The Triumph of Hope Over Fear

Dear Mr. Lough:

I found your last letter both informative and encouraging. I also noticed something else as I was reading it, and I’d like to comment on that before we go further in this series.

In the past—and I base this comment on my experience as your student a few years ago—I think your responses to my questions would have been far more… well… for lack of a better word, academic. Frankly, that’s what I was expecting. Something like the lectures you used to give—carefully structured, logical, filled with scripture references to support your point. But that’s not really what you have been doing in your response to my questions, is it?

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The Subjective Dimension in Change (On the Road to Easter, #4)

Dear Kathryn:

Before I go further in defining the parameters and describing the particulars of the change in my thinking over the past few years, I want to address one other factor that contributes to the process and experience of change: the subjective dimension. Simply put, we never make a significant change in our beliefs or practices until we feel the need for change. We will never take the risks associated with change until we are convinced, rather more instinctually than intellectually, that change is desirable, possible, and maybe even necessary.

At least that has certainly been true for me. I am today open to the possibility of truth in ideas and concepts that, only a few years ago, I regarded with derision and dismissed with prejudice. My thinking began to change when my circumstances changed, and I was no longer bound emotionally to an earlier pattern of thought and behavior.

Honest Doubt and Healthy Faith

I enjoy listening to a radio program called On Being every Sunday morning on our local NPR station. I began listening many years ago when the program was called Speaking of Faith. Despite the name change, the format has remained fairly constant. The host, Krista Tippett, interviews people from a wide variety of backgrounds and vocations and academic disciplines about truth and faith and their general philosophy of life. Most weeks it is fascinating, stretching, and stimulating.

A few weeks ago Krista’s guests were two scientists—astrophysicists, I believe—who were also Jesuit priests. I found their conversation unusually informative and enlightening. I thought I would mention it here, since the theme—belief and doubt—ties in well with the post I published yesterday.

The Arrogance of Unwarranted Certainty

Picking up where I left off yesterday, I want to consider further the first of three important truths I mentioned at the close of that post. There I noted that the older I get, the less certain I am about a lot of things, and I am not troubled by that. In fact, unwarranted certainty very often breeds arrogance, while honest doubt encourages humility and deepens faith.

I have a theory. It is not something I have read anywhere, at least not that I recall. It is the product of gut feeling and personal observation, not surveys or scientific testing of any kind. I may abandon it tomorrow, but for today, here it is.