Doubt and Faith - article in The Sunday Age today

From time to time I find myself in conversations with people who have gone to church all their life but feel they aren’t real Christians because they have doubts.

Really? Since when did doubt stop anyone being a person of faith? That’s like saying you’re not a real spouse because your partner occasionally gets on your nerves.

Doubt is a vital part of the life of faith. If you don’t have doubts, or, at the very least, questions about your faith, chances are you belong to a fundamentalist group that doesn’t allow questioning, or you are avoiding difficult issues you need to grapple with.

There is no call for Christians to be afraid of doubt. If God is truth, God is not going to be threatened by what we ask, no matter how brilliant we are.

I realized in my twenties that you don’t have to leave your brain at the door when you enter church. A lot of very smart people are Christians. Intellectually, Christianity makes as much sense as most other positions, either religious, atheist or agnostic.

Later in my life, I learnt something opposite but just as important: there are things about faith that are never going to be explained in a rational way. God is mystery as much as anything else, and a plodder like me can have as deep a connection with God as a theological genius.

A lot of people who feel guilty about having doubts are worried about things that seem unbelievable – the literal interpretation of the Bible being a major stumbling block.

But the majority of Christian scholars have not interpreted the Bible literally for centuries. It is not a historical or scientific document in the modern sense. Holy writ can be true without being factual.

There are always going to be good reasons why the most faithful of us have trouble seeing where God is – when we run up against appalling suffering and shocking evil for example. But these are dilemmas that we need to address if we are to grow into a mature faith.

The one thing it is fatal for Christians to do is to pretend – either that they have all the answers, or that the questions have not occurred to them. Australians, with their finely honed crap detectors see right through such phoniness.

Church at its best is where we can be honest about our doubts and questions.

Together, as faithful, doubting Christians, we can explore the many fine minds who have tackled these issues, we can share our own experiences of finding God in the depths, and we can pray for ourselves and each other as we wrestle with the uncertainty and ambiguity in life. Together we can echo the words of the father in Mark’s gospel who asked Jesus to heal his son – ‘Lord, I believe, help my unbelief’.

How it felt to lose my job

At the end of 2002, the collapse of Ansett promted me to write a reflection on my own experience of being retrenched, exactly a year before. Once again, job loses are dominating the news. Here is my take, wiritten nine years ago, on how it feels:

Is it my imagination, or do more people lose their jobs in December than at any other time? Last year, it was my turn. Four days before last Christmas, I was laid off. Rocked up to work on a Friday morning, looking forward to holidays, feeling festive. Was called into the group manager’s office and told not to come back after the break. Reading about Ansett’s demise this week brought it all back.

I got on fine with the bloke who had to tell me, and he probably felt as wretched as I did. He did the deed as gently as he could, but there’s no nice way to tell someone they’re fired. And in actual fact, I wasn’t exactly fired. There was a new CEO, there was a major restructure, I was a casual. It happens.

It took me a while to absorb what he was saying. Even when it had sunk in, I was in a state of shock more than anything else. I went back to my desk, and actually kept working on what I’d been doing when I was called to his office, kept finishing off an article I was writing, till I realised I didn’t have to finish anything off any more.

I had no idea what to do. I went back and asked if I should clear my desk of all my personal belongings, as if instructions to do that would mean that he was really serious. He said yes.

I went back to my desk and e-mailed one of the colleagues I was closest to. He sat in the desk opposite, but I didn’t trust myself to speak. I just wrote ‘Emergency. I need a coffee off the premises.’ He’d guessed. One of the awful things was that everyone had guessed, because I’d been called in and the office door had been shut and, at the risk of overstating things, the atmosphere reminded me of when I was a nurse and someone on the ward had just died.

My work mate took me out for latte and sympathy, unperturbed by my sodden face on the other side of the table. I went back to the office and started taking down the photos of my kids and the cartoons I’d stuck up. I rang my husband whose loving voice completely undid me and I started to cry in earnest. I lowered my head behind the partition of my workstation, not wanting to embarrass anyone.

All afternoon, as I packed my working life into cardboard boxes, my colleagues kept coming quietly up to my desk and expressing their regret. Their warmth and affirmation and sadness carried me through the day. I walked home in a daze, my arms full of flowers that they had rushed out and bought, and felt almost high on their support, the way you do after a really good funeral.

Next day reality hit home. It was hard to get enthused about Christmas. I cried on and off for three days. I was surprised at how discarded I felt. I had fought my way back into the workforce after many years at home with children, retraining as a mature-age student, fitting classes and assessment in between babies’ sleeps and picking older kids up from school.

Employment had meant a lot to me. I had felt fantastic about holding down a job, contributing to the family coffers after so many years of hard, worthwhile, but unpaid work. I loved the routine of getting to work, checking my e-mails, making the coffee, saying g'day to my mates, hitting my stride for the day. I even felt chuffed that I earned enough to have to pay tax.

Now, I was devastated. I made light of my feelings, saying to myself and others that I was lucky, hey, I’d only been a casual, my husband has a job, I have lots of other things in my life, something else will turn up. I thought of people much worse off than I was. But still I felt gutted.

We had paid for the family Christmas presents, we had paid for a long awaited holiday in Tasmania. I knew this would be exactly what the doctor ordered, but felt as flat as a tack. Holidays don’t have the same allure when there’s no job to come back to.

Something changes when you get the sack. I’m very cagey, now, about getting too comfortable in a job. Even more than before, I feel pathetically grateful to anyone who will employ me. And someone has. Something did turn up. I have been lucky, and have scored some work. It’s only temporary, but the boost that even temporary work gives you is not to be underestimated. And there’s always the possibility that it may lead on to something else.

But I’m still edgy and nervous, and a bit less confident about life progressing in an even line, from strength to strength. And there must be many people out there feeling like that right now.

Coffee - enough already!

You know you’re a Melburnian when…you think ‘IF I READ ONE MORE FREAKING ARTICLE ABOUT COFFEE I WILL THROW UP!’ You also know you’re a Melburnian (and apologies to the back page of The Sunday Age X 2) when you find yourself writing in caps for emphasis and realise you’re hoping to channel Danny Katz, in the vain hope that you might be even a quarter as funny as he is.

But back to the coffee. Free with last Friday’s paper, Age readers received just what we all need so badly – The coffee army handbook 2012 – just shy of 50 pages of beautifully produced photos and text about the best places in Melbourne to get your caffeine fix. Complete with arty rings of faux coffee stains on every page.

Well I don’t know about other subscribers, but I’VE HAD ENOUGH!

Don’t get me wrong. I’m partial to a decent coffee. Two or three times a week I will spend good money on one, and feel a little cheated if it’s not up to scratch. And the Melbourne obsession with coffee is endearing up to a point. As are our quirky, grungy laneways with their café culture that is probably one of the most harmless ways in the western world of having fun.

But I think we’ve all gone a bit nuts. Make sure your barista works only with fair trade beans by all means, but do we really need hundreds of different varieties of beans (100 percent Bolivian single-origin anyone?) Not to mention the machines (with costs ranging from a cheap and nasty $7000 Wega Atlas to the piece de resistance, a custom La Marzocco Mistral, a steal at $30,000). Then there’s the milk – it’s important to ensure the cows that produced it were eating the right kind of feed at the time. Of course.

And while I’m being a grumpy old woman, I’m also over photos of young hipsters standing artily in front of an exposed brick wall or artisan crafted table or old school shop counter, or leaning back on Bentwood chairs. Am I the only one who feels there’s something a little self-conscious and self-indulgent about all this? 

Clothes, food, wine and coffee can be a lot of fun. But we seem to have turned the pursuit of the perfect shoe/wine/degustation menu/latte into a religion.

I suspect that this obsession with the perfect, to be found out there somewhere in some paradise of cool, stops us enjoying more ordinary stuff that we can do and make ourselves. The colossal popularity of cooking shows and competitions are a case in point. I get the feeling that the more people watch cooking shows, the less they make their own food. Just as I reckon the people with spotless stainless steel kitchens tend to mostly eat out; it’s the more humble kitchens that get to see the real action. 

And, call me a moralistic kill-joy, but apart from anything else, there’s something a little obscene about spending so much time, energy, money and newsprint on finding the perfect coffee in a world where millions of people don’t have clean water.

Soft

Back when the acronym DINKY (‘Double income no kids’) was first around, I invented one of my own for people like us – SLINKY – ‘Single lousy income numerous kids’. 

Life was good and we lacked for nothing that mattered, but there weren’t many dollars in the bank at the end of each fortnight. Despite this, when I was heavily pregnant with our third baby, I bought what felt at the time to be a luxury item – a soft, white towelling robe that cost $60 – purchased on a rare trip to Melbourne from the Western District town where we lived.

It was the kind of garment that stars wore in movies, that sleek looking couples in ads for luxury hotels got about in. I thought I was the bees’ knees. I had bought it with the idea that I would have something respectable for my hospital stay, and some of the first photos of our little son show him wrapped in my arms and me wrapped in the snowy luxury of my glamorous new robe. 

Once I was no longer pregnant it was too big, but that only made me feel more protected and sheltered in it and it was a perfect colour to camouflage the drips of baby sick that were a permanent feature of my shoulders in those years. It rapidly became one of my favourite garments. Towards the end of my fourth pregnancy, it fit perfectly once more, and the two oldest children took to calling me ‘the great white haystack’.

The baby whose birth I bought it for is now 21; that dressing gown has never been replaced and is still my most comforting thing to wear. Having just been home for a week and forced to have my feet up much of the time, some mornings I haven’t bothered to get dressed at all, but have happily lounged around it in all day. Yesterday I had to wash it, as the collar and cuffs were no longer white but a dirty grey-brown, and I hung it lovingly on the line for the kind sun to bleach it back to creamy white.

These days, even when it’s fresh off the clothesline, it is a shadow of its former self. There’s a small rip in the front that I’ve never bothered to fix, maybe because I like working my fingers through it when I’m talking on the phone. Where the collar meets the back wore through years ago, and I patched it; now the patch itself has worn out. In several places, the towelling has completely disappeared, leaving bald, thin cotton. But it is soft, so soft, soft in the way that only very old cloth can be.

Over the years I have had a few of these garments that are so old and well washed that they positively caress you when you put them on. My old dressing gown is still a couple of sizes too big, and when I belt it tight, it feels as though a dear old friend is putting their arms around me. Shrugging it on brings back memories of pregnancy and breast-feeding and years of the children coming into our big bed for a cuddle every morning.

I love the fact that still, in a completely different phase of my life, I feel consoled and sheltered by this shabby old piece of material. These days most of our kids have left home and we are both in paid jobs; if I wanted to replace my robe with a flash new model, I could easily afford to. But that’s not going to happen until it falls apart comprehensively. And even then, I doubt I’ll throw it out. It will be kept in a high cupboard, along with a few of the kids’ baby clothes – a talisman against a world in which the shiny new is always assumed to be better.

The plan is that there is no plan

When it comes to the big picture, I’m a pretty go with the flow, see what comes out of left field kind of person. Move to the country? Sure, let’s give it a burl. Take a job as an event manager even though I have no qualifications or experience? Yeah, why not? I’m a big fan of left field – it has been good to me.

Give me the minutiae of everyday life, however, and I plan my days in 30-minute segments. I’m the list queen. My weekends start with a timed list on the back of an envelope – two 30 minute walks with the dog are scheduled, one each end of the day, as is ‘reading the paper in bed’, shopping, cooking, cleaning the house, writing the weekly blog post, even napping. An unanticipated drop in by a friend or neighbour can throw my whole day into chaos. In the Myers-Briggs personality inventory, I am pure ‘J’ – organised, anally-retentive, needing to know well in advance what is going to happen.

My husband is a more spontaneous ‘P’ type. If we have a day off together, he may say, ‘let’s go to a movie’, at which I take a deep breath, bite my tongue, mentally rearrange my to do list and say, ‘great idea’. Sometimes, on a holiday morning when we are having our second cup of tea over books and papers in bed, I say to him, ‘What’s the plan?’ and he responds, ‘The plan is that there is no plan’, causing me equal measures of panic and excitement. 

So, just this last weekend, after I’d had surgery on my knee and was told I had to keep my feet up for three days, I decided to conduct a bold experiment. No plans and no lists for 72 hours.

It has been exhilarating, terrifying and strange. Friday, still a bit spaced out from morphine and my first general anaesthetic since I was a kid, I slept for a good deal of the day. Saturday and Sunday, I read the weekend papers in bed for hours. Literally. But I didn’t write ‘10-12.30 read weekend paper’ as I might have done in the past. No, the new me read the paper till she felt like stopping. Sometimes she just stretched out in bed and stared at the ceiling. She knitted with her daughter. She didn’t go to church. She rang friends, just to chat, and didn’t panic when a couple of mates dropped in unannounced.

Yes, I know, it does sound a bit tragic. It’s not all bad, however. It’s how I’ve managed to keep writing through years of childrearing and paid work. Up until now, in most ways, my J-ness has served me well.

But now that I am no longer in charge of running a big family, it might pay me to loosen up a little. Having long established the habit of writing thousands of words every week, being a little less organised might help develop my creativity in unexpected directions. It might make me a more relaxed friend, mum and partner. Three days of enforced and utter idleness might be just the shock therapy required to kick start a new, laid-back, slightly more spontaneous me.