There’s a lovely passage about the pain of spiritual doubt in a letter that Flannery O’Connor sent in 1959 to her friend Louise Abbot. “I think there is no suffering greater than what is caused by the doubts of those who want to believe,” O’Connor writes. But I’d add this to that: I think there is no suffering greater than what is caused by the doubts of those who want to believe and are told by others that they cannot.
