On the Sin of Certainty
Every year, my daughters and I get together to watch the Oscars. Mostly we do this because it’s fun to get together, bet on movies (whether we’ve seen them or not) and watch all the famous people in their bright plumage prance around.
Anyhoo.
In preparation, I like to try to watch as many of the Oscar nominated movies as possible, so I can at least have a somewhat educated guess as to who I think will win each category. That’s why this last weekend my partner and I rented the movie Conclave, about the secret Vatican politics and processes of electing a new pope.
One scene in particular really resonated with me. It articulated something (albeit in very Catholic language) that I’ve been trying to get my head around for the last couple of years. Ralph Fiennes, as the beleaguered cardinal tasked with running the conclave, begins his sermon thus:
“My brothers and sisters, in the course of a long life in the service of our Mother the Church, let me tell you that the one sin I have come to fear more than any other is certainty. Certainty is the great enemy of unity. Certainty is the deadly enemy of tolerance…Our faith is a living thing precisely because it walks hand in hand with doubt. If there was only certainty, and if there was no doubt, there would be no mystery, and therefore no need for faith.” ― Cardinal Lawrence , Conclave
I speak a lot in sessions with clients about the need to get comfortable with the uncomfortable, to lean into uncertainty. But I rarely talk about the flip side, how living in your certainty is its own atrophy. It is the sin of trying to “be right” instead of “getting it right, in the language of Brené Brown. We make our worlds smaller when we are scared of doubt, of difference, of the unknown. We get caught in our own trap when we refuse any experience that may be different from ours.
How does it look like to commit the “sin of certainty”?
When you believe your version of the experience is the only one
When you believe you know what’s best and refuse to hear or be curious about other ways of doing or being
When you let fear close down your curiosity, and anxiety dictate the parameters of your world
Sound familiar? We’re seeing the danger of the “sin of certainty” in our polarized politics. Each side denies the experience of the other; each side is certain they know best; each side is scared to approach the other and therefore chooses to close their eyes instead of getting curious.
As a therapist, Certainty is my biggest red flag: it means I’m not fully present to my client— that I’m trying to impose my own worldview, my own experience onto their experience . I know I’m in the sin of certainty when I being to argue my point, when I feel like I know better than them what their experience is. If only they hear me out they’ll come to understand that my perceived experience of their experience is the right one.
Sigh. The humanity. If I’m doing this to you, please call me on it right away—it is one of my biggest flaws.
And also, it is really hard to remain open to the experience of the other. If it were easy, conflict would look a lot different. We would have way less wars, less divorces, less bitter custody battles. But our own experience feels so all-encompassing, so real, it’s really difficult to leave the snug, little perspective for the unknown waters of the other. It is rare the person who attempts it, and even rarer the person who becomes adept at it.
But not impossible.
I’m no longer a practising Catholic (and even when I was, it was pretty half-assed), but I have my own faith: faith that we are living an ameliorative event, that most people try their best to love and connect and not harm, though the ways they try to do that may be misguided.
Most of all, I’ve begun to trust in my own resilience as I navigate the experience of the other. Resilience to not only weather the storms, but to ride them out to where they take me and even appreciate the sometimes violent, sometimes gentle letting go they require of me.
This did not come easily.
Today marks the day a decade ago my husband at the time dropped the bomb of his affair and lack of interest in being married to me anymore. It has been a decade of storms and reckonings, of feeling flayed alive and having to grow a new skin. Certainty was flung out the window that day, never to come back. At first, I felt so unmoored it felt like my molecules were detaching from each other and that pieces of me were simply breaking off and floating away like dandelion fluff.
I longed to retrieve the false sense of security I had up to that point, the erroneous belief that if only I do everything “right”, I will be okay and people won’t leave me. I longed for it back, even if knew that its certainty was an illusion. Letting go of what I thought was my life did not come easily or gracefully and I made many mistakes trying to cling to a reality that was no longer.
And yet, in the process of letting go (slowly, one finger at a time) I found an easier, more loving, more supportive way of being in the world. And because I don’t always feel like I’m swimming upstream, my relationships with my kids, my family, my new partner also have less friction: Not only do I love better, I am better able to let other people love me. In short, I am edging away from the safety of certainty and growing my ability to sit in uncertainty.
Check-In
Is there a belief/idea/relationship/behaviour pattern you are clinging to that is not fitting anymore?
If so, what keeps you holding on?
How does it serve you? How does it hinder you?
What do you fear if you let go?
What does that part of you need to soften down and not hold on so tight? Acknowledgement? Reassurance? Witnessing?
Certainty is very seductive. It’s comforting, familiar and seemingly easier. We know where we stand. We don’t have to think so much. We can go through life lulled by a false sense that the world will always be the way it is now and will never change.
But then the sky inevitably falls on our heads and we are forced to reckon with the reality that what we thought was tried and true was never what we thought it was in the first place. That we are not what we thought we were.
Indeed, we may discover we are so much more.
