Is it acceptable to doubt?

The ninth chapter of the Gospel of Mark tells of a father who brought to Jesus a son who was afflicted with a tormenting spirit. Jesus assured the man that “All things can be done for the one who has faith.” In anguish, the father of the child cried out, “I believe; help my unbelief!”

The father’s cry resonates with the experience of many believers who realize that faith is not simply an alternative to unbelief. The man does not say something like, “I partly believe and partly doubt,” or “I sort of believe and sort of don’t.” The man believes and also does not believe.

The Greatest Loss, a poem by Frances Brown, begins, “Upon the white sea sand there sat a pilgrim band, Telling the losses that their lives had known.” Their losses included sunken ships, vanished gold, loved ones buried on foreign soil, wasted youth. When all were told, a stranger among them declared that despite their sad losses, his was heavier yet, “For a believing heart hath gone from me.”

Perhaps the heaviest burden and greatest disillusionment for one who believes in God—has faith in God—is the time faith falters. And no one is beyond the specter of unbelief. Mark’s gospel, the first gospel written, tells us that in his very last moments, as Jesus hung on the cross, his last words betrayed an unbelief: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” This from the lips of the one we name Son of Man.

Is it acceptable to doubt? Do we dare admit to our fellow Christians, to God, yea, even to ourselves that part of us dwells in unbelief? I find encouragement in Alfred Tennyson’s insight: “There lives more faith in honest doubt, Believe me, than in half the creeds.”

Elie Wiesel, a Romanian American Jew and world-renowned personality has a number on his forearm, A-7713, tattooed onto him at the concentration camp in Auschwitz, Poland. His story of the Holocaust is a story of dread—a nightmare beyond belief.

Wiesel once recalled a vivid experience at the concentration camp. All the men in the prisoner barrack were men of faith, but their faith had profoundly disappointed them. The believing heart had gone from them. So they decided to put God on trial for abandoning the Jewish people. They asked young Wiesel to witness the proceedings.

The prosecutor listed the charges one by one. God’s people had been torn from their homes, separated from their family, beaten, abused, murdered, and burned in incinerators. A defense was attempted. But in the end, God was found guilty of abandoning his people, maybe even guilty of not existing.

After what seemed like an eternity of dark and profound silence, one of the rabbis pronounced: “It is now time for evening prayer.” These men who had just found God guilty of abandoning them—these same men got down on their knees, and they began to pray their evening prayer. Belief—in the religious sense—faith— is not some escapist attitude that requires no effort. Faith is perhaps the most difficult challenge there is—a heart’s clinging to the love of God in a world that has never been a “happy-ending machine.” “Help my unbelief!” begged the father to Jesus. “It is now time for evening prayer,” intoned the rabbi clothed in the tattered, striped rags of a death camp prisoner.

What I pray that I will always believe, especially in the pursuing shadow of unbelief, is expressed, again, in the words of Tennyson: “And Power was with him in the night, Which makes the darkness and the light, And dwells not in the light alone.”