There Is a Doubter in Every Believer

While the notion of arguing with God may strike some as outrageous or blasphemous, it is part of the larger lament tradition that is deeply embedded in both the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Testament.

—Rosann Catalano

There is a doubter in every believer, and the doubt has an almost wholly positive function, for it keeps faith from degenerating into credulity. There is also, for the most part, an openness to something akin to faith in every nonbeliever, and that openness also functions positively, for its keeps disbelief from degenerating into cynicism.

—Douglas John Hall

Faith is either a struggle or it is nothing.

—Helmut Thielicke

The theme ‘doubt’ came to me after reading God and Human Suffering by Douglas John Hall.¹ Surely, it is the persistence and magnitude of human suffering that prompts a nagging sense of doubt. Doubt is sound theological counsel.

Feminist thinkers such as Wendy Farley, Elaine Pagels, Rosemary Radford Ruether, Judith Plaskow, Alicia Ostriker, Phyllis Trible, and Carol Christ have labored to teach us that theological truth is not static and that no one person or community can claim it. The idea that the truth cannot be attained need not yield cynicism or despair. Instead, it opens the field to a range of persons, perspectives, and styles. And so the number and variety of our teachers continues to grow: for example Xochitl Alvizo, Kate Brunner, Gina Messina–Dysert, Kelly Brown Douglas, and Grace Yi-Hei Kao.

In this issue, the poets show us imaginative ways of engaging the combination, or perhaps combustion, of faith and doubt. Plaskow has spoken of the need to be prepared to wrestle with God. As is the case with all poets, those assembled here enter this arena with concerns of content and form. Their lexicon is wide and varied; they call upon the mother, moon, womb, petals, wife, doves, and so on. Yet, they also seem to be surprised by the poems that emerge. They offer no specifically feminist arguments. They stand as souls saying their piece and bearing witness to the silence of God. As the poet Carolyn Forche has written, “the silence of god is god.”² Some say that poetry is prayer. If that is true, many of our poems exemplify this quality.

We begin with Mary Jo Firth Gillet’s poem “Sacrifice.” Gillet terms the “tug” of remembered faith and the doubt of adulthood the “fugue of love.” Her poem oscillates back and forth and confronts doubt as remembered faith. Madelyn Garner calls upon a “Fugitive God” to “listen” in “Concerning the Existence of God.” Her poem begins with an epigraph by Kamel Dauod, “God is a question not an answer.” And in “Steam Espresso Bar,” the poet finds herself in a dialogue with a god while getting coffee, as if all of a god’s grace is “hot and honeyed” with a slice of “orange blossom cake.” “This and this” the poet says, and God answers, “I know.” In “Guides,” Terri Muuss asks for help from any god or spirit to get through “this dusty geometry” of a world. And in “and the word was,” Muuss experiences god as light shimmering, as “smoke and no/name,” as the poem grows towards its ending, with “outstretched fingers.” Muuss’s poem is a progression toward meeting.

Elizabeth Dawkins Poreba explains that “God … draws straight with crooked lines” in her poem, “May 3 Is the Feast of St. Philip, Apostle.” She is speaking to Saint Philip, both of them “good with words.” Her doubt is disquiet, which she hopes can be stilled. Then in “The Pig Nut Hickory,” Poreba draws faith from the tree, bringing us the ancient Tree of Life, as well as the barren tree “bearing nothing in its branches.”

Holaday Mason asks, “Was I so careless, demons always/at the edges …?” in “Meditation on the I Ching, Hexagrams 2 & 43.” Here, silence has its bells, as the poem progresses to confidence that “everything will eventually arrive.” In her poem “Fire” she can almost tell us what Mary might have said, “such is the woman’s slow...