Where do we find refuge when doubt, fear torment the soul?

Doubt is like an inescapable virus. It lives cheek-by-jowl with us, seizing us when we least expect it, going for our weakest point, showing us no mercy or decency and wearing us down bit by bit. PHOTO | FOTOSEARCH

What you need to know:

  • Even the most committed lovers have their moments of doubts so that they have to keep asking each other time and again, “mmmh, do you love me?”
  • At the cross, some theologians interpret Jesus’ heart-rending cry — “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” — as an act in doubting that the salvific mission on which he had embarked and which was to culminate in death would turn out right.
  • In fact, it is said that at the Garden of Gethsemane, when he implored the father to take that “cup” away from him, he was not talking about the cup of suffering; he was agonising about the seeds of doubt that Satan was trying to implant into him.

In one of his most lapidary works, Spanish writer and philosopher Miguel de Unamuno tells the story of a priest — Saint Emmanuel, the Good Martyr — who arrives in a village and, through sheer piety and impeccable pastoralism, manages to convince the entire village to believe in the immortality of their souls and the existence of God.

Don Emmanuel, the priest, was such a man of God that he came to be idolised by the entire village and when he died, the bishop in the diocese he served initiated the process of having him canonised.

Except the Bishop did not know one thing; that Don Emmanuel was really never a believer, that he did not believe in the immortality of souls and held that Jesus Christ was himself in dire need of prayers. This he confessed to one Christian he had managed to convert.

Asked about what the truth about his beliefs were, he confided to one of his Christians, Lazarus; “the truth? The truth, Lazarus, is perhaps something so unbearable, so terrible, something so deadly, that simple people could not live with it!”

He died with his little secret, which he concealed from nearly everybody other than Lazarus. He believed that the villagers must not be deviated from the illusion of their dreams, that they may continue to live and dream until that time that they leave the world and discover the truth for themselves.

DOUBT

The leitmotif of doubt is a pervasive one. Even those who claim to be such inveterate believers always have their moments of doubt. It is said that Mother Teresa, now Saint Teresa of Calcutta, would sometimes be seized by capricious moments of doubt that she would immerse herself in deep moments of prayer to cast those doubts out.

In one of her private letters made public a few years after her death, she confided to her spiritual confidant, the Rev. Michael van der Peet, of the many doubts that she sometimes had about the Christ that she so assiduously served:

“Jesus has a very special love for you,” she wrote to Van der Peet, “but as for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great, that I look and do not see, listen and do not hear, the tongue moves (in prayer) but does not speak… I want you to pray for me — that I let him (a) free hand.”

At the cross, some theologians interpret Jesus’ heart-rending cry — “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” — as an act in doubting that the salvific mission on which he had embarked and which was to culminate in death would turn out right.

In fact, it is said that at the Garden of Gethsemane, when he implored the father to take that “cup” away from him, he was not talking about the cup of suffering; he was agonising about the seeds of doubt that Satan was trying to implant into him; that there was no heaven, that there was no God, that all that suffering was in vain.

The sanctimonious preachers would have us believe that those who doubt are bereft of faith. But to doubt is, in all, aspects, human.

For those who pray, aren’t there many instances one feels that the prayers are not going anywhere beyond the ceiling of their houses? Aren’t there times that one feels that if God really did exist, why then would the world He created be in such a turmoil?

QUESTIONS

God’s own prophet Jeremiah voiced these doubts when he challenged Him to explain why it was that the way of the wicked is the one that prospers, that those who really do try to do good meet damnation and suffering and those who are evil are the ones who take root.

It is a theme that resonates through the books of Psalms and Job.

My own grandfather was a reluctant believer. He married three wives who were believers. But in time, he became so disillusioned with whatever little vestiges of religion he had in him that he started having serious doubts about the piety of those who professed the Christian belief.

When he was diagnosed with an incurable disease, it was rumoured that my grandfather had, at last, once again, found God. But I doubted that severely since in his illness he could not even locate his beloved flywhisk, the existence of which he had empirical evidence.

Doubting has its own sacramental graces. Sometimes it is an inevitable part of the journey towards faith and belief in a higher power. This aridity is perhaps what St John of the Cross was referring to when he coined the term “the dark night of the soul.”

Even the most committed lovers have their moments of doubts so that they have to keep asking each other time and again, “mmmh, do you love me?”

Yan Martel, in Life of Pi, writes that we should not beat ourselves too hard if sometimes we find ourselves harbouring doubts about our lives and our beliefs. “Doubt is useful for a while. We must all pass through the garden of Gethsemane. If Christ played with doubt, so must we… then surely we are also permitted doubt.”

HIGHER POWER

However, doubt can also turn out to be gangrenous to the soul. For it has a way of metastasising into fear, the kind of fear that immobilises and prevents you from experiencing the full splendour and wonder of life.

Fear usually begins as doubt and moves to colonise the soul in a most unerring version. One moment, what started as a small question about the value of life and the possibility of immortality metamorphoses into a morbid fear that all life is vain and hopeless, that at the end of it all, Friedrich Nietzsche was right to declare that “God is dead”.

Doubt, together with its cousin fear, has the ability to convince you that you do not even exist, that there is no such thing as the self to begin with, that that which we call self is a mere mental construct, an abstraction of the mind, what some Buddhist scholars have described as “a conditional semiotic construct”.

This kind of thinking engraves the idea that all is vanity, that even praying or believing in a higher power is an exercise in futility; that the baroque philosophers were, after all, right when they proclaimed that the only meaningful thing is to seize the day and to always keep in mind that at the end of that long road called life, only death would be the last remaining destination.

Yet doubt is like an inescapable virus. It lives cheek-by-jowl with us, seizing us when we least expect it, going for our weakest point, showing us no mercy or decency and wearing us down bit by bit.

Sometimes when I listen to the preachers, I wonder how much of what they preach is what they believe. Like Emmanuel in Miguel de Unamuno’s story, perhaps they believe that their duty is to keep others believing while they themselves lost their faith a long time ago.

In my life, I have come to fear doubt more than anything else. It has that debilitating ability to wreck the soul and shipwreck ambitions. Yet, as Martel puts it, even when we are seized by doubt, we must move on for “to choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.”