{"id":621,"date":"2010-10-22T07:15:34","date_gmt":"2010-10-22T07:15:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/omeoflittlefaith\/2010\/10\/david-dark-the-wonder-working-power-of-sacred-questioning.html"},"modified":"2010-10-22T07:15:34","modified_gmt":"2010-10-22T07:15:34","slug":"david-dark-the-wonder-working-power-of-sacred-questioning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/omeoflittlefaith\/2010\/10\/david-dark-the-wonder-working-power-of-sacred-questioning.html","title":{"rendered":"David Dark: The Wonder-Working Power of Sacred Questioning"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"DavidDark.jpg\"<\/span>He probably doesn’t remember it,<\/b> but David Dark played a minor role in my journalistic coming-of-age. One of the first assigned articles I ever wrote was for a (now defunct) online magazine called Communique Journal<\/a>.<\/i> It was back in 1997 or so, and I was supposed to be doing an interview of the singer\/songwriter, Sarah Masen, who happens to be David’s wife. When a snowstorm prevented Sarah from performing the concert that was bringing her to my area, David helped me facilitate an email interview with her. It was my first interview using that bold new form of communication. And it led to my first online publication.<\/p>\n

I’ve kept up with David’s career ever since, and remain a fan of his work (Sarah’s, too). David is an excellent critic of Christianity, religion, and pop culture, and most recently is the author of The Sacredness of Questioning Everything<\/i><\/a>, which proclaims that asking difficult questions about faith is a sacred obligation. Eugene Peterson has called him “a reliable lie detector” when it comes to the Christian faith.<\/p>\n

Despite being a busy teacher and while pursuing a PhD in religious studies at Vanderbilt, David was gracious enough to deliver his own thought-provoking (and question-inducing) contribution to our “Voices of Doubt<\/a>” series.   <\/p>\n

————-<\/p>\n

I can’t recall a time<\/b> when I haven’t felt my pulse quicken upon entering the lobby of a
\nmovie theater, and I occasionally wonder if other filmgoers feel the same way. For my
\npart, the powerfully good vibrations hark back to the dream job I took up the day I turned
\n16, the day I got paid to pass time in what was to me a sacred space. I would soon be
\npromoted to handling popcorn, selling tickets, and, in time, running the film projector,
\nbut not without a few weeks undergoing the initiatory rite of sweeping my way around
\nthe lobby. There was nothing like it. I’d walk around the lobby with my broom and talk
\nto strangers about the movies in which they’d recently found themselves immersed. To
\nmy ongoing delight, they were very up for talking. Whether the film they’d seen was
\nrevelatory or lame, they were, in fact, eager to talk it all out with somebody, anybody,<\/i>
\nwho wanted to know what they thought. There I stood in an awkward fitting vest, horn-rimmed glasses, and a broom in hand. “What’d you think?” I asked (It was my job after
\nall). Did they sense something of their own lives in what they just experienced? Is the
\nworld a slightly different place now? If so, how?<\/p>\n

Movies, I found, related easily to all other movies and the subject of movies was and
\nis — we know it’s true — absolutely everything. Inspiringly broad-ranging conversations
\nmaterialized within seconds, and these conversations knew no boundaries. Everything
\nhad to do with everything else. Movie talk makes for many a tangent. And the tangents,
\nI came to understand, are the sunshine. The walls came down. <\/p>\n

In the wake of a good
\nmovie, the words that work like walls (religion, politics, entertainment, spirituality, or
\nwhatever boundary might keep some aspect of life seem irrelevant to another) would fail
\nat every turn. They were just different words that couldn’t do justice to the film-viewing
\nexperience. Movies would every so often almost succeed in nailing down our always-slippery human existence. Standing there in the theater lobby, yakking away with people
\nwho wouldn’t normally have a good reason to talk to me, I came to love this slipperiness.
\nThe slipperiness was there in any <\/i>good movie. It was evident in everything we have from
\nShakespeare. And if I could let the thing speak beyond the bounds of church buildings on
\nSunday mornings, it was shockingly evident, alive and signalling — this slipperiness — in
\nmy reading of the Bible.<\/p>\n

I know this isn’t everyone’s experience with what we sometimes call “a religious
\nupbringing.” But as a teenager, it seems I read too many comic books, tuned into too
\nmany Twilight Zone<\/i> episodes, and listened to too much U2 to ever think the Bible could
\nrender the world less weird or more narrow. For me, the Bible wouldn’t (couldn’t!) function as a sort of answer dispenser like a phone book or a dictionary. The Bible
\ndemanded questions (lots of questions) even as it posed cosmically profound questions to
\nthe lifeworld of anyone who dared to open it up. This leather-bound black hole has a way
\nof freaking you out forever. It makes space for all manner of strangeness. It means more —
\nnot less<\/i> —
\nconversation. More<\/i> —
\nnot less —
\nthinking<\/i>.<\/p>\n

Somehow, I developed an appetite for that which drove <\/i>me to doubt <\/i>what I thought <\/i>I
\nknew<\/i>. And it was in full possession of this sensibility that I sought out conversations
\nabout the Bible. Because I showed up with the same sense of expectation I’d long felt in movie theaters, I found I’d never meet a Bible study I didn’t like. Strangely, I suppose
\nI could argue that my years at the movie theater birthed within me a desire for a certain
\nsacred space I spotted constantly there in the lobby, very often in bookstores, and at least
\noccasionally within the walls of churches. I call it the space of the talkaboutable<\/i>. It’s the
\nspace a good story or a good song conjures up most effortlessly. <\/p>\n

And, needless to say,
\nit’s the space I believe Jesus of Nazareth brought with him, in word and deed, in his call
\nto change our ways of thinking and doing in view of a kingdom to come, the space he
\nannounced in response to questions concerning what he and his disciples were up to — questions he more often than not responded to with (frustrating as it was and is) more
\nquestions. This seems to be the way the work of sacred questioning gets done. With an
\neye on the life and liveliness to which Jesus summons us, I’d like to argue that this is our
\nwork too. Think of it as a sacred obligation, a calling, a vocation.<\/p>\n

Against the notion that faithfulness<\/b> to God requires a stifling of our ability to think
\nthings through or that dutiful submission to authority is somehow a virtue in itself,
\nI’d like to champion the joy, the responsibility, and the thrill of doubting, wondering,
\nof interrogating the voices (inside and outside our heads) that sabotage our ability to
\nimagine ourselves and others differently. I believe it might even be the most immediate
\nmeans to living a life of proper worshipfulness and due reverence. I have in mind here the
\nwords of Fred Friendly (he worked beside Edward R. Murrow and was played by George
\nClooney in the film, Good Night and Good Luck<\/i><\/a>). He said that his job as a newsman was
\nto create a pain in the viewers’ minds, a pain that can only be relieved by thinking.<\/p>\n

Do we bring this sort of thing to our reading of the Bible, our conversations with those
\nwe believe to be like-minded, our consumption of media? If we don’t, I imagine we’re
\nmissing the depths of the abundant life to which we’re called. I believe that it is by the
\nrelentless questioning of ideas, bad ideas about God, money, sex, success patriotism,
\nand real living people whose names we find it hard to spell, by rethinking the bad ways
\nwe’ve ordered the world in our heads that we redeem and get redeemed. Without it, we
\nmistake our strongly felt first impressions and often our sense of offendedness itself for
\na kind of deep spirituality, as if we’re only called to be simple-minded and deeply upset
\nby certain people who won’t fit into our grid, our narrow sense of what we find somehow
\nappropriate and inoffensive.<\/p>\n

The Southern storyteller, Flannery O’Connor<\/a>, once remarked that this thought habit mistakes
\nChristian faith for a warm, cozy electric blanket that will soothe, dim our perceptions,
\nand anaesthetize our minds with a stacked deck of ready-made answers. O’Connor
\ncounters this conception by insisting that an engaged and engaging faith is more like a
\ncross — that lively, more difficult, and more costly interface with the world God so loves.<\/p>\n

The questioning I call for is indistinguishable from the call to pay attention to the sweet
\nold world we’re in, to be mindful of the God-given complexity of the lives before us.
\nJust as Jesus’ questions worked wonders in human relations, expanding the possibility — the very meaning — of civilization on down to our day with reverberations we have yet
\nto take on fully, we ourselves are called to celebrate and expand this space. <\/p>\n

If we’re to
\nbe faithful<\/b> to the observational candor the Bible exemplifies and enables, we will push
\nforward with more — not fewer — questions. It isn’t just that they’re allowed or that God
\ncan handle it. Our commitment to the God’s new day on the way, the kingdom to come,
\ndemands them.<\/p>\n

————-<\/p>\n

Thanks, David. <\/b>Keep up with David Dark on twitter<\/a> or at his blog, Peer Pressure Is Forever<\/a>. And don’t miss his books The Sacredness of Questioning Everything<\/i><\/a>, The Gospel According to America<\/a>,<\/i> and Everyday Apocalypse<\/i><\/a>.<\/p>\n

Previous posts in the “Voices of Doubt” series…<\/b><\/p>\n

\u2022 Cara Davis: A Textbook Case<\/a>
\u2022 Matthew Paul Turner: Letting Them See My Doubt<\/a>
\u2022 Sally Lloyd-Jones: Where Did You Put Your Faith?<\/a>
\u2022 Chad Gibbs: When It Doesn’t Seem Fair<\/a>
\u2022 Leeana Tankersley: The Swirling Waters<\/a>
\u2022 Robert Cargill: The Skeptic in the Sanctuary<\/a>
\u2022 Dana Ellis: Haunted by Questions<\/a>
\u2022 Rachel Held Evans on Works-Based Salvation<\/a>
\u2022 Winn Collier: Doubt Better<\/a>
\u2022 Tyler Clark on Losing Fear, Losing Faith<\/a>
\u2022 Rob Stennett on the Genesis of Doubt<\/a>
\u2022 Adam Ellis on Hoping That It’s True<\/a>
\u2022 Nicole Wick on Breaking Up with God<\/a>
\u2022 Anna Broadway on Doubt and Marriage<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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