{"id":42730,"date":"2022-03-18T00:20:09","date_gmt":"2022-03-18T05:20:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.timesandseasons.org\/?p=42730"},"modified":"2022-03-18T00:22:00","modified_gmt":"2022-03-18T05:22:00","slug":"42730","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/2022\/03\/42730\/","title":{"rendered":"[Languages of the Spirit] Doubt"},"content":{"rendered":"

My husband frequently says of our team dynamic that he is the historian and I am the theologian, and that before I talk about anything I lay a theological framework for it. This is clearly interesting and endearing of me. The last couple of posts have been me laying the theological framework for this series, and now we get to get into actual examples of spiritual divergence. Just one last thing, though. A few comments in a previous post pointed out that I have not clarified what exactly I mean by spirit. This is a really good point because, frankly, the concept of spirit isn\u2019t always clear. There is the Holy Ghost (which is talked about as a power by which our mind is connected with God[1]<\/a> but is also described as a person). There is the Light of Christ which sometimes is the conscience with which everyone is born and is secondary to the holy spirit which is the source of greater truth[2]<\/a>, but other times is the source of all light and truth and makes the role of the Holy Ghost a little more ambiguous[3]<\/a>. There is the spirit that is inside our bodies and the spiritual creation inside everything and the spirit of different powers and principles. So what does \u201cthe spirit\u201d mean? Firstly, I think this is a really important question and I am grateful for the comments that brought it to my attention. Secondly, I am not going to try to answer because I don\u2019t know. Are there differences? Maybe we just have different terms for what is actually the same thing. Or maybe it is all fundamentally different somehow and we haven\u2019t even begun to scratch the surface. This deserves more attention, but for the purpose of this series I am talking about the spirit as the connection between us and God.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

A number of years ago I started out on what now gets referred to as a faith crisis. It was pretty early on in what has become a more widespread phenomenon (I like to be cutting edge). There was really no community for it, and there was a lot of discomfort in how people responded. To have doubt was a sign of loss of the spirit and it needed to be lovingly\u2014or not\u2014shamed out of you. Though I didn\u2019t accept the idea that I was just being faithless, I did believe that I wasn\u2019t feeling the spirit. I felt deep sorrow and emptiness and according to what I had been taught that could only have meant one thing: absence of spirit. I didn\u2019t exactly want to go back to life before doubt because I thought my questions mattered, but I missed feeling the spirit (or at least feeling it in the way I had been used to). I had no idea how to reconcile those things, and I didn\u2019t know anyone who could help me.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a lot of discussion about how God can speak to us in spite of doubt, loves us in spite of doubt, that the spirit can save us from doubt. Even still, after all the years of more openly speaking of doubt, many people\u2019s response to doubters is to try to help them make the doubt go away, either by just \u201chaving faith\u201d, or by leaving the church. In these cases doubt is something that needs to be put to rest. That is not what I am talking about. I am not going to tell you how to make doubt go away so that you can feel the spirit again. I am saying that there are circumstances where doubt is<\/em> the spirit, and it may be that actual loss of the spirit would not come from listening to doubt, but from refusing to.<\/p>\n

God taught me this one day a few years ago. I had been wrestling for decades and I couldn\u2019t take it anymore. As I sat under this unbearable burden I finally thought, \u201cFine! God, I will stay, but I am done with mental gymnastics and putting things on shelves. If there is something that I think is wrong or that doesn\u2019t make sense I\u2019m not going to pretend it must be right or that it doesn\u2019t matter. I won\u2019t lie to look like I fit into someone else\u2019s idea of faith.\u201d God immediately responded and asked, \u201cWhat made you think I wanted you to do that in the first place?\u201d<\/p>\n

I was shocked. Frankly I suppose I assumed God would, if anything, respond to me like I was a child throwing a tantrum. Isn\u2019t that how we tend to imagine that God thinks of us? It took me a while to absorb this question, and that God was taking me and asking it seriously. Why did I think that I had to be unquestioningly agreeable in order to be right (or look right) with God? Why did I think that was a sign of the spirit? I won\u2019t go into the reasons here; some of them would be glaringly obvious to anyone who has spent any time in any faith community, others are more personal. What is important for this discussion is that is not what God wanted from me. My Heavenly Parents wanted<\/em> me to wrestle and ask questions! They actually liked<\/em> that about me!<\/p>\n

After this I started noticing a lot more how many times in scripture that a revelation comes because of a person pushing back and asking questions; that God doesn\u2019t actually answer questions we don\u2019t ask. I was deeply moved by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks\u2019 posit that the reason Abraham was chosen to be the father of the covenant was because he was the first person who walked with God and was willing to question something that God said that he didn\u2019t agree with (the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah). Before that there were others who walked with God, but who were unwilling to wrestle with him. When they had problems they snuck behind his back, took it out on a sibling, lied, or just did exactly what they were told without thought or question. Abraham was the first person who struggled with something God said and talked to God about it. And, according to Rabbi Sacks, that was exactly what God wanted<\/em>. God didn\u2019t want obedience that came at the cost of thoughtlessness or sneakiness or resentment. Abraham\u2019s faith didn\u2019t come because he mindlessly obeyed, but because he was willing to question God to his face. Because God doesn\u2019t want slaves<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Doubt is the realization that there is something that is unknown that not only can but should be known. That what satisfied us as infants may no longer be enough to satisfy us as adults, because God doesn\u2019t want us to stay in a perpetual infancy<\/em>. What we call doubt may actually be the spirit prodding us, prompting us to ask God questions because our Heavenly Parents are eager to teach us what they know. This is one of the things that is so amazing about the gospel\u2014our Heavenly Parents, the God of the universe, want<\/em> us to understand them! Stop and really let that sink in for a moment. Let it dig deep and develop roots. God wants us to understand<\/em>. Do we really think this is going to be a comfortable, easily walkable road where everything always makes perfect sense and if it doesn\u2019t it\u2019s \u201cnot pertinent to our eternal salvation\u201d? How can we possibly expect that learning the mysteries of Godliness will never be hard and confusing and require us to deeply and seriously rethink what we think we know? How can we be so arrogant as to assume that because something doesn\u2019t make sense to us it must not matter or is even bad? To think that truth only needs to be pursued as long as it doesn\u2019t cause us to loose any sleep over it?<\/p>\n

Doubt can come from all kinds of things. Being disoriented by some of our own history, trusting another member and being betrayed by them, seeing the light of someone you love slowly fade away because they don\u2019t fit into the church mold, experiences or learning that contradict what you have always been taught. These are life events when the old trite phrases that used to be so comforting no longer cut it. (You know, \u201ceverything happens for a reason\u201d, \u201cit\u2019s policy or culture not doctrine\u201d, \u201cit will all make sense someday\u201d, \u201cjust have faith\u201d. All those pat answers that are meant to comfort but do so by silencing difficult questions.) But what if those difficult questions are themselves revelations? What if there is more God wants to teach us now but, like so many things, it requires a certain level of discomfort to be able to learn?<\/p>\n

It may lack the reassurance we have been trained to look for; there is no question but that it can be unpleasant and lonely. But it can also be the opening of what was once a locked door. Doubt can be a powerful language of the spirit, acting as the impetus to push \u00a0us right into the heart and mind of God.<\/p>\n

[1]<\/a> Lectures on Faith 5<\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> Moroni 7<\/p>\n

[3]<\/a>D&C 88<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My husband frequently says of our team dynamic that he is the historian and I am the theologian, and that before I talk about anything I lay a theological framework for it. This is clearly interesting and endearing of me. The last couple of posts have been me laying the theological framework for this series, and now we get to get into actual examples of spiritual divergence. Just one last thing, though. A few comments in a previous post pointed out that I have not clarified what exactly I mean by spirit. This is a really good point because, frankly, the concept of spirit isn\u2019t always clear. There is the Holy Ghost (which is talked about as a power by which our mind is connected with God[1] but is also described as a person). There is the Light of Christ which sometimes is the conscience with which everyone is born and is secondary to the holy spirit which is the source of greater truth[2], but other times is the source of all light and truth and makes the role of the Holy Ghost a little more ambiguous[3]. There is the spirit that is inside our bodies and the spiritual creation […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10396,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[55,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-42730","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news-politics","category-philosophy-and-theology"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42730","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10396"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42730"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42730\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42733,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42730\/revisions\/42733"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42730"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42730"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42730"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}