This is the last week of 2010. In fact, it is the last day of the calendar year. Its typically a fairly reflective day for some. Yet for others, it is the day/night when you enjoy yourself in good company. Most everyone toasts at 12midnight. I’m not so concerned about the toast at 12midnight, but I am curious about what is emerging: 2011. Is it a Black Hole?
I have had a college friend here this week who I will call my “reformed Bible-Thumping Partner.” It has been lovely to visit and laugh and remember. So much has changed. Perhaps everything in our lives since we have seen one another. We both attended a Private University that is Baptist. We both attended the same church in college for a period of time, which is Baptist. We both led Bible Studies and were compelled by this thing called: Christianity. And, to our surprise, we have both stepped into the Black Hole of doubt and questioning.
I call it a Black Hole because there is no clear course in doubt. Doubt is just that: doubts and questions. There’s even a prototype of a doubter in Christianity, which is recorded in the Bible. He is known as the Apostle Thomas and more commonly called: “Doubting Thomas.” He is just Thomas to me, full of humanity, questions, and perhaps even doubt! If anything, he is a great person to rest in on this eve of 2011. The stories we have of Thomas that are most prominent for me now are the stories of when the resurrected Jesus appeared to the disciples and Thomas needed proof. Jesus said: “Touch me!”
Is it in our bodies that we know? Is it in our touch of the other that we step beyond or outside of our Black Hole(s)? Does the human touch quench our doubt? Or, does it further perpetuate our questions? I don’t have answers for these questions, how ever rhetorical they are. But, I am aware that my college friend and I have traveled through several Black Holes of questions and doubt, largely around faith and religion.
And so, what happens when everything changes?! What happens when you wake up one morning and you just don’t know if what you’ve been told about religion is a lie, and question the very premise of your own belief. What happens when you decide to pack up your Religious texts because you don’t find them compelling or (and more likely) just say “This is a load of shit!” What happens when you can no longer recite the Nicene or Apostle’s Creed, which begins: “I believe in God…” What happens when you cannot perform these words in speech or action? What happens when you can no longer tolerate hearing stories about another’s religious experiences and when you do, it triggers a panic attack? And, what happens when you take that first step into the Black Hole?
Do we even have a choice as to whether or not we take that step, or is the step we take a compulsion of ours? Sure, we all have agency, but Who or What compels us totouch the Black Hole, the space and place of nothingness and perhaps everthingness? By our touch, how ever literal or metaphorical it is, we come to know and we come to doubt and we come to believe again in that which is different. Like the Apostle Thomas, we disrupt the traditional patterns of knowing, and we celebrate the epistemological tear. We often do not know what to do with this space that is created in the epistemological rupture, but we step into this space negotiating hope and hopelessness.
I am stepping back into this Black Hole w/ my college friend, because it is the place where life begins, and it is the space/place that feels most alive at the end of this calendar year.
“By our touch, how ever literal or metaphorical it is, we come to know and we come to doubt and we come to believe again in that which is different.”
As an educational thinker this resonates powerfully with me. Us developmentalists talk about the importance of “disequilibrium” – the time when what we thought we knew and understood is thrown into disarray by some new data, and we are forced to shift our mental weight to steady the rocking boat of our conceptions.
That being said, I try to embrace and welcome doubt, not as a black hole but more as a fertile garden whence many new insights might bloom. Might I recommend “Doubt” by Jennifer Hecht? It’s a wonderful intellectual history of doubt and doubters that treats skepticism as a tradition in itself, rather than the shadow of certainty.
I wish you luck in your reflection on this portentous day!
@James – I love the fertile garden image. Nice.
@Robyn – Really thought provoking post. For me, the foundation of my belief (or unbelief) is that no experience or event is ever crap, shit, wrong or even right. In this black hole you talk about, I imagine in my minds eye it is hard to see one another, to reach out for someones hand, or to be seen in the blackness/darkness. For me, relationship, belonging to one another, is the heart of Christianity and my faith. I am just wholly grateful that you and I can walk along as friends, sharing lives and different (but wonderfully exciting) new adventures.
I have been there, and my faith is always aware of that place of doubt. thank you for this, as my own black whole of doubt was now such a long time ago, and predated my regularly speaking the Nicene or Apostles creed.
As for touch and body: while surely embodiedness of faith and doubt are in that story, I am always fascinated by the ambiguity of the narrative, that the pictorial representations usually erase- Does St. Thomas actually touch the wounds? Or does seeing and the invitation to touch confound St. Thomas the doubting apostle that all that is left in him is praise. Each time I re-read this text I see differently – Sometimes it seems that Thomas touches and then praises, at other times he is unable to touch and is caught up in an ecstatic moment.
I have experienced another space, what Jean-Luc Marion calls the the space of theology as doxology, where the creed is worship and praise and not science. where knowledge is to be taken outside of knowledge as science, and yet is all embracing and all encompassing, within and without, immanent and transcendent, embodied and and beyond body.