THE GOOD DOUBT
And so I travelled on, short in the telling, long in the doing. At the source of a great river is a region of many valleys each with its own gurgling creek. Passing through its small towns and hamlets I was often told the story of The Good Doubt.
'One Spring morning, as the flowers bloomed, the lambs frolicked and the people talked cheerfully through the morning, afternoon and evening, a young man took up a few of his possessions, threw them in a sack and slung it over his shoulder. He went into the main street and proceeded out of the village. To any who asked where he was going he smiled amiably and said, "To Think." and continued on his way. The villagers smiled to each other and commented, unconcerned, that he had always been a strange one.
'He went into the nearby forest and was not seen for forty years. After the first year he was given up for dead by all but his mother. During this time, living off watercress and a few small animals he caught in traps, he did what he had intended to do. He thought. He was hoping for an answer, an explanation, some reason why, or at least a how.
'He thought about God. Perhaps there was a great creator who started everything. Perhaps he was kind or malicious. Maybe he created the Universe to amuse himself. He created man, with free will because he wanted love, and you cannot be loved except by a free willed entity. Or God is love, is movement, is the Universe itself and we are small parts of its consciousness. Perhaps there is no God and things just are the way they are. Perhaps God is fallible, the idea of fallibility depending on us or an even higher God. Perhaps there are endless levels of higher and higher Gods. Maybe there are many Gods with varying personalities that conflict, like in a grand soap opera, that create events on Earth, or we are pawns in their abstract game. Perhaps the nature of God is so different to us that we cannot ever hope to understand it.
'He considered the possibility of an alien race. Their planet was dying so they sent colonists to the Earth. Or we are an anthropology experiment for them to observe the way their species behaves when left in the wild and allowed to develop themselves. An experiment that's been going for thousands of years. They control us like cattle because they feed off our emotions.
'People are blobs floating in space and the physical world is a figment of their imagination. The world is a metaphor for the way they feel and an instrument for them to communicate.
'Perhaps he was God. The only thing existing. A consciousness alone. The world was a construction of his imagination. As soon as he perceived a new thing he was actually bringing it into existence, as part of him. To spot a new star or species of life was to create it.
'These and many other solutions he came to.
'After long consideration he became very sad. It seemed there was no conclusion he could arrive at that was absolutely true. Nothing that could not be argued against, nothing that could be proven. It seemed there was no answer after all. He had lost all hope.
'He began to wonder why it was that having no hope made him sad. But he had grown weary of asking questions, now he just felt like accepting things. He accepted that when he had hope he was happier. He didn't bother wondering what hope and good meant, he just accepted that they had meaning to him.
'Then he leapt up from his stone sitting stool, rushed out of his cave and kissed the sky in thanks. He had had an idea. This is how he found it, "But everything is explained. I have just spent forty years inventing explanations. It's easy to explain things. It's just that I don't trust them. I just hope they are. It's good that I doubt all explanations. If I found the answer to all questions there'd be nothing to hope for. There'd be no hope. It's doubt that gives me hope! And hope makes me happy."
'He finally felt as if he had something worthwhile to say to somebody. He decided to visit his mother. She lived in a small shack upstream of the village. It was night by the time he got there.
'Now, I should mention that during this time his mother had turned into a hunch-backed old hag and that she wasn't very happy when her son left her. In fact as time went by and her mind grew addled by age she had begun to hate him for it. She wouldn't have minded if he was dead or alive, it was just not knowing that bothered her. Since the evening he didn't come home for supper it had tormented her every waking moment.
'When she opened the door and saw her son standing there in the dark cold night she embraced him and quickly ushered him inside. She put him in a seat by the fire, found her kitchen knife and stabbed her son in the chest.
'"You can never leave me now." she said, "No more shall I sit here alone in winter, spring, summer or autumn wondering about you. I shall never again be in doubt."
'As she cradled his head in her hands he left her with his dying words, "But, Mum, doubt is what gives us hope."'
I heard this story in many villages. Each had its own variation of the explanations he arrived at during his time in the forest but I only ever heard three endings. Here is one:
'... "You can never leave me now." she said, "No more shall I sit here alone in winter, spring, summer or autumn wondering about you."
'As she cradled his head in her hands he left her with his dying words, "Mum, I was Thinking. One thing I wanted to say. After all this time. It is doubt that gives us all hope."
'A tear came into his mother's eye, "If only you had asked before you left." she said, I could have told you that." The son died. Only those who have done the same know if he found what he had hoped for, or maybe not.'
In the last ending he dies without uttering a word.