Monday of the Seventh Week in Ordinary Time
“I do believe. Help my unbelief.” These oft quoted words from Mark resonate and are among the most popular verses in the New Testament. We desire faith, and yet it eludes us. We may wonder why we doubt when faith is so desperately needed. Is God disappointed that we fail to embrace faith totally and without question?
Yet aren't doubt and faith two sides of the same coin? A generous American young man spent his “gap year” after college with Mother Teresa and her sisters in India. There he gave himself to the work of the Daughters of Charity. Before his departure, he met with Mother to review and reflect on the past year. Before parting he said to her, “Mother, pray for me.” What do you want me to pray for you,” she asked. “I want certitude,” was the lad’s reply. Mother’s response surprised him: “Certitude? I don’t have certitude. I will pray that you continually search for the Lord throughout your life. But not for certitude.”
The following quote from author Theresa Latini may help clarify:
“Certitude is quite the opposite of faith. Certitude does not require trust or openness. It leaves little room for doubt, honest questioning, creativity, and new insight. It emerges from insecurity and manifests itself as rigidity — in one’s thinking and relating to self and others. When we withdraw from someone who seems ideological, I suspect we are reacting, in part, against attitudes and actions based on certitude.”
Or as Voltaire wrote, “Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certitude is absurd.”
Sister Joan Chittister, OSB develops this further in her book Between the Dark and the Daylight:
“The problem is that certitude seduces us. It enables us to believe that what was said to be true because someone else said so. It simply cuts off thought. It arrests discussion in mid flight. And yet we yearn for it with a passion. We spend sleepless nights grappling with intellectual options in order to wiggle them into a satisfying kind of certainty without so much as a scintilla of evidence.”
She continues,
“Doubt is what shakes our arrogance and makes us look again at what we have never really looked at before. Without doubt there is little room for faith in anything. It is doubt, not certitude, that enables us to believe, because it requires us to think deeply about an entire subject, and not depend on only our side of reality. Only when we look beyond absolutes to understand every level of life can we possibly live life to its fullest, with the deepest kind of insight, with the greatest degree of compassion for others.”
Voltaire was right, of course. Certitude is comfortable but always unlikely and always disruptive. As life changes so must our perception and response to it.
—Timothy J. Cronin