“Ever since I was old enough to fold my hands and close my eyes, I’ve said prayers to God, answered ‘Jesus’ to all the children’s sermons questions, celebrated Easter and Jesus’s resurrection, believed that God would take care of me. But now, I wonder . . .” One or more of your students at some time, if they feel safe from any hint of judgment or of being misunderstood, may have hesitantly expressed this attitude to you, in class or in personal conversation. They may only be testing themselves as one of the experiences associated with growing up: “What does saying ‘I doubt’ feel like? Can we talk about it?” Belief is not really in danger; there is little real doubt that God and God’s salvation exist.
Sometimes, however, for us as well as for our students, the questions go deep. Someone we are close to dies, perhaps at a young age. Or someone we know suffers from leukemia or multiple sclerosis or an automobile accident. Or we are deep in a friendless depression, ignored, cyberbullied, alone. Or perhaps we are consumed by an intensely nagging thought that God is alive but doesn’t care in any form about us. Really, does God exist? Does God care? Such a condition led David and even Jesus to cry out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? . . . I cry by day, and you do not answer” (Ps. 22: 2, 3). Grace is no longer cheap; the search for it has become costly.
Doubt in Literature
Novelists who have been brought up in the Christian tradition often put their characters through this school of costly grace, reflecting in various degrees and with varying results their own struggles with faith and doubt. Given the distance the sensitive reader has from what is in the pages of the novel, she is able to sort out varying characteristics of the issues at stake, in the reader’s world as well as in the narrative’s world.
Two novels that create worlds where the main characters are engaged in conscious, and conscientious, spiritual struggles are Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory and Peter De Vries’s The Blood of the Lamb. In these novels, where fallen worlds are dominated by dying and death, the struggles are realistic, not romanticized, ones: the toothaches are real, the hypodermic needle punctures are painful, the coffee is bitter, the losses are devastating, psychologically and spiritually. The job of a good novel is to make a situation particular, and after we have walked around in these worlds—dirty, sweaty, fallen, but not without moments of power and glory—perhaps we can come out of them more understanding, more accepting, more firmly believing. And perhaps more able to minister to others, such as our students. So what can we experience in the worlds of Greene and De Vries that can enable us to interrelate with our students up against a lonely world, possibly depressing, possibly frightening, potentially perceived as foundationless, and ungraced with belief?
The Power and the Glory
One shape of disabling unbelief is that God exists but that God has abandoned me, for whatever reason. The graphically fallen world that Graham Greene creates in The Power and the Glory is characterized by the unrelenting discomfort of toothaches, mosquito bites, and perpetual, sticky humidity, as well as by spiritual apathy and a sense of being abandoned even by God. “I don’t believe in anything like that. . . . It’s too hot anyway,” one of the characters states (10). The narrative takes place during an anti-Catholic persecution in Central Mexico. Only one priest, the main character of the novel, has so far successfully escaped the persecution. He is an object of contempt to the people he serves: he has an illegitimate daughter, he is an alcoholic (the people call him “the whiskey priest”), and he has been stripped of all his priesthood’s visibly official marks: his vestments, his prayer book, his chalice, his briefcase.He has become an object of contempt, even to himself. Within Catholic theology, he “knows” that God has damned him, because he is serving the Host while in a state of sin, unabsolved by confession to another priest. When he is finally captured and condemned to be shot, he “felt only an immense disappointment because he had to go to God empty-handed, with nothing done at all” (210). In short, he thinks God is there, but God’s salvation is not for him, only God’s damnation, a thought that nags him incessantly throughout the novel.
If we had been left with only the priest’s point of view, we might have been tempted to agree with his self-analysis. But as is typical in his “Catholic” novels, Greene gives us an outside view, almost a God’s-eye-view, of the protagonist’s life. The first and third sections of the novel that surround the priest’s central point of view are made up of the points of view of the people whose spiritual lives the unaware priest has touched positively, however slightly. Like the son in Jesus’s parable who said he would not do what his father told him to do but then went ahead and did it anyway, the priest stays to bring God to God-starved people through the Eucharist where every other priest had run away or been co-opted or executed. Like the Hound of Heaven in Francis Thompson’s poem, God pursues the priest into spiritual meaningfulness in spite of himself.
What’s the takeaway here? First, we have to acknowledge that we, and our students, live in a fallen world, one that is not predisposed to alleviate the doubt, hopelessness, self-loathing, or God-forsakenness that we feel living in it. Second, as the sections of the novel surrounding the priest’s point of view suggest, Providence has a larger pattern for our lives, a pattern that we are participating in without necessarily knowing it. That pattern may include “the dark night of the soul” in the path toward belief. In his struggle for clarity in his tortured relationship with God, Christian Wiman acknowledges, “Sometimes God calls a person to unbelief in order that faith may take new forms” (61). A search for evidence for the pattern in the individual life of a questioning student over against the fallen world can be a worthwhile process.
The Blood of the Lamb
Peter De Vries grew up in the Christian Reformed Church in Englewood in Chicago. In the second half of The Blood of the Lamb, De Vries portrays Don Wanderhope’s experiences with the death of Carol, his twelve-year-old daughter who had leukemia. The second half is linked to the first by the accumulated losses that Wanderhope experiences: his brother’s death by pneumonia, his girlfriend’s death by tuberculosis, his father’s insanity, his wife’s suicide, and then most significantly his daughter’s suffering and dying and, through it all, perhaps his own loss of faith: “The child on the brink of whose grave I tried to recover the faith lost on the edge of my brother’s is the goalkeeper past whom I can now never get” (243–44).
Two features in the experience of the daughter’s death stand out particularly. One is the all-encompassing love Wanderhope feels for his daughter, registered in the gentleness and painfulness with which he describes the inevitable advancement of the disease. The other is the asking of that question that we all ask, or have heard asked, at painful times in our lives: Why does God allow this to happen? C. S. Lewis calls it the problem of pain: specifically, if God is a merciful, loving God, how can he allow children to die of painful and lingering leukemia? “Who creates a perfect blossom to crush it?” Don Wanderhope asks (225).
The solution to the problem is left ambiguous in the novel. Wanderhope throws a cake in the face of a statue of Christ, and he throws away a crucifix; but who is to say that those gestures are indications only of rebellion and not also of submission. Lewis said that the problem of pain does not exist if we don’t already believe that God exists. At the foot of his unconscious child’s bed, Wanderhope states, “Now I was glad that Carol could not see me standing there, alone, at last, on holy ground” (236, emphasis mine). The chronology of Carol’s death follows the chronology of Christ’s death and is traced out in frequent allusions to it, hence the title of the book. In addition, Wanderhope calls himself his father’s son; his father oscillated throughout his life between doubt and belief, at one with the sensitive human’s predicament.
In Christ’s message to the Laodiceans, John writes: “I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot; I wish you were either one or the other! So, because you are lukewarm—neither not nor cold—I am about to spit you out of my mouth” (Rev. 3:15–16). The whiskey priest, Don Wanderhope, and the student struggling with his doubt are not lukewarm; they are not apathetic. “They protest too much,” Hamlet might have said of them. The intensity of their struggle intimates their belief. If you can present your student with that . . .
In The Blood of the Lamb, one of the conclusions that Don Wanderhope draws is that an experience with suffering encourages not just consolation but compassion, the common ground that we must assume in any conversation about doubt with whomever in whatever form it takes. In fact, Wanderhope turns the beatitude around: instead of “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted,” he reformulates it: “Blessed are they that comfort, for they too have mourned” (246). He sees his own experience as a way of understanding other people’s problems and spiritually torturing questions: we sympathize with them; we experience what they experience; we walk in their worlds for a little while. If “one part suffers,” Paul says, “every part suffers with it” (1 Cor. 12:26). These two novels compel us to engage our Christian living with ourselves, other people, our students, and our God at the deepest levels.
Works Cited
De Vries, Peter. The Blood of the Lamb. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.
Greene, Graham. The Power and the Glory. New York: Penguin, 2003.
Wiman, Christian. My Great Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013.
Dan Diephouse is Professor Emeritus of English at Trinity Christian College. He is currently part-time photographer, part-time gardener, all-around housekeeper, and gives poetry readings for the Hope Christian Reformed Church Adult Sunday School.
