Believing. Horton Davies
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trying to avoid tackling a habit that I know ought to be dealt with? Intellectual doubts are often produced by moral failures. This is all part of the process of facing up to your doubts: “my unbelief.”
Doubts demand honesty. Doubts demand hard thinking. Doubts demand to be faced in the right attitude. The right way is to say: “We will hold to a thing until it is proved false; not, I will not believe a thing until it is proved true.”
I want to be as practical as I can and to suggest some thoughts that may help you to pray “lord, help my unbelief” with some sincerity.
Remember in the first place, even if you doubt some things, there are others you can be quite certain of. Some people say rather loosely that they don’t believe in anything any longer. I quote the words of the Reverend Leslie Tizard:
Something has gone up in smoke somewhere, and the pall is hanging over everything. So they assume that the whole structure of faith is going to pieces in the ruins, whereas, if they took the trouble to look into the matter, they would find that although a part of the building is in flames, the rest is sound enough, at the worst, a little blackened and salvable.
If doubt, that shadow, crosses the sunlight of your faith, it’s a very useful thing to sit down, take out pencil and paper; then write down all that you have to thank God for. Remember everything beautiful you have seen: in art galleries, out in the fields or by the sea, in books, in theatres or in picture houses. Put down also all the kindnesses, the unexpected favors you have received, all the examples of bravery and goodliness you have come across. You will find that by this time, you have exhausted all the spare paper in the house and burnt your cooking or missed a train. The moral of this is: there is so much to be thankful for. You had forgotten it before, because you were looking at the world with dark spectacles. Once you took them off and looked back down the vistas of your memory, you saw the truth in perspective. These things of beauty were real experiences and no amount of evil in the world can deny them.
If the problem of evil demands that you banish God from the world of your thought, the problem of good will just as easily demand that you bring him back in order to explain that.
Secondly our faith needs fellowship to sustain it. It is wise to remember that our faith is very much at the mercy of our moods; even the most muscular and robust Christians sometimes lose faith in God when they are passing through a sorrow that seems hard to bear. And when doubt bandages your eyes, it is wise to remember that there are others who can see the brightness. It is good to know that if the sun has gone out for us, there are still others who can see its resplendent radiance. And of course, we gather in church, not only to meet with others who have a radiant confidence in God, but we meet for fellowship with the ever-living son of God. That is the chief source of faith.
The father of the epileptic boy cried: “Lord, I believe,” of that much we are certain. He could trust Jesus. Consider all the shadows that crossed our Savior’s life: poverty, disappointment, loneliness (at one time even desertion by God), suffering, death. What a series of darknesses! But he could trust. Fellowship with him in the darkness will bring back our faith. Remember:
Christ leads me through no darker rooms
Than he went through before;
He that into God’s kingdom comes
Must enter by this door.
My last word is: prove your faith in action: Whilst Jesus told his disciples to believe in him, his other word was “Follow me.” When we are in a mood that makes religion seem hopelessly unreal, it is very useful to do some quite simple act which takes us out of ourselves. What it is does not much matter: going to see someone who is lonely; taking a handful of flowers to someone who is ill; reading to an invalid; looking after the children while a harassed mother goes out shopping; digging a neighbor’s garden. Indeed, anyone of the thousand little acts of human kindness will do. If we go out determined that we shall not return until we have done something for somebody, the world and everything in it will look different when we return.
Let me just repeat the stages of the journey by which you can defeat doubt. First, face them honestly. Secondly, ask yourself whether your doubts are not a defense you are putting up to save the necessity of obeying God’s call. Thirdly, write down all the beautiful experiences you have been through and all the kindnesses you have received. Fourthly, when your eyes are bandaged, meet with others whose eyes are open and especially meditate on the Light of the Word and remember the shadows of life. Then, leave introspection and go out to prove the reality of goodness by your own sympathetic action.
And pray at all times: “Lord I believe.” Thank God for all you can believe; and pray humbly as one who wishes to receive further light: “Help my unbelief.”
a victorious faith: conquering skepticism
G.K. Chesterton once said: “An age chooses as its saint the man who contradicts it most.”
This was by way of arguing that the industrialists of the Victorian age who had covered England and America with their “dark Satanic mills” were attracted by Francis, the lover of Nature, who sang of Brother Sun; that those who rapaciously grasped only for prosperity and more prosperity were strangely attracted to God’s little poor man who founded an order dedicated to poverty and simplicity. By the same token our age has accorded the highest respect to Albert Schweitzer. In an age of specialism, he combines brilliance in music, medicine, with the single dedication to lifting the life of the humblest of humanity, the African. We are attracted by what contradicts us most. But this is only half the truth.
The other half is that we are condemned by what contradicts us most. St. Francis, Dr. Schweitzer, and supremely their Lord and ours, shame us, humble us, and reveal the easy compromises and complacencies that hitherto satisfied us. A bland poet cried: “We needs must love the highest when we see it.” But they crucified the highest when they saw him.
If there are saints that fascinate and contradict us, there are also saints that seem nearer to us, more like us, who mirror our problems: lesser saints who can lead us to the higher saints, and to the King of Saints, Christ. Such is Doubting Thomas; for, as we look at him, we see ourselves. I do not think that any age has had to contend with such religious difficulties as our own: I do not think any of the Christian centuries needs Thomas as badly as we do. The tremendous and rightful advance of the natural sciences, and the applications of the techniques of natural science to the social sciences, have made faith another word for credulity and love only the crude satisfaction of a biological need. “Take nothing on trust” say our new masters the scientists; it is the refusal to accept old hypotheses and the demand for demonstrative proof that brought progress through Newton and through Einstein. It is the very spirit of Thomas. “This theory of the Resurrection of my crucified leader is all very well” he might say say in our language, “but I want visual proof, and tactile demonstration. Let me just put my finger in the wounds and the nail-prints to be sure that this is really Jesus. I want reality, not rumor.” That is the scientific spirit. And that is why for a scientific time, faith is so very difficult.
Of course there are many answers to this problem, which I can only mention in passing.
(1) The scientist also has his faith, his underlying unproven and unprovable assumptions to his entire enterprise. He assumes the rationality of the universe, that his mind and other human minds are part of the order which he finds in the world, and which alone make his descriptions and predictions and experiments possible. This might be a uniform illusion; it might equally be truth. There’s no way of proving or disproving it. It has to be assumed. That is faith.
(2) Secondly, I might point out that the scientist accepts as true and important aspects of reality factors in our human life which cannot be measured in any accurate quantitative way. Take the very quest for knowledge: for some it is a raging, unquenchable thirst; for others it is a merely nominal thing. There is no index of the thirst for knowledge. Take those emotions that play such a large part in our life: love and hate, anxiety and assurance. Love ranges from the sheer Himalayan heights of the Incarnation where sacrifice flings itself down for the utterly undeserving’s sake, to the wallowing pig’s trough of lust, with some many intermediate stages. Hate ranges