Is Doubt a Disease?
Sometimes my doubt is treated like a disease – people keep their distance; they worry and pray and whisper amongst themselves; the brave ones try to fix me.
Sometimes I think I’m diseased – when it’s a struggle to sit through church, when I’m afraid of too much quiet time to think, when I ask questions that cast fear across faces, when I can tell that even the brave ones have given up.
Sometimes my doubt is treated like an antidote – people find solidarity and healing; they ask questions they’d been afraid to ask out loud; they dream of a bolder, more examined faith; the brave ones say they don’t want to be fixed.
Sometimes I think we are the antidote – to apathy, to fear, to irrelevance, to inherited beliefs, to an un-changing and fixed faith, to utter extinction.
But most of the time I think that doubt is both– the disease and the cure, the problem and the solution, the threat and the evolution.
It is the disturbing art of the Church that forces us to think.
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Do you ever doubt your faith? Do the people around you treat doubt like a disease to be cured? How can doubt be destructive, and how can it be constructive?
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