September 26, 2003
Disbelief
It is easy to be lulled into a kind of take-for-granted, here-we-go-again listening to the cyclic pattern of readings from scripture that calendar the seasons of the church’s year. But just as we may be so tempted, there come these startling two-by-fours between our eyes like this morning’s gospel with its unorthodox paramedic casting out demons and its catalog of emergency surgery for the morally lapse (Pent 16/21B, Mk 9.38-43,45,47-48).
These extraordinary stories and others like them about walking on water and being swallowed by fish and turning water into wine at best may strike most of us not only as quaint, but perhaps even absurd. For those who feel they must believe in the inerrancy of scripture, they have to be absolute nightmares. Maybe Paul had this sort of thing in mind when he called the gospel a scandal and a stumbling block to the Greeks and Jews and surely would have included us if we’d been standing around.
But because we are so shocked — and rightly so — our preoccupation with the lack of any convincing fact about them can lead us to risk overlooking what may be any possible convicting truth within them.
So why is it that the obvious consensus of the faithful down through the centuries is to tell these stories over and over and over again? What is there about them that makes a difference? What is there about them that we can believe, that somehow, we must believe? If we are to take comfort in them, how can we?
The 18th-century poet Samuel Coleridge suggested a way. He called it the “willing suspension of disbelief.” He spoke of that childlike ability to believe that is born firmly in each of us, that characteristic which Jesus likened to the presence of the kingdom, but which so often withers as we grow older and are taught that the world of imagination is simply not all that reliable.
The power of Coleridge’s phrase, the “willing suspension of disbelief,” is the conviction that not only disbelief, but belief, as well, is a matter of choice. And that by virtue of God’s creative imagination of us into human being, we are free to choose. Faith, itself, is a choice. It is primarily an act of the will. Just so is the choice to rid ourselves of what may be a clutter of disbelief.
We live in a time when few of us will to believe what we do not already understand or what we have not experienced or what does not meet our own personal criteria in order even to qualify as “experience.” Most of us have not been swallowed by a fish. Most of us have not walked on water, even if in certain moments some of us leave the impression rather that we think we could if brought to the test.
But like Jonah and Peter, for example, who were faced with these things, all of us have been afraid and more than likely will be again. All of us have eyes and hands and feet that haven’t always been morally impeccable. All of us know someone whose faith we are convinced is “less” than our own, but whose faithfulness casts out demons again and again, demons that we can’t even lay a hand on. Our fear to believe, to choose faith, can often be one of our special scandals and stumbling blocks.
We live also in a time when fear of almost any kind is our enemy, when to triumph over fear or even simply to hold fear at bay has become more important than to understand fear. A growing part of our own beloved church is making the strangest of choices in these times, judgments clearly grounded in an obsession with being right and a profound fear of being wrong.
As a nation and as a people, we’ve spent billions to conquer fear, to make ourselves secure from our doorsteps all the way to outer space. This anxiety about a hostile environment without can only create in us a hostile environment within. We greet strangers with at least a mild suspicion, if not more. Addiction, a most singular form of fear, is rampant, not only addiction to chemicals, but addiction to power and to control. Wherever such addiction resides latent in our genes, as the evidence increasingly suggests that it can, fear inevitably drives it out of hiding and into control over us.
Perhaps, then, it may help to suspend our disbelief when we realize that these ancient stories are not so much about controlling fear, but about understanding and naming fear and about understanding the gravity of our moral behavior. We inherit these stories and hear them over and over that we might understand, not that we might better describe or define or convince or demonstrate through research, but that their message might have meaning for us, that it might make sense and become a part of us, that it might ultimately overcome our fear or at least cast it into a manageable perspective.
Just as the will to love precedes true loving, so can the will to suspend disbelief create an environment for believing. One can choose to free oneself of the notion that something must be demonstrably and factually clear before it can be considered true. To open ourselves to that possibility is the meaning and can be the beginning of our spiritual awakening.
Jonah and Peter were rescued because they believed God was accessible even under the most outrageous conditions. Jesus affirmed the man casting out demons even though he was not a card-carrying member of the discipleship. Perhaps that’s the message, the answer, the understanding, even the healing value of a willing suspension of disbelief.