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Words of Robert WestonSome of the most religious people I have known call themselves atheists or agnostics. That might seem a strange statement. A person might say to me, "I don't believe in God." And I might respond, "Well, tell me about the God you don't believe in. Chances are I don't believe in that God either." The reply I receive is often filled with a depth of spiritual honesty, and an unwillingness to assent to what does not ring true to personal experience. It often expresses a faith that is still "in transit," still growing in understandings, on a life journey through both darkness and light. The questioning and doubting do not mean a lack of faith, but rather are openings into a deeper relationship with that which may be beyond naming. They are religious questions, religious replies.

A person may not be conventionally pious, but we all have experiences in life which lead us into questions, searching for understanding in response to the mysteries of life and death. "We are not human beings having a spiritual experience," wrote the French philosopher, priest and paleontologist, Teilhard de Chardin. "We are spiritual beings having a human experience."

We might discover as we grow that the beliefs we held as younger people no longer speak to us. For some, that is the day they discard the whole idea of religion as meaningless. For others, the day those beliefs cease is the day, as one person described the experience to me, "that the scales fell from his eyes." It was a day that he suddenly lost his childhood creedal faith. But he gained an authentic relationship to his own spiritual life and began to see life in a new way.

The person I describe as a "religious" atheist, (and who would probably disagree with this description) is a wonderful man who has lived a very long time. He is a deeply reflective person, a compassionate person, and a person who says things like, "The more I see of life, the more filled with mystery I feel things are." He is a person who has a sense of awe and a connectedness to all that lives. He is a person who has questioned and wondered his whole life.

And now he is in his 10th decade; and unafraid of death. He finds great peace in knowing himself to be part of this Mystery of Being. Part of what gives him such a steady place to stand, I think, is that his faith in life has grown through his questions, doubts and skepticism. He has not been afraid to imagine that what he thought was true, might not be so, and he has remained grounded. Recently a movie was released that came very briefly to our area. Its title: "Doubt." It is the film version of the Pulitzer Prize winning play by John Patrick Shanley. It takes place in a church school in the Bronx in the '60s. The plot has to do with the principal of the school, who suspects that the priest has been behaving inappropriately with students. There is very little evidence upon which to base her suspicions, but she is certain, and without doubt. She airs her concerns with others, thus spreading a dark rumor. A younger teacher in the school is not so sure; she wonders if there aren't other ways to interpret the information. Yet the principal's conviction is absolute. Insufficiently substantiated, rumor and innuendo spread in their insidious ways. And the priest is removed from his position. As viewers of the film, we are held in uncertainty, never sure what the truth really is. But the final lines of the play are the principal's: "I have doubts! I have such doubts!"

The playwright subtitled his play "a parable," suggesting that the process we witness in the play/movie is one that we may experience in other walks of life - ones in which we close our minds to the idea that the truth about a person, a situation, or a belief might be other than imagined - more nuanced, more complex, more ambiguous.

In his preface to the play, Shanley writes: "It is Doubt that changes things. When a (person) feels unsteady, when he falters, when hard-won knowledge evaporates before his eyes, he's on the verge of growth (which) often seems at first like a mistake, like you've gone the wrong way, and you're lost. But this is just emotion longing for the familiar. Life happens when the tectonic power of your speechless soul breaks through the dead habits of the mind. Doubt is nothing less than an opportunity to re-enter the Present."

Some of the most profound parts of my journey have begun with doubts, that led to questions, that led to discoveries, that led to a deeper and deeper faith. I continue to be enriched and to grow in communities that share their stories, certainties, doubts and questions. Sharing with people of many faith traditions - believers and nonbelievers, theists, humanists and atheists all the diverse ways that the Spirit lives and seeks and shares its life.

The Rev. Sandra D. Fitz-Henry is the minister of Murray Unitarian Universalist Church in Attleboro, and is in her 13th year of ministry with that church. She previously served congregations in New York and Pennsylvania, and loves working in this parish, sharing the ministry with so many strong lay leaders. She is the mother of three grown children, and has one grandchild. A Boston native, she grew up in New York, Nashville and Los Angeles and lived in Denmark, Spain and England. She was an artist, religious educator and hospital chaplain, before entering parish ministry full time.