One of the strangest things religion can do to a person is convince them that questions are dangerous. I spent a lot of years in church culture where certainty was treated like maturity. The stronger your faith became, apparently, the fewer questions you were supposed to have. You were supposed to know what you believed, what the Bible meant, what God wanted, who was right and who was wrong. If you started asking too many questions, people got nervous.
I don’t believe that anymore. Some of the most important spiritual growth in my life began when I finally became willing to say, “I don’t know.” I don’t know if the explanation I inherited is the only explanation. I don’t know if the tradition got everything right. I don’t know if every interpretation I preached twenty years ago is one I would preach today. I don’t know if God is nearly as offended by my curiosity as religious people told me God was. Admitting that didn’t destroy my faith. It made room for something more honest.
A lot of us inherited our theology before we were old enough to examine it. We were handed conclusions before we were taught how to wrestle with the questions. Then life happened. Grief didn’t fit the explanation. We met good people outside the boundaries we were taught. We watched religious leaders behave in ways that contradicted what they preached. We experienced love, pain, mystery, suffering, healing and the sacred in ways our inherited theology didn’t always have language for. At some point, the neat answers stopped being neat.
I spent thirty years in ministry. I preached thousands of sermons and stood in front of people confidently explaining things I now hold with a lot more humility. That doesn’t mean everything I believed was wrong. It means I changed. I learned. I lived. I suffered. I healed. I encountered things I didn’t know how to explain. Eventually I realized that changing your understanding is not always evidence that you abandoned truth. Sometimes it means you became willing to pursue it.
Jesus asked questions constantly. “Who do you say that I am?” “What do you want me to do for you?” “Why are you afraid?” “What do you think?” He seemed remarkably comfortable making people think. Religious systems can become less comfortable with that because questions expose assumptions and force traditions to explain themselves. Sometimes the answer is uncomfortable. Sometimes it’s, “I was wrong.” Sometimes it’s, “I don’t believe that anymore.” Sometimes it’s, “I still believe this, but for completely different reasons.” And sometimes the most honest answer is simply, “I don’t know yet.”
You do not need permission from a pastor, denomination, institution, theologian, parent, teacher or former version of yourself to examine what you inherited. You are allowed to ask why. You are allowed to change your mind. You are allowed to keep searching. You are allowed to discover that God may be much larger than the framework somebody handed you.
If your spiritual life cannot survive an honest question, the problem probably isn’t the question. Ask better ones.
This article is provided for educational purposes and does not constitute medical or legal advice. Psychedelic substances remain controlled under federal law except within authorized research, approved medical, or legally recognized circumstances.
