A Prayer For When Faith is in Crisis
Or, how the loss of belief is like losing a baby tooth...
Mystery Beyond All Naming,
Be with me in my faith and in my doubt.
Be present when I effortlessly trust in your loving grace, and when I question all concepts, all myths, all images associated with you.
Guide me to remain non-attached and serenely indifferent to the questions that swirl around you and through you.
Help me to remember that uncertainty is not the enemy of faith, nor its opposite. Illuminate my eyes so that I may realize what a gift a centered and contemplative doubt can be.
Show me those places where shame can be released, where anxiety can be assuaged, and where judgment can be gently surrendered into the infinite splendor of love.
Breathe with me, so that I may find love, truth, beauty, wonder, and goodness in every breath, and so that I may find limitless nurture in limitless silence.
And having received so many graces from you, inspire me to be a source of blessings and healing and compassionate care for others as well.
All this I ask in your unspeakable name and unknowable knowing.
Amen.
This prayer is inspired by Brian McLaren’s enormously helpful book Faith After Doubt: Why Your Beliefs Stopped Working and What to Do About It (St. Martin’s Press, 2021). Brian offers a roadmap for adult spirituality, going through four periods of simplicity, complexity, perplexity, and harmony; and he points out how a crisis of belief is often the psychological process that ushers us from one dimension of faith to the next. It is also inspired by an old Buddhist saying that there are three essential elements to Zen practice: great faith, great doubt, and great perseverance (or determination).1
Those who walk the contemplative path might feel tempted to shy away from perplexity or questioning; I know that when I am gripped by uncertainty, it generally feels like I have a problem that needs to be solved. But what if such a crisis of disbelief is not the enemy of spiritual growth, but rather its helper and initiator? If any one stage of faith is like children’s teeth, then isn’t doubt the equivalent to a tooth falling out? Perhaps it’s a bit unpleasant, but ultimately necessary and life-giving because it creates the space in our hearts for a more mature spirituality to take root. But unlike baby teeth that fall out only once in a lifetime, faith can yield to doubt over and over again throughout the lifespan, since we are (at least potentially) always available to grow spiritually.
We comfort our children when they lose their teeth by promising them a visit from the tooth fairy — a Tinkerbellian equivalent to Santa Claus who visits the child at night to remove the tooth from under their pillow, replacing it with a gift of money (when I was young the “payout” was generally 10-25¢ per tooth; I imagine nowadays most kids are expecting at least a dollar if not five!)
If a “faith fairy” could visit us at night to console us every time we’ve traded our belief for doubt, perhaps we would be more willing to go there, trusting that an inner crisis is not necessarily faith destroyed, but often is simply a cocooning of the heart — a caterpillar’s self-giving to make way for a new butterfly of deeper spiritual meaning and purpose.
This is the central idea behind Roshi Philip Kapleau’s classic book The Three Pillars of Zen.