I viewed the film, Doubt, New Year’s evening. It is a fascinating and thought provoking study of certitude and ambiguity with a very powerful and unsettling closing scene that should tweak anyone’s conscience and bring a tear of sorrow over our own judgments.
Reviewers opine the film isn’t about its ostensible focus; the struggle of a nun to show a priest has had an inappropriate relationship with an altar boy, but about the clash between new and old ways. While both are certainly subtexts, to me the film delves deeply into the matter of judgment - theological certitude (I use the word theological because in our Christian belief, every judgment is a theological problem), and into the matter of obligatory charity and compassion implicit in our belief.
Though the film occurs in a Catholic milieu, it applies to any church, its members and its leaders, even a Presbyterian one. It is always a failure when a Christian organization uses expediency not compassion to justify its acts. I suspect expediency seems an ostensible safe harbor for “leadership” when the person or persons pointing out a need for compassion and change are viewed as too peripatetic; when a controversy over doing the right thing might slow a manager’s upward mobility in the organization; or when the organization just fears controversy over its actions.
We all are susceptible to it - congregants who try to be faithful but are slaves to their wants and fears; congregations who fear the loss of a minister; a minister who fears the search for a congregation; potentates in the corporate church hierarchy who seem slaves to their position too fearful of change to act as leaders, or who have lost the message of the Gospel that to succeed you must fail to be recognized for it; me writing this critical piece.
“Walking the talk” is a hard row for us to hoe. I guess the whole idea of servant leadership is too alien for us to doubt our prejudices, to trust in God or to eschew a Machiavellian judgment (or appreciate that we have made it).
There are days when I doubt we can find financial resources to replace a home of a seventy-eight year old woman living in a mold-filled mobile home, or the volunteer labor to get a mother, husband and child back into their house after three years living apart. Some days relief organizations bring four or five (or twenty) cases to me asking for our construction help but my doubt of how long we will be allowed to stay and when we will have volunteers keeps me from shouting, “Yes we will help.”
But when we do manage to overcome the seduction of doubt – how sweet it is!
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