This recording features the Sunday Talk portion of the service. For the full service watch here.
Carrying Our Doubt Together- Rev. Darrell Jones
DESCRIPTION
What power and possibility lies in our collective doubts? This week we turn to the collective inner experience — the doubts we share as part of our shared unconscious — and explore what transformations can come from carrying and examining doubt together.
SUMMARY
This talk explores “divine doubt” as an essential, ever‑present element of faith rather than its negation, reframing doubt as a necessary point on a spectrum that runs from clarity and certainty to unknowing and ignorance. Drawing on Paul Tillich, Joseph Nelson, Richard Rohr, and Anne Lamott, Rev. Darrell Jones argues that doubt, when held consciously, becomes a tool for growth, transformation, maturity, and humility, while worry is distinguished as an anxiety state that pulls us off the spectrum of faith altogether. He emphasizes that communities often misinterpret doubt as failure, weaponizing it through shame and exclusion, whereas embracing doubt as part of life’s tapestry can transform uncertainty into resilience, deeper understanding, and “heavenish” experiences of acceptance and communion.
The sermon centers on “carrying our doubts together,” proposing collective doubt as a sacred disruption that interrupts the illusion that certainty is the highest wisdom and invites shared inquiry, honest questioning, and mutual support. In community, doubt can shift certainty into curiosity, isolation into belonging, inherited beliefs into re‑examined systems, and rigid ego into deeper humility and more mature faith, fostering innovation and more compassionate, alive communities. Rev. Jones applies these insights to contemporary social and spiritual contexts, including diversity, equity, inclusion, and allyship, suggesting that connection need not depend on total agreement or certainty, and that the deeper invitation is to choose devotion over withdrawal and connection over being right. The talk concludes with a guided practice that honors personal doubt as a devotional path back to conviction and present‑moment awareness, affirming that, together, communities can learn to trust one another while still unsure, allowing an emerging future and a larger divine presence to unfold through their shared life.
TRANSCRIPTION
This transcription was auto-generated, please excuse typos, errors and omissions.
Rev. Darrell Jones:
I like Jason Mraz. He has a way with words. Thank you, Paige, for singing that song today. She checked in with me and said, “Is there a song that you’d like to feature before the talk?” And that one popped into my mind and it seemed like a sweet sentiment if you think about the words, I won’t give up on us. To me, it’s almost like what if Cityside was singing that to you, right? And what if you sang that to Cityside, that we’re not going to give up on one another. Sometimes we have to wander away and stumble around and figure out who we are, but we always come back. And to me, that’s one of the beautiful things about community, especially an inclusive one like this is that we’re always here, arms open. If I have not had the pleasure of meeting you before, my name is Reverend Darrell Jones.
My pronouns are he/him and I am honored and humbled to offer some thoughts to get creative like Quincy Jones and to play a little bit because one of the gifts that was given to me when I first started studying Science of Mind was this idea that there wasn’t always a right answer. And I thought that there was. And I stumbled around for years and decades looking for the right answer and always came up short. But I realized that there was more value in the questions than there were in the answers. And to me, that’s part of doubt. So as we approach and continue to focus on this month’s theme of divine doubt, I am ready to play. So here we go. Hold on tights.
If you didn’t get to listen to Reverend Rainbow or Amy, you spoke last week, right? Yeah. Listen to those talks because there’s some threads through all of this that I’m going to come circle back to, but it’s really, really good stuff. The hero’s journey is always such a profound thing to explore. But this week we’re going to talk about carrying our doubts together. What power and possibility lies in our collective doubts? Today we turn to the collective inner experience. The doubts that we share as a part of our shared unconsciousness and explore what transformations can come from carrying this together. Our reading comes from two things. Anyone know Paul Tillick? Liberation theology, very, very heady dude, but awesome stuff. And if you didn’t know, so the book of the month is falling upwards, which I have some quotes from that, but I was drawn to Science of Mind Magazine.
Some of you may or may not know that this thing is a hundred years old, not this particular one, but the magazine itself is a hundred years old and we’re celebrating it in 2026. 2027 was the official beginning of the organization called Religious Science or Science of Mind Centers for Spiritual Living.
I get this every month and it has amazing just daily affirmations and words. And then oftentimes the theme that we’re speaking to here is also reflected in some writing in the magazine and I was drawn to that. So that’s where our quote comes from. Joseph Nelson is a practitioner who was invited to write an article and so I lifted the reading from him today and I’ll read it again. “If doubt appears, it should not be considered a negation of faith, but as an element always present in the act of faith, existential doubt and faith are poles of the same reality, the state of ultimate concern, dopeness coming from Paul Tillich. Joseph Nelson goes on to say,” Doubt then is not the enemy of faith, but a most honest test. In scripture and among mystics and modern spiritual seekers, devotion is not measured by certainty, but by perseverance, by continuing to pray, serve, and seek even when God feels absent.
Most days I feel the absence of God. Anyone else? Yeah. Yeah, just the three, four of us. Okay. I look outside myself and I want evidence of God to look a certain way and oftentimes, especially if I turn on this thing, I’m shown otherwise. Today we explore carrying our doubt together. Whether it’s self-doubt, doubt of others, doubting our beliefs in something greater, whether we’re holding the doubt by ourselves or we’re holding it in community, there are some fundamental things in teachings around doubt that were visited in the past two weeks that I want to bring back again. And maybe you’re hearing this for the first time today. I read this as if I was new. I brought that beginner’s mind. So our reading starts off with, “If doubt appears.” I want to stop right there. I think we should edit that to when doubt appears.
If implies that doubt may not happen, that’s a bunch of bunk. It will happen. No matter what, doubt is going to happen. So when doubt appears, remember that doubt is not a negation of faith. Doubt is a part of faith and believing. It is a necessary element of faith, a necessary element of faith. It just so happens to sit on the other end of the spectrum of faith. If you think about there being a spectrum of faith at one end there is clarity and certainty and knowing and at the other end is ignorance or unawareness and unknowing. Every single day of our lives, we are sliding up and down this spectrum. We are clear in one moment and then something happens in our lives and we find ourselves with our hands on our hip going, “Really?” Anyone ever had this moment?
And so we put our hand on our hip, we say, “Really?” And we began the quest of integration, taking some new awareness about ourselves, about our world and trying to make sense of it. Doubt is not the absence of faith, trust and understanding. If doubt is held correctly, it can be an amazing tool. A tool of growth, a tool of transformation, a tool of maturity. The problem is many of us never want to hold doubt. We’ve made up a story that doubt somehow is a failure in our faith. We isolate ourselves or we isolate others when doubt appears and we treat doubt like it’s some stain that must be bleached out and not seen.
Doubt is a part of the framework of living. Doubt is a part of the tapestry. It isnt all that there is, but it is a part of the beauty and the larger piece of artwork known as life. Embracing doubt rather than fighting it transforms uncertainty from a paralyzing weakness into an opportunity for growth, resilience and deeper understanding. Instead of viewing doubt as a failure, what if we accepted it as a natural part of life and as a sign that we are pushing beyond our comfort zones, allowing us to move forward despite not knowing the outcome. So I do have a quote to the next quote here from Richard Roar’s book Falling Upward. He says, “Creative doubt keeps me with a perpetual beginner’s mind, which is a wonderful way to keep growing, keep humble and keep living in happy wonder.
Knowing everything and knowing it all is not what we’re here to do together. We are here to hold one another as we grow and become, to honor the individual and the collective beginner’s mind. Doubt reminds us that we don’t have to know everything and it humbly invites us to realize we can’t know it all and thank goodness that we can’t. As to me, that’s part of the adventure of life, discovery. My wife Carrie turned me on to a new Instagram account, Cody Sanchez, an entrepreneur. Anyway, this is going to punch you in the gut. Every time I start to worry, I remember that worrying is practicing atheism. Oh, dang.
Every time I start to worry, I remember that we’re practicing atheism and I like that she uses the word practicing. We’re always practicing something, right? That’s one of the things about science of mind that humbles me. It’s like if I’m having an experience that feels out of whack, somehow I’m practicing that out of whackness in here and I need to check it. And I think during this month of mental health awareness month, to be able to distinguish the difference between doubt and worry would be liberating. Worry is an emotional state of anxiety and unease about future what if scenarios while doubt is mental uncertainty or lack of conviction in truth or a reliability of something. Worry is not on the spectrum of faith in my book. Worrying usually takes us off the spectrum completely. Doubt still implies possibility and it challenges us towards clarity. Worry turns off the engine of discovery and then stops us dead in our tracks of moving towards anything.
Richard War goes on to say, no one is in heaven unless they want to be. Dang. Okay. No one is in heaven unless they want to be and all are in heaven as soon as they live in union. Everyone is in heaven when there’s plenty of room for communion and no need for exclusion. Doubt dwells everywhere, including heaven. If we attempt to exclude doubt or anything for that matter, hell is at hand. It is painful to be excluded. Did anyone ever experience that? It is hellacious and today we all practice exclusion on some level because it oftentimes feels safe. It’s familiar. It’s comfortable. We exclude the thing that we don’t understand, but exclusion is exclusion is exclusion. It is painful and hellish, not heavenish. Is that a new word? Do you like that heavenish? I was like, “That’s kind of heaven-ish.” I’m going to bring that in.
When we are practicing acceptance and communion with what is, when we are practicing acceptance in communion, when we welcome what is, even if we don’t like it, including doubt, heaven is at hand.
Try that one on this week. Richard War goes on to say in our next slide here, “That seems to be the great difference between transformed and non-transformed people. Great people come to serve not to be served. We are here in community to serve, but we’re also here in community to discover and grow and to be of service of doubt. I think that doubt in community is one of the greatest gifts that we can have, but oftentimes we make it wrong. If someone says, I don’t understand that, or if someone says, I don’t like that, or doesn’t make sense to me, all of a sudden we put up our dukes and we start defending.
But if we are here to serve one another, when we come together in any setting, whether it be social, whether it be professional, spiritual or otherwise, and we show up for the good of the group, if we show up to be in service of this greater good, then everything in the group can be used for the good’s greatest being and goodness, including doubt. So we go back to our reading. When doubt appears, it should not be considered a negation of faith, but as an element always present in the act of faith. Doubt then is not the enemy of faith, but it’s most honest test.
We’re not punishing one another. We’re testing one another in community. We are here to push the envelope of our understanding of the divine as our individual experience and our collective experience. What if we made this a devotion? So Joseph Nelson goes on in the article in Science of Mind Magazine. When we choose devotion over withdrawal, so think about that. Oftentimes doubt reveals itself when we isolate or we withdraw. When we choose devotion over withdrawal, we discover that faith is not a fixed feeling but a living practice, one that grows stronger each time we turn to it even in the dark. And to me, you know I love my meditation and mindfulness practices. This is synonymous with the philosophies and the teachings of mindfulness, that we aren’t trying to meditate to get to some perfect destination where we’re perpetually in this peaceful presence and everything is just okay.
Although we can land there sometimes. We practice returning. We come back to the present moment to simply build the muscle to return.
We practice returning to the present moment and remember that the stories of yesterday and the stories of tomorrow can only be vetted today. We can only check them in the present moment. Doubt to me is like the past. Certainty is like the future. They are stories but they’re on the spectrum. But right here, right now is what is. This is what we know and rarely what we know in the present moment is 100% certainty. It’s just kind of the way it is. But using doubt as a devotional practice of return, we realize that we’ve drifted away and we come back to faith. But again, most of the time in community, we use doubt as a weapon, a weapon of condemnation.
When doubt is present, we condemn and we shame ourselves and one another. What’s in your consciousness? What are you thinking? How could I think that? When actually, if we can hold that doubt together and use it as a tool, imagine what we could do together. Does anyone know Anne Lamont? I love her writing and her mind. She has a little Quincy Jones in her too. She gets all creative with thoughts and she said, “The opposite of faith is not doubt but certainty. Certainty is missing the point entirely. Faith includes noticing the mess, the emptiness and discomfort, and letting it be there until some light returns. Collective doubt can be a sacred disruption. It interrupts the illusion that certainty is the highest form of wisdom and reminds us that growth often begins with honest questioning. When doubt is carried alone, it can be isolating, it can be shameful or destabilizing, but when doubt is shared in community, it becomes a doorway rather than a dead end.
The power and collective doubt is that it softens performance. People stop pretending that they have all the right answers and begin telling the truth. Communities rooted in shared inquiry become more compassionate, creative and alive because they are not spending energy defending rigid positions. Instead, they are listening, discerning, and experimenting and evolving together.
I think right now on our planet, definitely in our country, we are being called to be anchored in this idea of doubting, not just doubting someone else’s belief, but just doubting where we have been moving, doubting some of the systems that have been holding things in place, not saying we have to throw everything out, but we just need to stop in the present moment and check and vet the story of how we’re living. Okay. I’ve got a couple of bullet points here. When we examine doubt together, there’s several transformations that become possible. The first is certainty gives way to curiosity.
Has anyone heard this phrase, don’t get furious, get curious? In some of the training work that I have been doing in the education space lately, this has been an invitation. We move from needing to be right to wanting to understand one another. So we don’t get upset when we hear something we don’t want to hear. We get curious and say, tell me more about that, as opposed to defending and being defensive. When we examined out together, isolation becomes belonging. I hope someone needed to hear … Oh, hi everybody online, by the way. I hope someone needed to hear the fact that I wake up every day and I doubt. Just because I have reverend in front of my name doesn’t mean that I all of a sudden know everything. I don’t know everything. I don’t and I’m grateful that I don’t. And as we share this with one another, then we don’t isolate one another.
We go, “Oh, you don’t know what’s going on too? Let’s walk through that together. It’s a little bit easier to go through that mud.
When we examine doubt together, inherited beliefs can be reexamined. I think this is huge. Collective doubt creates spaces where we can question systems, we can question traditions and assumptions, and we can move towards healing and wholeness and justice if we need to. When we examine doubt together, humility deepens. Doubt can dismantle some of our ego. It requires us to be humble. When we examine doubt together, faith becomes more mature. And this is the thing I really hope that you understand. This to me is the whole being on that spectrum of faith as all we’re trying to do is mature our faith. There’s no destination of perfect faith. We are maturing all the time. Just as we grow from one age to the next, from one phase of our life to the next, we’re in a maturation process and our faith is the same. And when we examine doubt together, new imagination emerges.
Communities willing to sit in uncertainty and unknowing often become more innovative. Who wants to be more innovative? I do. Do you? Can we do that together? I think there’s something powerful and special about agreeing to do that. I sit on the board for the Centers for Spiritual Living and before we started talking any business, we spent a day and a half talking about how we were going to show up together. With this idea that not if doubt appears, when doubt appears, how do we agree to interact with one another? Do we shame? No. Actually, I brought the phrase, I’m like, ” We’re here to get naked. “People were like, ” What? “I was like, ” Come on. “Not literally, but we’re here to not hide. We’re not here to put up masks. We’re here in spiritual community to be seen. We’re here to see one another as we are.
All of the foiables, all of the puss and everything that’s growing out of … But we’re here to be with one another as we are. And if we agree to make that okay and normalize that as opposed to some sense of perfection, then I think it allows us to work together that much better. Doubt can actually refine our faith if we let it. It burns away simplistic answers and invites a more embodied, compassionate and expansive relationship with truth. Collective doubt asks,” What if we do not need to arrive at certainty to remain connected to one another?
What if we do not need to arrive at certainty to remain connected to one another? I’m reading a book called Calling In right now. We talk about calling people out. I think we need to do more calling in. And one of the big principles that I’m walking around with is in this question. What if we did not need to arrive at certainty to remain connected to one another? In the world of inclusion work, of diversity, equity, inclusion, justice, and belonging. Have you ever heard the word allyship? I realized one of the faulty math that was in my head, that an ally needs to be 100% in alignment with everything that I believe.
That’s not going to happen, but oftentimes we try to come together, whether it’s allyship, whether it’s in community, whether it’s … I mean, my wife and I, we never agree on everything 100%. And if I expected that of our relationship, then it wouldn’t be a very functional relationship. What if we did not need to arrive at certainty to remain connected to one another? Oftentimes when I’m coaching people and they’re having relationship troubles, they’re having troubles at work, I often ask the question, “Do you want to be connected or do you want to be right? Perhaps one of the greatest possibilities hidden inside collective doubt is this. We learn to trust each other while we’re still unsure. That’s it. We learn to trust each other while we are still unsure of everything. That kind of trust transforms relationships, communities, organizations, cultures, and yes, even nations.
In carrying our doubt together, we may learn how to trust one another while we are still unsure of our future, but trust that there is a future emerging that we all contribute to starting today and so it is. All right, my friends, bring your hands up to your heart. Take a deep breath in. And as you exhale, I want you to honor somewhere in your life you’re experiencing doubt. Whether it’s doubt in yourself and your capabilities and your beliefs, maybe a relationship that you’re in, maybe you’re doubting your body, it’s not functioning the way that you want it to. Let’s not make any of that wrong and just honor that this is a devotional practice, this doubt that is here. Take a deep breath in and we use this doubt to bring ourselves back to a greater space of conviction, a willingness to remember that even in our doubt, even in that which we don’t understand, even the stuff that we don’t like, there is a presence in this moment right here, right now today.
You can call this present source, you can call it love, you can call it light, you can call it divine, you can call it God, you can call it energy, you can call it flow, call it whatever you want, but recognize it now. There is something right here in this present moment in the midst of that doubt that it’s like pushing up through you for you to emerge more, expand, become. And we do this not alone, but we do it together where two or more are gathered the emergence is greater. So let us emerge well together this week. May we walk hand in hand, holding our doubt as a tool as opposed to a weapon. May it be something that transforms us into remembering that we are expanding, that we are emerging, that we are living expressions of the universal presence no matter what. And so everything is in service of that.
May we be of service to this emerging edge of life as our life in the midst of what we know and that which is uncertain. And what I know is as we remember this truth in the present moment over and over again that we are okay and we are on our way, then all is well. So may we be well this week trusting the divine ourselves and one another and so it is amen.