Fenton Johnson is the author of four books, the most recent of which, Keeping Faith: A Skeptic's Journey, is the 2004 winner of the Lammie Award for Spirituality Writing. White Crane Editor Bo Young spoke with Johnson recently.

Bo Young: This issue is themed "Healthy Spirituality." Personally, that is virtually synonymous with "healthy skepticism." Keeping Faith's subtitle is "...a skeptic's journey"...what role do you think skepticism has in spirituality?

Fenton Johnson: Oh, that's an easy one. I think I can answer it in a sentence. Or two.

Another term for skepticism-one that I first heard among the Buddhists-is "great doubt."  When I began my research for writing Keeping Faith, I thought that great doubt was a barrier to great faith.  Across the time of writing the book-which is to say, across the time of spending large portions of several years living and practicing a contemplative life-I've come to realize that for me, probably for many thoughtful people, great doubt is a prerequisite for great faith.  When I think of Americans of great faith, I don't think of various fundamentalist clergy, preaching from their smug certainties.  I think instead of people like Dorothy Day and Martin Luther King, Jr., and Audre Lorde and Harvey Milk and Cesar Chavez and Gene Robinson.  (Note that some of these people were regular churchgoers and some never darkened the door of a church.) These people were beset with doubts all the time, as any glance at their writings or speeches will show.  Faith was for them a discipline, an exercise in engaging doubt and turning its considerable energy into a positive force in their lives and the lives of others.

A good morning to ask that question-as gray and chilly as San Francisco can be in the summers, and I'm all but swamped in a tidal wave of doubt regarding the novel I'm struggling with writing.

BY: What do you mean by "engaging doubt"? And how can doubt be a positive force?

FJ: I've come to see doubt-as I've come to see anger-as a force that can undercut and overwhelm or support and nourish.  Think of water, or fire.  Unchanneled, or undirected, either can be (and often is) a force for destruction. The key lies in their channeling-in devising forms that enable their energies to be turned to constructive ends.

Although "devising" isn't the right word, because it suggests that each of us must reinvent the wheel, and I don't believe that's the case.  I see myself as a reformer, at the same time that I value tradition.  That's why I attend a church (albeit a left-wing church) and sit zazen (albeit with nontraditional sitting groups).  I see these traditions as providing models on which I can draw in channeling these potentially destructive-or potentially constructive-energies.  If I were a Native American, I'd be engaged in powwows and sweat lodges.  I admire non-Native Americans who seek those routes-so long as they do so from a stance of respect and humility-but I think that in going so far from their birth traditions they're choosing harder rows to hoe.  As a writer and a gay man I have enough hard rows to hoe, so in embracing this particular challenge I've opted for the standing forms.  All the forms have something to teach us, starting with the very value of the forms themselves-which is as a means to channel and direct the forces of our lives.  We're all carrying a lot of anger these days, because we have good reason to, though perhaps gay men have more than our share.  And so the study and practice of the forms becomes especially critical.

BY: You may be one of the only seekers I've encountered who recommends "anger" and "doubt" as good catalysts for spirituality.

FJ: Well, gee.  I never met the woman, but I can imagine that Mother Teresa was one of the angriest people on the planet-angry at the suffering she witnessed, of course, but more to the point angry at its causes. How could it be otherwise, when one only has to walk a few blocks to see people who have so much more than they need and yet are unwilling to act to alleviate that suffering?  Imagine the suffering the Dalai Lama witnessed in his youth, even as one sees in his face the peace he has attained.  That comes about-surely-not because these spiritual figures were born with greater access to internal peace than you or I but because they have earned it-partly through their own willingness to embrace suffering as a means to an end.  And what is spirituality, finally, but a path through which one seeks to find redemption in suffering, the world's and one's own?

There's a passage from the letters of the Russian writer Chekhov that moves me greatly.  In describing himself late in his short life (he died at 44 of tuberculosis), he wrote, "Write a story, do, about a young man, the son of a serf,...brought up to respect rank, to kiss the hands of priests, to truckle to the ideas of others...write how this young man squeezes the slave out of himself, drop by drop, and how, on awaking one fine morning, he feels that the blood coursing through his veins is no longer that of a slave but of a real human being."  What is the spiritual path but the squeezing out of oneself, "drop by drop," the blood of the slave-in this case, anger and doubt?  But, since the universe wastes nothing, the challenge then becomes:  How does one use that old, tired, angry, knee-jerk doubting blood?  And that is the challenge of the seeker.

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