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| Jens Rasmussen in Doubt |
Have you ever been so certain about something that you can't make room for questions? If you consider another viewpoint, does that make your original thought erroneous?
Or, perhaps, can both beliefs co-exist?
This is what happens in "Doubt," a play staged in Foley Hall at the Springer Opera House. One minute, you think you get what's going on, then further actions make you question. "Doubt" ends tonight.
The play was written in 2004 by John Patrick Shanley, who wrote the script for the 1987 movie "Moonstruck."
"Doubt" was awarded the Tony Award as well as the Pulitzer Prize in 2005.
The drama is set in 1964. It's about a priest named Father Flynn, who is accused of abusing a boy, the first black student in a Catholic school. Father Flynn, played by Jens Rasmussen of New York, is accused of wrongdoing by a nun, Sister James, played by Megan Channell. She reports Father Flynn to the principal, Sister Aloysius (played by Marianne Fraulo).
"Doubt" is directed by John Ammerman, who returns to the Springer Opera House, where he played the title character in "Macbeth" in 2003 and his original play, "Booth, Brother Booth" in 2004.
Alice Budge, a community volunteer, saw the play last weekend.
She said it ranks among the best Springer productions she's seen.
"I think it was powerful, not only because of the performances but because the angle of vision keeps changing," said Budge, who is on the Springer board.
As audience members begin to doubt and question the actions of the characters, so too they wrestle with the place doubt has in faith.
"I think by the end, you have doubts in terms of the participants, but you also have a sense that the person who's most strident is also full of doubt," Budge said.
Churches through the centuries have had a mixed relationship with doubt, as a theological construct, and also contain people of great faith -- including the late Mother Teresa of Calcutta -- who wrote and spoke about their doubts. In the case of Mother Teresa, though, most of the revelations about her internal struggles came out after her death. Mother Teresa told a priest in 1979: "Jesus has a very special love for you. As for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great that I look and do not see, listen and do not hear."
Other famous doubters include St. John of the Cross in the 16th century, and more recently C.S. Lewis, the Christian apologist.
In Latin, doubt means "to waver or vibrate." It originally meant to waver between two options with uncertainty.
St. John of the Cross (1542-91) was jailed by the Church in Toledo in 1577 for his refusal to relocate after his superior's orders and allegedly because of his attempts to reform life within his order, the Carmelites. He received public lashings before the community at least weekly, and was kept isolated in a tiny cell barely large enough for his body. He managed to escape nine months later.
In prison, St. John of the Cross wrote most of his famous poem "Spiritual Canticle." His experience with suffering and doubt is reflected in all of his later writings.
The apostle St. Thomas, sometimes called the patron saint of doubters, is famous from scripture for his role in questioning. In one example, in the conversation at the Last Supper, Thomas said: "Lord, we do not know where You are going, and how can we know the way?" St. Thomas is especially remembered for his incredulity when the other apostles announced Christ's Resurrection to him: "Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the place of the nails, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe."
"Doubt is expected," said the Rev. Tom Weise of St. Patrick's Catholic Church in Phenix City. "Everybody has some amount of doubt.
"The Church teaches that everyone can be saved, but almost every one of them has a dark night of the soul. The very tradition started with Christ on the cross: 'Father, why have you abandoned me?' Abandonment has to be the epitome of suffering and doubt."
Lord Alfred Tennyson's poem, "In Memoriam," indicates his wrestlings with suffering and depression: "There lies more faith in honest doubt," Tennyson wrote, "than in half the creeds."
Os Guinness, the British thinker and writer, once said: "The shame is not that people have doubts, but that they are ashamed of them."
Only natural
Jens Rasumussen is the star of "Doubt" at the Springer. Rasmussen will speak at the adult Sunday school forum at 9:15 a.m. Sunday at St. Thomas Episcopal Church, 2100 Hilton Ave. Assistant director Kim Hickman will accompany him.
Raised in the Catholic Church and a Catholic school student for 12 years, Rasmussen said doubting one's faith or doctrine was not exactly encouraged in his upbringing.
"It was about moral absolutes and definitely I was in a black and white world," Rasmussen said this week. "But there was one caveat: My mom told me to listen to my still, small voice, and I was given permission to trust my own intuition. She taught me that intuition was the voice of God. In that way, I was able to question doctrine."
Rasmussen has not formally been connected to the Church since high school yet considered becoming a monk at one time. He said he's not connected to organized religion these days, preferring the word spirituality, in large part because of what harm religion has caused through the centuries.
"Doubt" allows audience members to participate in a "talk-back" after each show. Rasmussen said the most heated discussions so far have come between people or groups of people who see things differently than others in the audience.
Yet the play has taught him that doubt is a natural part of life, and part of a life of faith.
"Blind faith is no faith... . A message of the play is that doubt should not be scary, that it's OK to be unsure."
BY ALLISON KENNEDY
