was 16, when what I’d seen and learned caused me to question for the first time the religion that I’d grown up with and which structured my life. Am I Christian simply because my parents are? I wondered. Are all religions simply the opiate of the masses, as Marx said? Does Christianity deal effectively with the question of suffering? Is it even possible to know ultimate truth? This was a definite “I HAVE DOUBT!” period in my life, and I’ll be eternally grateful to the people who listened patiently to me as I processed and fretted, and I’m not even an award winning actress!

Eventually, after running my mind around in circles, it began to dawn on me that I could never argue my way back to being a Christian and that in fact, this was the whole point of faith. Since then, I have learned to see faith as an activity rather than a possession you could lose or regain. A few weeks ago, I finished President Obama’s first book, Dreams From My Father. Before he became a Christian, churchgoing friends of his would ask him about his beliefs. “I would shrug and play the question off,” he says, “unable to confess that I could no longer distinguish between faith and mere folly, between faith and simple endurance.” I love this. It acknowledges that there are times when faith has very little to do with heartfelt belief and is more about just making it through the day. It acknowledges that there are times when believing in something bigger and better than us seems to be pure idiocy.

For several years after Semester at Sea, my faith felt featherlight. I would hear a comment or learn a fact in a class that would plunge me into a nauseating spasm of doubt. This faith which I’d fought so hard to win back seemed as fickle as a windsock, inflating only when the wind was strong enough.

After some time, though, things got better. The doubts remained, to be sure, but the anxious spiritual paralysis faded away. I learned to live with doubt. Last week, I wrote the following response to the Obama quote in my journal: So often, my senses seem to be telling me that they are all there is. But I keep going, despite what my belief-o-meter is telling me on a given day. I guess that’s partly because I know by now that I’ll “come around,” that give me a few days or even hours, and I could be singing a different tune. But I think it’s also partly because by now, I tend to see those periods or moments of doubt as essential to my faith. They’re the other side of the coin, the yang, the versa, the exhale. If I don’t have voices, including my own, that are expressing doubt at least semi-regularly, my faith becomes a monologue rather than a conversation.

I now see myself as a pendulum oscillating between doubt and belief and faith is the arc that this movement creates. I think faith is as hard as spelling. I’ll never be able to spell “privilege” on the first try, and I’ll never be able to prove definitively that God exists. But there is a strength that comes from endurance and in the end, knowing the Word is more important than spelling it.

Have a good week,
Sarah/Mouse