A while ago, I was walking past a Friends Quaker Meeting House when I spotted a notice. It read: ‘Come in and have your answers questioned.’
Suddenly, I felt my heart open. The words of Pema Chödrön, the Tibetan Buddhist monk, came back to me:
We think that the point is to pass the test or overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart … The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.
The particular brand of Buddhism I was practising at the time didn’t feel quite so open-ended. It preached an absolute conviction that you would only change your karma if you adhered to the three essential aspects of faith, practice and study. We were frequently told that even serious illness could be overcome with strong faith.
For three decades I had got the most from – and given my best to – this daily practice. But now it didn’t make sense to me anymore: which is why my heart responded so positively to the Quakers’ framing of their faith around an openness to not knowing. As time went on I found myself leaning into gentler concepts of surrender, acceptance, and uncertainty. I still enjoyed the meditative aspect of chanting but the belief that our particular version of Buddhism gave us special insight and even protection from life’s turmoil no longer moved me. I wanted to embrace a more inclusive, more fluid vision of life.
This had been summed up for me twenty years earlier when I started collecting redemptive narratives for the charity I founded: The Forgiveness Project. I was interviewing Khaled al Berry who told me that when he’d belonged to the Islamic terror group Al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya he had believed there was only one way to know truth – the divine way, the infallible way. Now, however, he saw the perils of this way of thinking and had come to believe that ‘the most dangerous thing in life is to let people become convinced that truth has just one face.’
This idea was echoed recently in the Oscar-winning film Conclave. ‘Certainty is the great enemy of unity; certainty is the deadly enemy of tolerance,’ declares Cardinal Lawrence in his homily on the eve of the conclave.
If the rhetoric of certainty feels oppressive it’s because it divides people, setting apart those who are ‘right’ from those who are ‘wrong’, feeding into the if you’re not with us, you’re against us narrative.
The challenge of course is learning to live with uncertainty without being immobilised by it – believing still in a future that can allow life to be lived to the fullest. Here I take to heart the words of Audre Lorde in A Burst of Light when she writes: ‘I live my days against a background noise of mortality and constant uncertainty. Learning not to crumple before these uncertainties fuels my resolve to print myself upon the texture of each day fully rather than forever.’
The older I get the happier I am to be confused, to accept there is so much that is beyond my control. I am far more at ease in a place of not-knowing and fragility. I believe there are no simple answers, and certainly no single answer. I reject the binary and the polarised discourse of today. I continue to question and to doubt. I don’t have everything figured out – and I’m not sure I want to.