Safe doubt.

I’m reading Christian mystic, Richard Rohr’s Breathing Underwater: Spirituality and the Twelve Steps right now. I knew halfway through the introduction that this would be a read-multiple-times kind of book.

In it, Rohr outlines the typical Twelve Steps of AA weaving in points on the complex journey of deepening one’s spirituality. Essentially, the golden thread tying it together is the paradox of grace. This upside-down logic clicks somewhere inside me other than my head—something I feel my intuition confirms before my intellect.

Anne Lamott articulates it well in her introduction to the book, “…the foundational ways that I believe Jesus and the Twelve Steps of AA are saying the same thing but with different vocabulary:

We suffer to get well.

We surrender to win.

We die to live.

We give it away to keep it.

This counterintuitive wisdom will be forever resisted, denied, and avoided, until it is forced upon us by some reality over which we are powerless—and, if we are honest, we are all powerless in the presence of full Reality.”

In acquiring a taste for contemplating paradoxes like these, I have gradually become repelled by tidy faith—organized spirituality packaged in the trappings of black-and-white doctrine and held in the grips of the people feeding it to us. I grew up learning how to wrap the mystery of God in a blanket of shaky Biblical interpretation, performance, and denial disguised as faith. And while I see my religious upbringing and the people involved in it through a lens of deep compassion, I cannot continue believing the way I once did.

This neat and tidy idea of religion is marketed to us by most contemporary churches, but the problem comes when these communities fail to admit that life is messier than they have the capacity to endure. As Rohr wrote, “Religion is for people who are scared to go to hell and spirituality is for people who have been through hell.”

Only in embracing doubt have I ever been able to hold onto a semblance of faith that I could actually touch, feel, and grip with my own hands. I like how Brene Brown puts it, “I don’t trust a spirituality that doesn’t have dirt under its nails.”

I’m taking the risk to put beliefs under the microscope of rethinking, re-studying, and rehashing even if it threatens my entire worldview. I’m wrestling with concepts that were once spoon-fed to me. I’m running old ideas through the new filter of: “do I want to keep this or let this go?”

I have the privilege of getting to ask questions and I’m learning that it is the questions themselves that transform; not their answers.

One excerpt in Breathing Underwater has stuck with me for the last few days:

“I like to say that we must ‘undergo God.’ Yes, God is pure and free gift, but there is a necessary undergoing to surrender to this Momentous Encounter. As others have put it, and it works particularly well in English, to fully understand is always to stand under and let things have their way with us.”

It is unbelievably difficult work to stop and to “stand under” and let mystery have its way.

I don’t know what I’m talking about and I don’t know what I’m doing, but the more centered I become, the more I’m convinced that there is much more safety in doubt than there is in certainty.