Reflection by Rev Linda Hart

My Question Given Its Place - as presented to Putney Unitarian Church, London

I probably shouldn't repeat the old tired jokes about Unitarians, as each time I do, I feel a little guilty for helping to perpetuate some of the untrue ideas about us. Yet, like eating that next crisp, it is hard to resist. You may know some of these, and perhaps you, too, enjoy them with the same guilty pleasure. Those old sayings about how in the US that when a Unitarian moved in, the neighbours burned a question mark on their lawn. Or the one about how when confronted by a fork in the road, one way with a sign pointing left that said 'Heaven' and another pointing right that said 'Discussion about Heaven', the Unitarians always take the right hand path. Worse than that is the one about what you get when you cross a Jehovah's Witness with a Unitarian? Someone who knocks on your door for no apparent reason. Someone quipped, in my favourite one liner about Unitarians, that we are those people who walk the fine line between confusion and indecision.

And then there's the whole question of changing light bulbs: How many Unitarians does it take to change a light bulb? An undetermined number. We choose not to make a statement either in favor of, or against, the need for a light bulb. However, if on your own journey you have found that light bulbs work for you, we celebrate your choice. Indeed, you are invited to form a committee, write a poem or compose a modern dance about your bulb for next Sunday's service, during which we will explore a number of light bulb traditions, including incandescent, fluorescent, long-life, and tinted, all of which are equally valid paths to luminescence.

People - including we ourselves - have a lot of fun with Unitarians and our open and accepting religious community. And the place where they have the most fun is around our willingness to remain open to differing truths, and, I think, to the role that doubt plays in our religious life. The punch line is always the question mark, or the willingness to discuss and to explore, it's that we are unwilling - most of the time at least - to proclaim one truth that is final for all times. Gracious sakes, I can hardly proclaim a truth that works for 10 minutes some days!

In many traditional religious communities doubt is not a welcome visitor, nor are admissions of doubt taken as opportunities. When I had my brief foray into born again Christianity in my teens - I mean, how does a born and bred Unitarian rebel? - my questions about the presence of evil, and the nature of a God who controls all the world who yet allows for pain and struggle, death of the innocents, famines and wars was always met by the silencing reply, 'We cannot understand God's purpose. We must trust that there is a reason.' It was the unwillingness to truly struggle with those questions that finally sent me back into my Unitarian youth group where we might not have grappled with those questions directly, but where the questions were entertained as honoured guests.

Doubt is often cast in the role of the opposite to faith. Faith is what we all want, or so some preachers would tell us. Faith, like the faith that Thomas the Doubter couldn't have. In that story, it is reported that Jesus said to him 'Thomas, because you have seen Me, you have believed. Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.' Those who doubt, like Thomas are portrayed as somehow lesser, those who must see, must have some sort of evidence, must touch and discover for themselves - from that one line - are relegated to second class believers, not really faithful.

If we were to have a patron saint, it would probably be Thomas. Not as the one who was lesser and not quite good enough, but as the one who was willing to ask, who needed to be sure, and who found, according to Denise Levertov, not shame when he felt that rib bone, and not certainty - he didn't even feel that his question had been answered, but that it was

That's what we hope to find. Not the final answer. Not some sentence that gives us certainty. Rather, our quest as religious people, as spiritual people is to see our questions and our questioning hearts as having a place. The point isn't the certainty, but the discovery again of the nature of truth, the nature of our lives. The point is some insight that helps us to see it better.

Of course, Unitarians aren't the first to discover such an idea. The Buddhists have long practised the kind of openness for which doubt is a doorway.

When the Tesshu, a master of Zen, calligraphy and swordsmanship, was a young man he called on the Zen master Dokuon. Wishing to impress Dokuon he said, "The mind, the Buddha, and all sentient beings after all do not exist. The true nature of phenomenon is emptiness. There is no realisation, no delusion, no sagacity, no mediocrity, nothing to give and nothing to receive.

Dokuon promptly hit him with a bamboo stick. Tesshu became quite furious.

Dokuon said quietly: "If nothing exists, where did this anger come from?"

Jacob Needleman tells a story about when he went to meet the master Suzuki who was one of the teachers who opened Zen to Western minds. In the process of finishing his studies for his PhD, and deeply schooled in the study of comparative religions, he came up with what he thought would be the perfect question to ask the master. It would demonstrate his depth as a seeker, and surely engage the master in a lengthy and meaningful conversation. The question was 'What is the Self?'

Finally led in to Suzuki's presence, they finished off the niceties of their meeting, and Needleman posed the question: 'What is the Self?'

'Who is asking?' came the reply. Needleman was struck dumb, and never recovered from that exchange to hear anything more that was said during his interview.

Doubt isn't the opposite of faith, nor is it some sort of lesser path to the truth that we find in the world. It has it's place in the unfolding of truth, and rather than being somewhere off to the side, an unwanted stepchild, it is rather, in the words of Robert Weston, 'is the handmaiden of truth...the key to the door of knowledge; it is the servant of discovery.'

Certainty, the possession of an unfailing truth, rather than being the best path, is instead both more dangerous and less helpful. Irma Zaleski makes the point well in her book Who is God . She writes:

There is no greater danger to faith, to wisdom and to love than the presumption that we know it all: that we have understood it all, that there is nothing more to discover or learn. Doubt makes it very difficult for us to fall into such a presumption. It forces us to recognize how little we really know, how little we have understood, how much infinitely more there is to learn. Doubt makes it possible for us to approach the Mystery as if it were for the first time: with our hearts and minds open, ready to receive a new vision, ready to embrace it all over again. Doubt is the way of beginning again.

Sometimes, I suppose, even Jesus gets it wrong. It isn't true that it is better that one believes without seeing. It doesn't make you somehow more deep and spiritual. The better and more difficult path is the path of St Thomas, who struggled with is belief, who worked at it, who longed for understanding and wouldn't simply accept already given answers.

Allow me to note here that though I say that with an awareness of the irony inherent in sounding certain whilst preaching a sermon about doubt. But this is part of the puzzle as well. That we doubt cannot be relied upon as a reason for not acting in the world, for not doing what we can. Knowing that any truth I discern is only partial does not absolve me of working for justice, for peace - it doesn't give me the choice of not acting for fear that there may be a larger truth out there that I've missed. Indeed, there will always be a larger truth out there that I've missed. My doubt should press me forward to understand even better, to make the work of my hands be ever more in the service of what I have understood so far:

•  that we are granted this life, this breath, these hands and hearts as a gift for us to use,

•  that the whole of creation is best served by living with love and compassion and kindness,

•  that we inhabit this world with flawed and amazing creatures, our friends, our loved ones, the companions that are with us in our lives,

•  and that we are called to be creators of a world of peace and plenty.

And though, yes, I doubt these at moments, still I keep on. And I suspect that you do, too.

Let us cherish our doubts and trust that we shall walk in the light of growing knowledge; Let us not fear doubt, but let us rejoice in its help. And open to the new truth that will ever break into our heats and minds, let us move boldly into the future.