Sydow wrestling with doubt in "The Seventh Seal"
Spiritual Sunday
Last Sunday I wrote about ways in which The Book of Job can console those who are suffering. A couple of readers responded, including Kelsey, a recent convert to Christianity. She noted that she has always had difficulty with Job and wondered whether she could continue to say that “to live is Christ, to die is gain” if she were confronted with Job’s adversity. It’s a tough question.
I think of novelist Anne Lamott’s query, “What is the opposite of faith?” The answer is not “doubt,” she says, but rather “certainty.” Of course we would like to banish all doubt, but certainty is denied us because we are not robots but humans. Even Jesus had moments of doubt, in Gethsemane and on the cross. Faith, as I see it, is a framework through which we look for meaning in the world, including meaning in our suffering. We may have different words for this faith—in her response to the Job post novelist Rachel Kranz used the word “integrity, which is to say being true to your best self—but I think that it all comes down to the same thing. ”God” is the label we attach to our inner divinity or higher self.
My favorite religious poet tackles the questions of faith and doubt head on. George Herbert’s “Affliction (I)” was recently brought to my attention by Erica Wharry, a student who used it to wrestle with her own roller coaster relationship with faith. As always, Herbert is never afraid to challenge God. The truth is so important to him that he will not settle for answers meant only to placate.
In the first three and a half stanzas, he talks about how easy it was to believe in God when times were good. Herbert may have in mind the figure of Satan in Job, who notes that of course Job is faithful when he has family, friends, health and wealth. As Herbert describes it, all was well for a while in his life also. However, you will see a “but” intruding in the fourth stanza as his fortunes start to turn:
Affliction (I)
By George Herbert
WHEN first Thou didst entice to Thee my heart,
I thought the service brave :
So many joys I writ down for my part,
Besides what I might have
Out of my stock of natural delights,
Augmented with Thy gracious benefits.
I lookèd on Thy furniture so fine,
And made it fine to me ;
Thy glorious household stuff did me entwine,
And ‘tice me unto Thee.
Such stars I counted mine: both heaven and earth
Paid me my wages in a world of mirth.
What pleasures could I want, whose King I served,
Where joys my fellows were ?
Thus argued into hopes, my thoughts reserved
No place for grief or fear;
Therefore my sudden soul caught at the place,
And made her youth and fierceness seek Thy face:
At first thou gavest me milk and sweetnesses;
I had my wish and way:
My days were strewed with flowers and happiness:
There was no month but May.
But with my years sorrow did twist and grow,
And made a party unawares for woe.
The sorrows that Herbert now goes on to describe involve first his own sickness and then, when he recovers, the death of friends. Feeling like a blunted knife, he loses his “mirth and edge” and is “blown through” with harsh mood swings:
My flesh began unto my soul in pain,
Sicknesses clave my bones,
Consuming agues dwell in every vein,
And tune my breath to groans,
Sorrow was all my soul ; I scarce believed,
Till grief did tell me roundly, that I lived.
When I got health, Thou took’st away my life—
And more ; for my friends die:
My mirth and edge was lost: a blunted knife
Was of more use than I.
Thus, thin and lean, without a fence or friend,
I was blown through with every storm and wind.
Herbert also wrestles with career disappointments. By birth and spirit he should be a figure of some renown in London, but instead he is cooped up in a university, betrayed to a “lingering book” and wrapped in an academic gown. (Hey, it sounds good to me—but then I’m not the genius that Herbert was.) And when he is tempted to leave (“the siege to raise”), the academic world lures him back with praise:
Whereas my birth and spirit rather took
The way that takes the town,
Thou didst betray me to a lingering book,
And wrap me in a gown.
I was entangled in the world of strife,
Before I had the power to change my life.
Yet, for I threatened oft the siege to raise,
Not simpering all mine age,
Thou often didst with academic praise
Melt and dissolve my rage.
I took thy sweetened pill, till I came near;
I could nor go away, nor persevere.
And then, when it looks as though he will adjust to this life (“too happy be in my unhappiness”), God makes him sick again:
Yet, lest perchance I should too happy be
In my unhappiness,
Turning my purge to food, Thou throwest me
Into more sicknesses.
Thus doth Thy power cross-bias me, not making
Thine own gift good, yet me from my ways taking.
Herbert doesn’t know where he stands now and complains that his books won’t show him. He dreams of being a tree—if one could mindlessly follow God’s plan, one would know for certain that one was of some use to the world and all doubts would be banished. He longs for certainty:
Now I am here, what thou wilt do with me
None of my books will show:
I read, and sigh, and wish I were a tree—
For sure, then, I should grow
To fruit or shade; at least, some bird would trust
Her household to me, and I should be just.
But because he is human—like Kelsey and Rachel and me and all of us—he beats against the big questions. He knows he should be meek in the face of trouble and strong when he is weak, but he chafes at his situation. Maybe, he defiantly tells God, he will go serve another master. The conclusion of his poem is powerful but ambiguous:
Yet, though Thou troublest me, I must be meek;
In weakness must be stout:
Well, I will change the service, and go seek
Some other master out.
Ah, my dear God! though I am clean forgot,
Let me not love Thee, if I love Thee not.
In some ways, he sounds like a five-year-old threatening to run away from his mother. As I read the last two lines, he is acknowledging that, deep down, he has no choice but to love God. Or to put the situation in Rachel’s terms, he has no choice but to live a life of integrity. “I am complaining about you so doesn’t that mean I don’t love you?” I hear him desperately asking God. But in fact he does love God. He is grounded in his highest self.
None of this makes his life easy. But as with all of us who care, it makes his life worthwhile.
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4 Comments
I actually hear him WISHING he didn’t love God, because life would be so much easier if he could serve some “other” master. “Please, God,” he says. “Since I don’t love you anyway, don’t you think I could REALLY not love you? WOuldn’t you LET me not love you, since I don’t anyway?”
But then, as you say, he knows he is beaten. Even if he doesn’t love God, he is stuck loving Him. Even if he WISHES to serve some other master, he is stuck loving God. Even if loving God doesn’t save him from all the ills he speaks of–the loss of friends, the loss of health, the blunted career, the doubts about his own usefulness (and, probably, the resentment at the usefulness he knows he has–as a tree, he would be happy to be of simple use; as a man, he wishes for something more)–even if loving God doesn’t save him from all that, he is stuck loving Him anyway. “Can’t you let me not love you if I don’t love you? Isn’t that enough to get me off the hook?”
Apparently not.
I pulled out my Herbert this evening and enjoyed becoming acquainted with some new poems as well as revisiting those I’d read years ago. These closing lines from “The Collar” reinforce your comments likening Herbert to a five year old. Herbert is desperately trying to throw off his vocational calling but to no avail:
But as I raved and grew more fierce and wild
At every word,
Me thoughts I heard one calling, Child,
And I replied, My Lord.
I think, in our pain, it’s the not understanding that is the real cause of suffering. (This from the same book I mention below.) And all are not as fortunate as Julian of Norwich, say, who receives a vision that convinces her of the love of God and the ultimate resolution of all things, no matter how horrible they may be in this lifetime.
A second, that I hadn’t read before tonight is called “Bitter-sweet.” I like that Herbert, as many of the Hebrew psalmists,commits to conversation with God no matter what the situation he finds himself in. I’ve often heard that you don’t need to agree with God, the important thing is to continue to engage with him. To take to him the good and the bad, the “complaints and the praise.”
Ah my dear angry Lord,
Since thou dost love, yet strike,
Cast down, yet help afford,
Sure I will do the like.
I will complain, yet praise;
I will bewail, approve;
And all my sour-sweet days
I will lament, and love.
I’ll also include a poem by Rumi which tackles the issue of the silence of God by using an unusual metaphor. I found this passage in a delightful and profound book by Barbara Brown Taylor entitled “An Altar in the World.” In this chapter she is talking about the practice of feeling pain.”
“…a man…spent his nights calling out God’s name until his lips grew sweet with praise. then one night a cynic asked the man if he had ever heard anything back. Since he had no answer to that, the man stopped praying and drifted into a muddled sleep. Khidr, the guide of souls, came to him in a dream and asked him why he had stopped praying.
“Because I’ve never heard anything back,” the man said.
“This longing you express IS the return message,” Khidr told him.
The grief you cry out from
draws you toward union.
Your pure sadness
that wants help
is the secret cup.
Listen to the moan of a dog for its master.
That whining is the connection.
There are love dogs
no one knows the names of.
Give your life
to be one of them.
It’s an interesting argument, that the longing itself is the answer.
A great set of posts! Thanks again for keeping us thinking…
I don’t agree. What is faith? An act of dependence. Do you have faith that the chair will hold you? Then you simply sit down as we all have thousands of times. It is when the chair fails or is pulled from us that we hit the ground very hard (and perhaps wind up on America’s Funniest Home Videos). But until you sit, you have not performed an act of faith. You may be certain, you may believe, but you haven’t shown faith.
Thus, the opposite of faith is not certainty, but rather the refusal to depend on something to be true.
Now, of course, you can have faith in things that fail, but that is not the opposite of faith but rather misplaced faith.
In respect to Christianity (at least from a Baptist perspective), faith is depending on the finished work of Christ’s sacrifice and resurrection for salvation (Justification).
The faith is that God cannot fail and cannot lie, therefore salvation is assured and is knowable.
Very interesting. Jews, by the way, aren’t asked to have faith–the notion that religion requires it is a completely Christian innovation. “What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with thy God?” You would think that last clause involves having faith, but you don’t actually have to have it–just perform it. The actions of creating community and showing humility–expressed in the 613 commandments that Orthodox Jews are supposed to follow (covering your head, following the dietary laws, commemorating all the many holidays, following ethical behavior)–are daily actions that are supposed to create something larger than the little rules individually suggest: a relationship with God that is based on action, not feeling or knowing. In other tribal religions, faith isn’t even a category; in African religions, gods and spirits are so present that you spend all your time placating them and honoring them, exactly as you would the members of a large, contentious, and easily offended extended family, and as you would the mysterious but partly manipulable forces of nature.
I think about faith a lot, but I am struck by how the Christian concept of faith IS often involved with the kind of dependence that the last poster writes about, as opposed to other versions of what that word might mean. In political faith, which is the kind that most interests me, faith is like being a quantum physicist who deduces a kind of action that he/she believes to be true but cannot see…until briefly, occasionally, it is visible. There is something there, you know it but cannot see it, you might be wrong, and you have to live as though you are right, because that’s what sustains you & gives you life meaning. But there are lots of Christian philosophers–Pascal & Kierkegaard come to mind–who talk about their faith in a similar way. I was haunted, by the way, by the recent New Yorker article about a schizophrenic woman whose delusions informed her life in EXACTLY that way–they shaped her life and gave it meaning, and they were patently false and led to her isolation and her death. (She believed a man she had met briefly was madly in love with her and was coming to save her; she believed the government was persecuting her; and she believed God had called her to live alone in an abandoned house, which led her to ultimately starve to death…) Faith is scary because you DON”T know. In my opinion. You don’t know, even if you do. To me, as a secular Jew, that is why the Christian religion includes Christ saying, at the peak moment of his story, “My God, My God, Why have You Forsaken Me?” Even God sometimes wonders where God is and whether the story and the suffering have a larger meaning…or did you just make the wrong choice and nobody told you? (Or they told you, as Satan does, and you refused to listen…)