From “Faith After Doubt: Why Your Beliefs Stopped Working and What To Do About It” by Brian McLaren
“Gradually, I realized I was trapped by a false dichotomy, an impossible choice between two unacceptable options,” Sam explained. “Stay in the fortress of certainty and at least pretend to be satisfied with the answers I had been given, or leave the fortress and experience absolute, utter meaninglessness.” There had to be a third option, he thought.
The title of the book he was holding gave him an answer: We Make the Road by Walking. “Maybe faith was never supposed to be a fortress,” he said. “Maybe it was supposed to be a road. And maybe it was a road that led into the unknown.” That shift in metaphor – from fortress to road – helped him see doubt not as a dead end but as a doorway out of the fortress and onto the road. “Finally,” he said, “I reached a decision I could live with. I would keep faith, but rather than a faith that forbids all doubt, I would move forward with a faith that any God worth believing in would be able to love me as a doubter, and would rather me be honest than a pretender. I guess I finally realized that faith was never meant to be an engineering project.