Oars in water Photo: Beth Jusino / flickr CC
Exploring doubt
Rosalind Smith writes about a book on loss and belonging
The cover of a book does not usually influence me but I admit to being immediately moved by this one. It shows a photograph of a lowering, open sky and the hauntingly bleak, flat marshes of the north Norfolk coastline: wild, wet and wind-swept, beloved of artists, walkers, bird-watchers and others. A single rowing boat lies tilted on its side amongst the dark green vegetation and rivulets that flow towards the not far distant sea.
This single lonely boat is almost a metaphor for the content of the book – Exploring Doubt: Landscapes of Loss and Longing by Alex Wright – the place in which any of us can find ourselves when we have experienced loss in our personal lives: alone and stranded. The author found himself in this condition on the breakup of his marriage, and the sudden disintegration of his life, as he knew it: ‘I felt lost on an uncharted map of darkness… I had no map, no plan, no safe haven and no way of reaching safe harbour. The idea of God seemed almost impossibly far away.’
This initially overwhelming feeling of doubt and sense of despair gave way to a determination to ‘make it through’ and he found himself drawing on the hope and solace offered by friends, a rich blend of literature and ‘the solitariness and melancholy beauty’ of the Norfolk coastline, and his realisation of the inherent importance of doubt and uncertainty in the process of moving forward.
The author touches upon the history of the area and its three well-known mystics, Richelde, Julian and Margery Kempe, and this leads on to a wider consideration of medieval mysticism, that which has often encouraged us to try and think of what God might be in terms of what he is not. He quotes from the anonymous mystical text, The Cloud of Unknowing, written in the second half of the fourteenth century:
If you wish to enter into this Cloud, to be at home in it, and to take up the work of contemplative love as I urge you to, there is something else you must do. Just as the cloud of unknowing lies above you, between you and your God, so you must fashion a cloud of forgetting beneath you, between you and every created thing. The cloud of unknowing will perhaps leave you with the feeling that you are far from God. But no, if it is authentic, only the absence of a cloud of forgetting keeps you from him now.
Many mystics have felt abandoned by God. St John of the Cross speaks of the dark night of the soul: ‘a dark contemplation that is painful to the soul’. Teresa of Avila once said to God: ‘If this is how you treat your friends, no wonder you have so few.’
Similar expressions of doubt are found in the writings of the Umbrian mystic Angela of Foligno, and the medieval Beguine mystic Hadewijch, who writes of something called ‘unfaith – a loving doubt in relation to God which deepens the soul’.
Many of us, perhaps most, can resonate with these doubts and misgivings at least during some part of our own lives. Alex Wright speaks about the Psalms and their relevance to us today, finding a profound value in ‘immersing in the darkness, in a preparedness to enter the pit – to experience desolation, deprivation and the loss of all hope’ because only then ‘may we fully experience the light that blinds us when our release is eventually secured.’
Exploring Doubt: Landscapes of Loss and Longing by Alex Wright is published by Darton, Longman and Todd at £12.99. ISBN: 9780232530605.
