Poem: Wrestling in the storm

On faith, doubt and the in-between

The Storm on the Sea of Galilee – Rembrandt van Rijn

Below is a poem in three movements from a time when I was wrestling with a deep sense of uncertainty around my faith — whatever your beliefs, I hope the theme of internal conflict will resonate on some level.

Bigger on the Inside includes a few different strands — written essays, Imaginative Discipleship podcast episodes, and occasional poetry. You can choose which sections you follow, depending on what’s most helpful to you, by updating your choices in your account settings.

Wrestling in the storm

1. Faith

A leap in the dark
A lover’s kiss
Betting my life on eternity’s stakes
Questioning obedience
Seeking understanding
A quest
A pilgrimage
A journey and a gift
Empty hands lifted up

Child-like hope
Adult-like perseverance
Keeping steady in life’s storms
Beyond reason yet reasonable
Where intellect gives way to relationship
Where thinking gives way to trusting
Where wondering gives rise to loving

Some say it’s madness
A delusion — illusion — epistemological confusion
But I find in it sanity
Some say intellectual suicide
I say death and rebirth
Giving up and gaining
A recognition of my limits
A receiving of the divine
The substance of things hoped for
The evidence of things not seen

A mystery
Fragile and unbreakable
Doubtful and certain
Individual and communal
The dark night of the soul
And shining cloud of witnesses

Not of myself
So that no-one can boast
A seed implanted
A signpost heavenward

Life.

2. Doubt

The storms come
And what I thought rock turns to sand
My house crumbles
If the foundations be destroyed
Who can stand?

Hope seems wishful thinking
Community seems confirmation bias
Certainty seems foolishness
Belief seems blindness
Where has my confidence gone,
Faded away like cut grass?

I oscillate — vacillate — hovering
Tossed with every wind
Between belief and despair
Deconstruction and reconstruction
Trusting and doubting

So many questions:
Is this real?
Is this true?
Is this good?

I cry out in the storm:

I believe, help my unbelief!

3. Calm

I think I believe, though I’m not always sure I do.

Two tunes overlap, clashing, competing
If I focus, one resolves
But I still hear the other
Rising to drown out the first.

Living cross-pressured
Caught in the multiverse of meaning
The universes next door
Colliding with my own.

Faith and doubt
Optimism and nihilism
Humanisms secular and sacred
Materialist ‘nothing buttery’
A universe of blind pitiless indifference
Realities objective or constructed.

But the mystery of existence
Seems too great a gift to have no-one to thank for

And the beauty of the Lamb
The self-giving one, dying and rising
Seems too good to be untrue.

So I might be wrong
But for today
I still choose to believe

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No AI was used in the writing of this poem.

I’m more settled in my convictions currently, but I know what it’s like to feel tossed and turned between different viewpoints. If you’ve been through similar times of uncertainty and change in your beliefs, what was it like for you? Have you come through the storm yet, and how did you change along the way?