What is the opposite of faith?

asks the writer Anne Lamott, as she slogs through yet another day in the life—fighting with her 13 year old son, trying to build a relationship with the boy’s father, struggling with memories of her mother so bitter and angry that she cannot even bear to take the box containing her mother’s ashes off of the back shelf in the guest room closet, despairing of the war in Iraq and her sense of utter impotence—as a Christian believer—to make even the tiniest dent in her own hard heart, let alone in the heart of the world. What is the opposite of faith?

Doubt is the opposite of faith. Right?

Right? Only believe with all your heart, and doubts and conflicts, struggles and contradictions, will evaporate like the pre-dawn mist rising off the stone tomb of Jesus disappeared with the first rays of the sun on Easter morning.

On Easter Day of all days, it is tempting to take this way, this via positiva.
And there are voices in scripture who will help us, if this is our
choice. One such story comes from the gospel of Matthew—a gospel with
clean lines, brave conclusions, clear instructions. Dramatically
supernatural, unabashedly proselytizing, Matthew’s story of the
resurrection is intended to leave us with no doubts.

The writer of Matthew uses every device at his disposal to convince us that
the evidence of Jesus’ resurrection can neither be negated nor
explained away in ordinary human terms. Two earthquakes, a terrifying
“angel of the Lord,” all in dazzling white, the lies of the chief
priests and the scribes, the myth of the stolen body…all are drawn
forth and deployed like weapons of mass conversion to set the disciples
up for lives of glittering success as they are sent out with their
script and their strategic plan: go therefore and make disciples of
all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy
Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you…and
lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.

Matthew’s gospel demonstrates the mighty acts of God in history; a certainty made
visible…. but: how can such a resurrection save us? We
know the dark side of certainty. We are gifted with the language of
Power, beguiled by the winsome forcefulness of our own mythology; sure
of our rights, our obligations, our mission to save the world. And
yet…we are not reborn, and somehow, sometimes, we know it.

If freedom from doubt is the Resurrection you have come seeking today,
it’s a buyer’s market. There are Christians—and Christian
communions—everywhere, who rely heavily on the power of Resurrection
Certainty to bulldoze their way through the ordinary doubts and
darknesses of daily life, the wary skepticism of people who believe
differently, and the uncompliant, determined death—dealing that is life
in this world among the powers and principalities. Melt the clouds of sin and sadness, drive the dark of doubt away go the words of the old hymn, but in the hands of certainty, they are less a prayer than they are a militant call to arms.

The pastor of a large Presbyterian Church in Ft. Lauderdale was given nearly a full page one day this week in the op-ed section of the Herald, offering not so much his opinion or his faith in the mystery of resurrection as he stated just the facts, ma’am: that the factual—the factual evidence of the resurrection of Jesus was so compelling, so objectively attested, so logically presented, that there was no question of “belief” at all—rather, a universal intellectual and practical assent in the risen Christ akin to, say, knowing that Starbucks will give you a triple venti nonfat latte if you order it up and plunk down your $4.35.

This militant certainty that sets aside faith walks a clear, though dangerous path through our common life: cutting a swath recently through the small community of Pinellas Park, Florida, and the little hospice where Terri Schiavo lingers in a
twilight state of not-quite-living, compelling strangers—who do not
know the sorrow and the struggle of her family, and who do not have the
right to render judgment in this intensely private matter of life and
death—to bear witness to their utter certainty that there is only one
right divinely mandated choice for Life, and damn to hell anyone who
disagrees or doubts this action.

The New York Times carried
in recent weeks a series of articles describing the deliberate
humiliation and tormenting of Muslim captives detained at Guantanamo
Bay. Hard and shameful stories, that have caused people of conscience
in the military and out of it to question whether we have as a nation
lost touch with our core values of tolerance and compassionate mercy.
Yet more chilling, somehow, than all of these stories put together was
the one reported about a soldier named Smith, who, when asked by his
victim why? why are you tormenting me? replied simply because I am a Christian.

The opposite of faith is not, as we have been programmed to believe, doubt.

The opposite of faith is certainty.

Me,
I don’t do so well with certainty these days. The fixed script seems
rigid, unyielding. The formula doesn’t fit the fabric of life as it is
unfolding around me, around the people in the spiritual community I
call home. In the face of brokenness, doubt, and fragility … in the
midst of hard questions with no easy answers… in the heaviness of a
hospice room where Terri Schiavo lies dying while her family fights and
prays for clarity, for truth, for mercy; in Red Lake, Minnesota where
shattered families and a violated Native American tribal community are
listening for answers and gathering up the tangled threads of violence,
alienation and death; in these lengthening, soul-draining days of war,
in the small potent tragedies of families and individuals that cause us
to clear our throats and lift up our small voices in prayer, week after
week…lord, hear our prayer.

What does it
mean to make a disciple? What is the purpose of our baptism? How does
the meaning of Christ’s resurrection—so clear within the small world of
the ancient gospel witness, so difficult to touch and grasp in the hard
light of day—really have the potential to transform us? Does it?

The
ending of the gospel of Mark—which no observant person would dare to
call a “resurrection story”— is, as we receive it, singularly lacking
in miracle, almost devoid of hope, and ridiculously lacking in role
models, populated as it is by an ambiguous “man in white” and
frightened, silent women who, even when commanded, cannot muster a word
of witness to contradict the looming emptiness of the silent tomb.

But
what if the subtle scent of resurrection has been overshadowed by our
cheap dependence upon the trappings of power and certainty? What if
faith flowers there, and here, in the midst of the doubt and the fear,
instead of being badgered into existence by relentless constructions of
creeds and demands?

The words at the close of
the gospel of Mark which describe the reactions of the women who went
to the empty tomb are generally translated in the most unflattering and
destructive of ways: they were “alarmed”. They were overcome by “fear,”
“trembling” in terror—they said nothing to anyone because they were
“afraid.”

But I believe it is the culture of
Certainty that disvalues the unique and tender witness of the women who
went to the resurrection in the gospel of Mark. There is ample textual
evidence to suggest an alternative translation, one that honors the
nuances of fear, doubt and struggle that pave our pathways to grace,
and at the same time affirms that resurrection is possible not in spite of, but because of our attentiveness to uncertainty, doubt, and mystery: Listen: And
going out they fled the tomb, for trembling and ecstasy possessed them,
and they said nothing to anyone, for they were filled with awe.

I’ve been thinking that this year is for me, an Alligator Easter. Let me explain.

My
friend Eric the traumatic stress psychotherapist suggests that when we
are frightened or have experienced trauma, our thinking, spiritual
selves go into “fight or flight” mode. We lose the ability to think, to
explore creative options, and we reduce everything to the certainty
that we are must kill or be killed. My friend calls this being
possessed by our “alligator brain,” and we’ve all been there and done
that. You know what I mean…whether your experience is the profound
terror of a life threatening attack or accident… or the more
mundane—but no less threatening—experience of someone with power over
us threatening our well being; financially, professionally,
emotionally. Confronted with terror and threat, our certainty is fixed,
and our choices are two: eat it, or run away, so it doesn’t eat you. A
world of infinite possibilities dissolves into the orthodoxy of fear,
of violence. Our god-given creativity and imagination is smothered by
threat. Eric counsels that if we can only be aware that this is our
primitive response, we can be in charge of it, and change it. We can
sense our body’s tightening, feel the adrenaline that cuts off our
reason, and choose not to be controlled by it. Accepting our fear, our
distress, we can breathe, relax our bodies, free our mind—and soul—to
explore alternatives with creativity, courage, and grace. The key thing
is to breathe, and to know that we choose whether to die to our higher
self, our soul, or to be born again.

This is how
it is in the “resurrection story” that closes the gospel of Mark…there
is fear, and doubt, and the power to stay with it, so that something
else can be at work.

When our devotion to a
“faith” grounded in certainty tempts us, the witness of the silent
women in Mark calls us instead to a way of believing that is openended,
unfinished. A way of believing that acknowledges that God’s revelation
is always born in mystery, and worked out in our bodies through our
attentive, mindful participation in all of life’s experiences, mundane
and extraordinary alike.

When we are tempted by a
belief system that calls upon us to march off into a world of absolute
assertions that trample people’s rights and impose a tyranny of
Certainty upon ourselves and others—especially when we are facing hard
times and difficult choices—the women of Mark suggest that running off
half-cocked from the empty tomb to babble whatever it is we think we
know is at best, a useless expense of effort, and at worst, an
arrogance that tramples the fragile flowers that bloom in the fertile
soil of suffering and doubt.

If we are longing
for a strategic Christian plan of decisive, prescribed action, we might
try instead the discipleship of the women of Mark, who practice their
watchfulness at the crucifixion and a mindfulness at the empty tomb
that acknowledges that God’s revealing of godself is more in the
ordinary than in the spectacular or miraculous.

Mark’s
gospel invites every human being to comprehend that they—that we—are
made in God’s image, and therefore are capable of reflecting God in the
world.

Isn’t this what the other Christian
“Smith,” Ashley Smith of Atlanta, showed us when she, a wounded soul in
search of saving grace, encountered another broken child of God, the
fugitive Brian Nichols, who had raped and killed and fled justice in a
nationally televised manhunt two weeks ago. Taken prisoner in her own
home, Ashley confronted her terror and reached into the empty tomb of
doubt for grace. Like wisdom in the Proverbs, like God in the psalms,
like Christ on the cross, she set a Table for her enemy, and found a
brother. She listened to his story of failure and pain, and shared her
own, and in the breaking of bread and hearts, the mystery of
resurrection was made flesh.

In Greek, the gospel
of Mark ends with a preposition, “gar,” which means for. As we all
know, ending with a preposition is sloppy, incomplete, and
leading—which is everything a gospel should be, everything a
resurrection might become, if we let it.

Our
trembling is not terror — but holy awe, that in every circumstance, God
is doing a new thing… if we will allow ourselves to participate in it.

Our
speechlessness is not less, but more than words… as we consider not
what we are sure of, but what we are not…which is where God is bringing
a new thing to life, an eloquent silence that is an open space in which
in which we might write the resurrection’s meaning for ourselves.