“For every gain in deep certitude there is a corresponding growth of spiritual ‘doubt’. This doubt is by no means opposed to genuine faith, but it mercilessly examines and questions the spurious ‘faith’ of everyday life, the human faith which is nothing but the passive acceptance of conventional opinion.”
Thomas Merton
New Seeds of Contemplation
I began my journey more than 40 years ago with the certainty of the naive. I had known pain. My own loneliness as a five-foot one-inch, 97 pound 15 year old is what lead me to religion in the first place. A simple invitation from a cute girl in algebra and I was being picked up for mass each Sunday at 9:40 (thank you Renee Williamson). I began a “personal relationship with Christ” a year later after a week at Malibu Club in Canada.
My certainty grew with my new found “faith”, both out of my personal experience (the human mind is, after all, hard wired to find evidence to support its existing belief system) and in my understanding of the Bible as the unerring word of God as passed on to me by my Young Life leaders. Mine was a faith that left no room for doubt. If I had a question, the Bible had a four square answer with a roof. Doubt was the antithesis of faith.
Which isn’t to say my journey wasn’t interrupted by a few things over the years. College, fraternity, the discovery of beer and girls that actually paid attention to me pulled me off course for a few years. But by junior year I was back on the straight and narrow, leading a Young Life Club of my own at Shorecrest High School, leading bible studies in my fraternity and a few others and even starting an outreach in the Greek System called UW Club. Each and every passing experience reaffirmed to me the wisdom of my faith and cemented in me the certainty that I was on the narrow road through the eye of the camel (to mix a metaphor).
My view began to change when my friend Stu gave me a copy of “Disappointment with God” by Philip Yancey which lead me to “The Myth of Certainty” by Daniel Taylor. Both were salves to the nagging doubts that had crept into the anteroom of my faith in the years after I married. The peace and wholeness that was supposed to come from settling in with the one God had chosen for you never materialized in our 400 square foot apartment. Only arguments over dirty clothes, unloaded dishwashers and what to watch on television that night followed by passionate apologies and the subtle desperation that comes with the realization that this is what you chose and it wasn’t getting magically better.
Suddenly I understood, intellectually at least, that certainty cheapens faith. In fact, faith is impossible in the face of certainty. Faith, by definition, is that which we believe but cannot prove. Certainty is that which we know without doubt. Faith says “I believe in God, but can’t prove that He exists.” That belief is based in a trust of my personal experience. The best I can offer in proof are anecdotes and analogies. The ancient Hebrews had the Ark of The Covenant with them, Taylor says, physical proof of God’s existence. And yet it did not inspire faith or love for God.
Mine was not a popular opinion in my Evangelical community. I had many heated discussions with friends about whether the Bible was the unerring word of God or if it was merely God’s wisdom as written by holy men, fallible and true all at the same time. Even then I was beginning to develop the muscle of resisting dualistic thinking, though I didn’t understand it as that at the time.
When Griffin was diagnosed with Spina Bifida I was rocked to my core. My designs for a lightly blemished, model Christian life were destroyed. God’s part in my life was similarly displaced. I cloaked my existential doubts in pseudo-spiritual intellectualism, proclaiming that Griffin’s disability was caused by Sin (with the capital “S”) let loose in the world, like cancer or autism, a cosmic roll of the dice gone bad. God did not cause this. I bristled at the notion that God had given me this situation as people tritely observed, “God doesn’t give us more than we can handle.” My trite retort was, “well if Griffin’s wheelchair is God’s gift, I’d like to regift it. To you.”
Deep down, in the unconscious, I think I was indeed asking why God let this happen to me. That a God in whom I believed had wounded my son was unforgivable. I largely shelved my faith for 15 years, wandering about the wilderness, burying the wound to my soul in the seeking of happiness, the acquisition of things and of friends and the pursuit of advancement at work and socially. In some perverse way, Griffin’s disability was my Ark of the Covenant in reverse: it was proof on wheels that the God I once believed in no longer existed. But to admit even that was too painful.
On a rainy winter Monday night in Atlanta a voicemail appeared on my phone. I hadn’t seen the phone ring, which wasn’t unusual as we live in an area we call the “cell hole”. So I listened to the voicemail. It was a male nurse at Wellstar Cobb Hospital asking me to call him back. Griffin was obviously back in the hospital for god knew what reason. The last time he had done an inpatient stay at Ridgeview he ended up at Wellstar with a 104 degree fever, a UTI and a severe case of diarrhea that made a return to Ridgeview a “medical impossibility” according to the Ridgeview medical director, who had assisted in cleaning the outcome.
So it was not with a small bit of frustration that I called Wellstar back. This stay at Ridgeview was a bit of a last hope. Griffin was severely depressed, ignoring his self-care which left us cleaning sheets and disinfecting mattresses as he slept the day away in his own waste. And only recently had we uncovered the accelerant: Griffin was drinking any alcohol within his wheelchair bound grasp: leftover wine from dinner, errant beers left in the upstairs fridge, and only recently malt liquor he’d buy on his own on the way home from school. We moved all of the alcohol downstairs and out of his reach, confiscated his driver’s license and insisted he begin attending AA meetings. And yet and still…he drank the cooking wine stored in a cabinet in the garage and passed out in the kitchen with his shorts down to his knees. It was time to give Ridgeview another try.
I went about Monday evening chores as I waited on hold on speaker. I began to warm leftovers, emptied the dishwasher, greeted Gretchen as she arrived home. I explained with a sigh that I was on hold with Wellstar and Griffin was likely back in the hospital. She sighed, too, as she went to change out of her nursing scrubs.
The nurse finally answered the phone. “This is Stephen.”
“Hi, this is Sean Shannon. You called.”
“Uh, hang on,” Stephen said as I heard paper shuffling. “Are you Griffin Shannon’s father?” he asked.
“Yes, I am,” I replied.
“We need you to come here as soon as you can. Do you know where we are?” he said flatly.
“Can you tell me what’s going on?” I asked, my heart rate quickening. I am no wilting flower when it comes to calls from the hospital with Griffin. By our last count Griffin was approaching 40 stays and 24 surgeries. It takes a bit to get me anxious. This was different.
“We just need you to get here as soon as possible. Do you need the address?”
“No, we know where it is.”
I knew in that moment he was gone. I told Gretchen what the nurse had said. She knew as well. But neither of us would say it. In our silence he could still be alive. In the 25 minutes it took to drive to Wellstar Cobb Hospital he could be alive. In the walk from the emergency room to the family room, he could be alive. Neither of us dared spoke lest the breath behind our words extinguish his. The ER attending physician arrived.
“Your son passed away at…” His words faded into nothingness. He spoke further about time, circumstance, I don’t really remember. What I do remember is that my son was dead. And so was the construct of the God I knew.
