The value of a crisis of faith and assumptions about it.
I recently heard someone give a talk about having a crisis of faith. And their conclusion was that it’s not a bad thing. It isn’t a problem. It’s a good thing. It doesn’t mean that you’re a bad person, in fact it means that you’re a good person, someone who is willing to question and struggle with their faith. So doubt and crisis means that you’re actually a great Christian, maybe even a better one than people who are secure. Which to my mind proves the age-old principle of accomodation.
People tend to assume that whatever position they’re in is the right one and the good one, whatever it is. And when people change positions, often the lesson they learn isn’t humility or socratic ignorance, it’s how to accommodate and make themselves comfortable in any position they happen to hold.
It a mistake to think that a crisis of faith is necessarily a bad thing and that no good could come from it. It’s also a mistake to think that a crisis of faith is necessarily a good thing, and that no harm can come from it. Neither guilt nor innocence is guaranteed by either. The reality, for both, is that you don’t know if it’s good or bad, and wisdom consists in ridding yourself of the assumption that you do, so you can actually engage in some genuine thought and labor of the soul.
You can’t know at the outset whether your crisis is good or bad because: 1. You don’t fully understand your own reasons and motivations, 2. You don’t know what the end result will be. You’re down in the valley; you’re outside the place of clear vision. And in that place it’s very hard to make judgements, positive or negative. The very mechanism you use to produce and assess those results has been arrested.
Figuring out your reasons and motivations and considering where they are heading is the whole point of taking time to think and giving yourself some space in a crisis of faith. After all, what is a crisis of faith? It is when you take a stable, functional structure, the foundation of how you act and understand and react to the world, and suddenly put in on hold and put it under examination because you need to examine or work on some of the fundamental underlying assumptions that make it work.
Maybe your worldview it isn’t producing the results you expected. Maybe you see something else you like more or that seems to work better. Maybe there was a catastrophic breakdown, maybe it failed to predict and interpret something terribly important that you should have been able to see coming. In some way your psychological machine failed, at a level you can’t just dismiss as chance, forcing you to halt and examine and reconsider fundamental elelements of its design.
From a functional standpoint, that’s what a crisia of faith is. Life is always throwing monkey wrenches at the machines we have built to navigate it. A good system is designed to handle those inevitable bumps in the road and get you safely through them. But some bumps hit us harder, and some roads start to shake your composure apart mile by shuddering mile. The problem, when things go badly wrong, is that it’s not immediately obvious whether the problem was some flaw in your system, or whether it was just some chance disaster, or whether it was the result of malevolent interference from outside forces, or whether there was a serious flaw in your own adherence to and embodiment of the system (pilot error).
All you know if that you’re in genuine distress. A psychological collapse has been provoked. Is that because you’re tired, or lazy, or old, or young, or under attack, or deceived, or confused, or unlucky, or hypocritical, or underinvested, or underinformed, or misunderstood, or sick, or being manipulated, or being shortsighted, or being insensitive, or being too sensitive, or reading into things, or failing to read into things, or one of a hundred other possibilities?
You don’t know. You might be taking a genuine and honest look at things you’ve needed to look at for a long time. Or maybe it’s a dozen other things that are causing all this. You can’t assume that you know. That’s the whole point of a crisis of faith, to realize that you’re not sure what it all means. And you can’t be sure even of your own motivations, because your machine has broken down and you’re in the valley of uncertainty.
It’s not great to be in the valley of uncertainty. People need to be functional to survive. So you can’t really afford to take your whole mechanism for living and for psychological stability apart many times in your life. You may end up with perpetual post-traumatic stress if you do.
Your faith, whatever it is, is the basis of how you regulate and moderate your pcyche and its parts into something approximating a functional, stable personality that can actually identify and pursue goals. It’s how you regulate all your psychological subsystems and keep them in place and working for your instead of pulling you apart. When the system does fall apart it’s a threat to your whole being, your whole world, and your whole sphere of endeavor. That governing system is what lets you see and understand the world, yourself, and how to operate in it. You can’t kick the foundations out from under it without experiencing some trauma. Even for a good cause.
So a crisis has very negative effects, it produces trauma. And you can’t afford to have too many, or your life falls apart and you fall too far behind to recover. It places enormous psychological and physiological stress on you. But, for obvious reasons, you can’t afford to never accept such trauma. Sometimes the machine really is broken and needs to be fixed. Sometimes that’s the only way to avoid the pain and disaster of trying to push ahead with a broken system, by admitting that it’s broken and taking the time to figure out how and why.
By leaning into the pain and trauma you pay the price of the shutdown, with the hope of producing something better on the other side of it. If there wasn’t any hope of this outcome, then there would never be any good argument for bothering with corrective measures. But if the system truly could be better or worse adapted, more or less stable than it is, then it’s worth working on. Sometimes you can make small refinements and adjustments on the fly without too much pain, iterative changes. A crisis occurs when the problems are too deep to be handled this way, when you need to get at the heart of the engine. And that takes either a lot of pain, a lot of insight, or a lot of courage to push you into embracing and realizing that moment.
So is a crisis universally good or bad? In a way, it’s both, and neither. It’s dangerous. And you may not, in fact you can assume you don’t, fully understand what it means or why it happened or why you’re going through it. It may rest on very bad justifications or very good ones. Either way, it’s dangerous. You’re very vulnerable, like a bird gone to ground. You’ve been seperated from your pack, you’ve lost your sense of direction. You’ve slowed your movement. You’ve stopped and you’re looking around. And that makes you vulnerable to capture.
It’s not a coincidence that the methodology of cults–political, personal, and religious–often depend on seperating your from your intimate connections and confusing the foundations of your stabilizing social and psychological mechanisms. They need you to be in the valley of doubt. If you’re going to be captured, it’s the easiest time for someone or something to do it. You’re vulnerable, you’re needy, you’re passionate, you’re isolated and confused.
If you’re going to get snapped up by something, this is when it will most likely happen. Your fear, your resentment, your pain, your desire for comfort, your anger, your isolation, your outrage, your curiosity, and even your insight and courage can be used against you, to draw you in with the promise of something that will solve your problem and stabilize your structures and offer you what you want.
If you walk into a crisis of faith failing to realize how vulnerable it has made you, that you could end up embracing something even worse if you haven’t truly learned to take care, then the chances that you will fall into something worse in a moment of need (even legitimate need, need for justice or vengeance or meaning or comfort) is greatly increased. And that is the crux of what I’m saying. We don’t know if doubt is good or bad, whether a crisis of faith is good or bad, because we don’t yet understand the reasons for it and we haven’t seen the results. Doubt is necessary. It’s dangerous–we can never forget that–but it’s necessary. Many dangerous things often are.
So as much as I would like to offer comfort, telling you that faith is always good and doubt is always bad, or the reverse, I cannot. I can only offer wisdom. Doubt is necessary. We have to learn to manage it, and we have to respect it, both for its power and for its hazards. Without it, we have no hope for learning. But it carries a heavy responsibility, as all powerful things do.
You can get lost in doubt. It can snare you. You can’t treat it like it’s merely an evil and you can’t treat it like it’s a virtue, and least of all like it’s nothing. It’s part of life. It’s common. But it’s not banal, because life isn’t banal. Doubt matters.
So treasure it and fear it, as you treasure and fear living. To live is to be vulnerable to doubt. To think is to risk being wrong. And to act is to risk failure. But without those risks, we have nothing, we go nowhere. So be kind to yourself, be honest, and be skeptical and be on your guard. Face the danger, but don’t pretend that it isn’t there. Take the adventure, but be careful of where your steps could lead or be led.
Always pursue honesty. And never pursue doubt for its own sake. Doubt that doesn’t seek something isn’t doubt, it’s indecision and temerity, it’s lukewarm and aimless. You may not know what the truth is, it is well to doubt that, but the point of skepticism is to seek truth and know it better. And at some point you have to live, have to stake your life on something, or be nothing. Because life doesn’t last forever, and it doesn’t hold still. Doubts or not, we all must live. And to live is to stake your life on something.
Making Nobody Happy 