Faith and Doubt

George W. Bush, speaking to reporters on Air Force One, flying back from Rome after the funeral of Pope John Paul II:

Q:  If there was ever a moment where you ever had any doubts in your own faith, what out of the past public things would strengthen your resolve and firm up your relationship with your God?

THE PRESIDENT: I think a walk in faith constantly confronts doubt, as faith becomes more mature. And you constantly confront, you know, questions.

My faith is strong. The Bible talks about, you’ve got to constantly stay in touch with the Word of God in order to help you on the walk. But the Lord works in mysterious ways, and during all our life’s journeys we’re enabled to see the Lord at work if our eyes are open and our hearts are open.

And today — you can analyze and you can look at the coffin being held, with the sun shining on it, anyway you want. I happen to feel it was a special moment that was part of a special ceremony for a special person. And it helped strengthen my faith.

And you can have your faith strengthened on — you can have your faith strengthened when you stand up at a faith-based initiative and see someone standing up and testify to what their love has done to help a child, or how a child’s life has been helped.

My faith gets strengthened when I went to the school the other day and saw the mentoring relationship between a young professional woman and a young kid who’s going to go to the seed school where there’s a 95 percent chance that kid is going to go to college. And that helps strengthen my faith.

So there’s, you know, ways — whether the moment be majestical or whether the moment be a part of just an average — your average moment in life, you can find ways to strengthen your faith.

And it’s necessary to do so, in my judgment. There is a — it’s called a "walk," it’s not called a "moment" or a "respite," it’s a walk. It’s a constant maturing of an understanding of a — and today’s ceremony, I bet you, for millions of people was a reaffirmation for many and a way to make sure doubts don’t seep into your soul.

It is close to a perfect answer — the acknowledgment of the ever-present existence of doubt, the characterization of faith as a “walk” (with echoes of the 23^rd Psalm), and the recognition of evidence of transcendence in moments both large and small.

Norman Lamm of Yeshiva University published a lengthy scholarly article on “Faith and Doubt” that is worth studying.  But in some ways George W. Bush’s extemporaneous statement on the plane back to America — delivered without benefit of speechwriters or a prepared text, complete with a word not found in a dictionary (“majestical”) that is nevertheless the perfect word (like “misunderestimated”) — is better.