The Sin of Certainty: Why God Desires Our Trust More Than Our Correct Beliefs

by Peter Enns

  But so many feel like they have to fake it.

  They have heard sermons and lessons their whole lives where they were taught to think of the world in a certain “Christian” way, and then maybe in high school, maybe in college, they begin to see that life is more complicated and God doesn’t work according to the plan. So a major disconnect rises up between what they had been taught and what they see. Their faith is no longer a convincing way of explaining the world, and so they leave it.

  But we are pilgrims and have a lot in common with other pilgrims who also felt God’s absence right in the Bible.

  And then there’s Jesus. On the cross, Jesus experienced the kind of dying we are talking about here and that is sure to come our way: God’s abandonment—“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46). No last-minute rescue. There couldn’t be. For Jesus, as for us, abandonment had to happen. Our periods of doubt, where God seems absent or in hiding, move us by God’s grace further on in the journey, even when we may feel like we’ve left the path altogether. We are at that moment following the path that Jesus blazed.

  Feeling abandoned by God may make us more like Jesus than when things are floating along swimmingly.

  I first encountered this way of processing faith when I was introduced by some friends to the “dark night of the soul” and two sixteenth-century Spanish mystics, St. John of the Cross and his mentor Teresa of Ávila.

  The dark night is the unrelenting sense of painful alienation and distance from God felt as distress, anxiety, discouragement, despair, and depression—and I’ve learned that it’s a lot more common among us than we might feel comfortable admitting. Some experience this darkness more intensely than others, some for longer times than others. But the feeling is the same: they lose a sense of closeness to God and conclude that they no longer “have faith.” And so they despair even more.

  St. John’s insight, which has meant a lot to me, is that the dark night is a special sign of God’s presence. Our false god is being stripped away, and we are left empty—with none of the familiar ideas of God that we create to prop us up. The dark night takes away the background noise we have created in our lives in order to prepare us to hear God’s voice later on—in God’s time.

  When the dark night comes upon us, we are being invited to surrender to God and trust him anyway. And, of course, this is very hard to do and leads us to why it’s called a dark night in the first place: we have no control over what is happening. We all want to stay in control, especially people like me with the whole German type A personality thing going on. Darkness takes control away from us—which we hate.

  I have several phobias. Here’s one of them.

  Imagine you’re hiking along a wooded trail, and you come to an opening in the rocks—a mine shaft. You poke your head in and see a railroad car empty and resting on the tracks. You climb in to see what it feels like, which sounds like a good idea at the time—until your shifting weight nudges the car forward.

  Before you even know what is happening, you’re gathering speed. Within moments, the car is going too fast to jump out. Plus, now it’s dark, and you can’t see a thing. You’re stuck and begin to panic. Where is this thing taking you? All you know is you’re going down, you’re probably going to die, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

  Soon you find that what you used to call “dark” gets even darker. You go on like this, faster and faster, deeper and deeper, for who knows how long, minutes that seem like hours. But then the slope begins to even out and the car slows before coming to an even stop.

  You are now completely alone in a cave, far, far beneath the familiar surface. Probably thousands of feet down. All around you is a silence you never knew was possible, enough to hear the blood squishing through your veins. And it’s so dark that the “pitch darkness” of even a secluded cabin would literally be a welcome sight.

  You are completely disoriented. You have no sense of your surroundings—where the walls are, where the ground rises or falls. Unless you have the emotional capacity of a shrimp, you’d be scared out of your mind—maybe having a panic attack. “No problem, I got this; I’ll just sit here and work this out” isn’t part of your thinking process right now.

  And finding a way out seems hopeless. You’re just wondering whether you should risk moving at all. Eventually, you try to grope about on your knees, then take a few steps, gingerly at first, one way, then the other. Soon you realize that wherever you are, it’s vast, dark, and flat, and you can’t do anything about it. And you’d give an eye and a lung for a flashlight.

  You are out of control. The dark controls you. That’s what dark does.

  Okay, that’s a made-up story. Here’s a real one—which changed my perspective on faith about as much as anything I can remember.

  In 1975 the Jesuit philosopher John Kavanaugh went to work for three months at the Home for the Dying in Calcutta, India, with Mother Teresa. He was searching for an answer to his spiritual struggles. On his very first morning there, he met Mother Teresa.

  “And what can I do for you?” she asked.

  Kavanaugh asked her to pray for him.

  “What do you want me to pray for?” she asked.

  He answered with what I’m sure he felt was a perfectly reasonable and humble request, in fact the very reason for which he traveled thousands of miles to India in the first place: “Pray that I have clarity.”

  “No. I will not do that.”

  Kavanaugh asked her why.

  “Clarity is the last thing you are clinging to and must let go of.”

  “But you always seem to have clarity.”

  Mother Teresa laughed. “I have never had clarity. What I have always had is trust. So I will pray that you trust God.”

  The first time I read this well-known story I was passing through my own loss of clarity, and God was a no-show in my life. I was like John Kavanaugh—a “clinger,” holding on to clarity so I could diagnose what the problem was, fix it, and move forward.

  Wanting clarity is seeking some sort of control. A flashlight in the mine shaft. That’s “all” I wanted. It doesn’t even have to be on all the time. Just when I need it so I can get my bearings. I can handle this dark night, but on my terms.

  But this is the dark night. No bearings for you. Then it wouldn’t be dark anymore.

  Darkness takes away control, what Thomas Keating and others call the “ego,” that part of us that simply has to be in charge of our lives. That part that wants to cling to life, whereas Jesus says every part of us needs to die—especially the part that wants to retain control.

  The darkness does us a favor by exposing control as an illusion. When everything is removed, “Where can I take back some control here?” eventually ceases being the active question and is replaced with a plea: “Lord, help me let go of control. Help me die. Help me trust.”

  That choice, it seems to me, sums up the life of Christian faith. And that is so very hard—and if anyone tells you Christianity is a crutch, you should take one of those crutches and beat him over the head with it (in Christian love, of course, making sure to tell them you will be praying for a quick recovery).

  And you know, maybe that mine-shaft car doesn’t come loose on its own. Maybe God nudges it a bit.

  Let’s Bring This Aboveground

  If you’re guilt stricken because you harbor doubts and just can’t seem to have your act together and be a happy Christian like your roommate or that lady in church, listen to Mother Teresa. According to her own journal, she was in her dark night more or less from 1948 until near the time of her death in 1997.

  And all those noble and self-sacrificial things she did, things that may have made her one of the few public religious leaders who’s never been the subject of an SNL skit or a Daily Show takedown. Perhaps her long dark night fueled her life, where she kept moving anyway, as an act of trust so deep it cannot be rationally explained—and indeed would look foolish if anyone tried. And the result was about as clear a J
esus movement as you can point to in recent history. Mother Teresa learned trust—not clarity, not certainty, but trust in God. And all of that poured out to the people around her.

  I’ve heard it said many times: “Let go and let God.” Or as the hymn says, “All to Jesus I surrender, all to him I freely give.” But “letting go” and “surrendering all” might be more than we bargained for, and not something we can easily pull off on our own steam, nor might it even occur to us to try. Again, we’re talking about a deep transformation, so deep it is described in the Bible as being nailed to a beam and left to suffocate slowly. And the self does not die quietly. We do not willingly go into the dark night.

  When we are not letting go, when we try to stay in control of something—when we are “clinging” to something, as Mother Teresa said—perhaps that is when God mercifully turns off the light and makes it dark. Not because God is against us, but because God is for us.

  When we are out of control, that is when God can speak to us—without all of the layers of God talk we have piled up inside of us. God puts us out of our control so that we can learn to trust rather than cling to knowing what we believe—a deeper state of being that the familiar meanings of belief and faith don’t quite get to.

  Trust.

  Trust is letting go and learning to lean on God, and not our own insight, as we saw in Proverbs 3:5. Then we can get a taste at least of true liberation from our attachments, from our fears, and live with freedom and joy. That is the Christian journey. That is resurrection now.

  One cannot have contentment in the Christian life without the darkness. Dying is the only path to resurrection, and that is the only way of knowing God. There is no shortcut. Jesus himself is our model for this.

  When faith has no room for the benefit of doubt, then we are just left with religion, something that takes its place in our lives along with other things—like a job and a hobby.

  Doubt is God’s way of helping us not go there, though the road may be very hard and long.

  Chapter Eight

  Cultivating a Habit of Trust

  Deep calls to deep . . . all your waves and your billows have gone over me.

  —Psalm 42:7

  Do not let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God, trust also in me.

  —adapted from John 14:1

  Ever Have One of Those Decades?

  Me too. Mine was in the 2000s. My forties.

  Life happened—quickly and often. It was a rough time, but I learned a lot about myself that I needed to learn, more than I ever thought I could know. I was beginning to see the difference between trusting God and controlling God in my thoughts.

  To tell my story, I need to mention briefly the story of another, our daughter Elizabeth. Lizz’s story is hers to tell, not mine, but she’s allowed me to open that door to shed just enough light on how this one father, husband, and professor learned in his forties what he wished he had learned decades earlier.

  Lizz had from day one been strong, extroverted, adventurous, cute as a button, and flat out spasm-inducing funny. Around the age of eight, however, she came to be fearful, unwilling to venture out and do the things she had always loved doing. In time, we all learned to give it a name: anxiety. The years that followed were difficult. Sue and I were winging it, pretty clueless about what anxiety was and how to address it.

  Speaking now only for myself, my entire focus was on “fixing” my daughter. My intention was noble: I wanted to rescue her, but I only came to see years later that Lizz’s battle with anxiety brought to the surface my own; by fixing Lizz, I was really trying to soothe myself. That dynamic only makes things worse for everyone, but I had no self-understanding about any of it.

  I had been able to cover up my anxieties for most of my life, but when “life happens”—especially with your children—your world becomes chaotic and impossible to manage, like herding cats. Before you know it, you’re overwhelmed. The long and short of it is that from the time Lizz was about eight until she was nearly seventeen, I was emotionally raw and walking on eggshells. Lizz’s anxiety was not in my control, which made me more anxious, and round and round it went. It would take me years before I saw the toll that my thinking patterns took on me.

  When Lizz was sixteen, her anxiety had become a lot more intense, and, among other things, she was in the early stages of an eating disorder. After a lot of searching, phone calls, and meetings, we eventually wound up making the hardest decision of our parenting lives. The best thing for Lizz was to get away from our family for a time. She would spend eight weeks in a therapeutic wilderness program in the hills of Georgia, and then go directly to a therapeutic boarding school in Arizona. Both were completely new concepts for us.

  I actually felt relieved that Lizz would be in a setting where she could be helped. My hovering wasn’t good for her, and it was harming me. On the other hand, sending your child to live in the woods without being able to monitor her (visits aren’t allowed) was sad and fearful for both Sue and me. And then boarding school in Arizona?! Might as well be Siberia.

  But those months away from home—sixteen in all—were healing for Lizz and for us. No one was fixed. In fact, during regular family therapy weekends in Arizona, the very idea of fixing other people was practically beaten out of me by some of the most compassionate and skilled people I ever met. And so we were all on a road to recovery. Things were looking up, and we were all encouraged.

  By traveling such a difficult and lonely road and for so long, Lizz had gained tremendous spiritual insight. She experienced firsthand that when all you know of your life is ripped away from you—childlike trust in God is all have you have, and it is enough.

  I was happy for Lizz and relieved—for both of us. As far as I was concerned, Lizz was back and our troubles were behind us.

  Not quite. I had no clue I was next on God’s to-do list. I was about to take my own trip to Arizona.

  Live Strong

  About a month before Lizz left for Georgia, I joined my son Erich’s college baseball team on their spring training trip. As a lifelong Protestant, the baseball season was about the closest thing I had to a liturgical year, which begins for me, as it did for the ancient Israelites, in March (although mine doesn’t involve a barley harvest).

  And did I mention spring training was in Arizona?

  I didn’t know it at the time, but along with watching eight games in seven days, I was also scouting out the area where Lizz, in a few weeks’ time, would begin a fourteen-month stay.

  Before I left, Sue and I knew that Lizz would need to leave home very soon, and Lizz knew it, too. She asked me if I could bring home, of all things, a yellow Livestrong bracelet (long before Lance Armstrong’s steroid scandal). I would have plenty of time to visit some malls, and this was at least something I could do to make Lizz feel better. But no luck. No one carried them, which seemed odd, since they were a “thing” at the time.

  Lizz understood, but I so wanted her to have some symbol of strength. Even her asking for a symbol was a sign that she was determined to find a way to have courage and live her life.

  Later that week, the players and their parents were at a poolside cookout hosted by two wonderful and generous college alumni. Being the congenial fellow I am, I struck up a conversation with our host, John, while he was flipping burgers. He stretched out his arm to reach for the seasoning, and on his wrist, what do I see two feet in front of me? Nothing other than the elusive yellow Livestrong bracelet—waving it like it was a banner.

  I couldn’t believe it. What a stroke of luck.

  I’ll bet he knows where I can find one. Maybe . . . nah, that’s crazy . . . but maybe he even has an extra one. That’s stupid. Who carries extra yellow Livestrong bracelets?!

  But still, of all the possible strangers to meet in some random state I’d never been to, John was wearing the exact same bracelet I’d been seeking throughout greater Phoenix.

  I still have a couple of days left in Arizona, plenty of time to pick one up. He’ll know
where to get one.

  And even as I was processing that thought, I felt a chill up my back, a sense that something bigger was happening.

  “Hey, you’re wearing a Livestrong bracelet.”

  “Do you want one?”

  (Momentary silence. I’m stunned.)

  “I have a garbage bag of them inside. You can have a few.”

  A bag full. An abundance where my efforts had produced not a single one.

  John answered a question I didn’t ask. In fact, I didn’t even ask a question.

  By all appearances and in accordance with the accepted rules of social convention, I was simply making polite small talk: “Hey, love your cross-trainers. What year’s your Volvo? When did you have your awesome grill put in?”

  John should have responded in one of countless socially appropriate small-talk ways—“Yes, I’m a fan.” “My friend has cancer, and I’m supporting him.” “I’ve worn it for years.” Something like that.

  But instead, out of the blue, and without even a transitional comment—“Yeah, a friend of mine has cancer, so I wear it all the time. Say, do you want one? I’ve got a bunch left over from a fundraiser”—he just asked me, “Do you want one?”

  Like he had heard a question where I only made a statement.

  Like God was saying, “Move over, Enns. I’ll ask him myself.”

  “Sure,” was all I could bring myself to say.

  I was an emotional wreck to begin with, but at this I had to turn away. I also felt my knees weaken, so I moved to a chair a few feet away and began to hold back tears. The party was going on all around me, and I was sitting there in my own world—in one of those surreal states where your periphery gets cloudy, like you’re in a dream tunnel. Did that just happen?

  A rubber bracelet. Such a dumb little thing. But I felt a Presence, and I “knew”—not in my mind, where I like to keep my knowing—but in my whole person, in defiance of my reason, that I was loved and remembered in the midst of my own fear and helplessness. I was overcome by hope, and glimpsed just enough to keep me going, that Lizz was not my problem to fix, that I had to let go of that very thought, and that I could trust God with my daughter. And as I came to see more clearly in time, this moment was simply an early step in unlearning control and cultivating a habit of trust.