A Couple of Thoughts

Last Friday, after Mr. Milkweed finished his final grades for spring semester (after five 10-12 hours days), we celebrated by going out to see The Avengers.


Awesome movie. Highly recommend!

The movie theater we frequent is housed in this giant brick warehouse that was constructed in 1887 to build trains. Large portions of the interior and exterior brick walls have been preserved, and a lonely little section of tracks breaks up the parking lot. Nowadays it's a confetti-carpeted pleasure palace, but it used to shelter hundreds of workers grinding away to build these massive steam locomotives... these hulking tools of commerce that helped usher in the 20th century.



I dropped Mr. Milkweed off at the entrance and drove away to go park, finally finding a space at the edge of the lot. I had nothing on my mind other than keeping things that way, but opening the car door into the humidity was like pushing that swinging door at the back of our big church sanctuary and entering the quiet of the chapel.

I had a moment there once on a Saturday morning when the weight of the door and the quality of light and silence were so unexpectedly full of God's presence that I stood completely still for as long as I dared. I was holding vases of flowers for the altar and eventually moved to set them down, but that moment stayed with me for the rest of the day and week and month and until now. Maybe it always will.

Friday night was its companion, I think. It was God and the scent of the honeysuckles together all at once, and even though I was supposed to be hurrying into the theater I didn't for a few minutes. And then I locked the car and walked away and across the lonely tracks and into the bright lobby and the noise.

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I have been spending a lot of time over the past few months thinking about the line that doubt draws between belief and non-belief. About how it can be scary to be in that kind of No-Man's-Land (although it's really Everyman's Land) and how it can be easier to jump off the tracks onto one side or the other: the place of faith, questions be damned, or the place of the rejection of that faith, with its former comforts packed away on a shelf.

Andrea Palpant Dilley recently posted a piece here on CNN's Belief Blog that really resonates with me. She grew up in the church, walked away when her questions made it too uncomfortable, and eventually found a place for herself within the church again. She writes:

"When I came back, I still carried...discontent. I was confused, and still bothered by questions and doubts. I stayed in the back row and didn’t sing or pray. I wasn’t really sure I wanted to be there.

And yet I sat there, Sunday after Sunday, listening to the pastor and the organ pipes and trying to figure out what was going on in my dark, conflicted heart.

Although I never experienced that dramatic reconversion moment, I did come to peace with two slow-growing realizations.

First: My doubt belonged in church.

People who know my story ask what I would have changed about my spiritual journey. Nothing. I had to leave the church to find the church. And when I came back, the return wasn’t clean or conclusive. Since then, I’ve come to believe that my doubts belong inside the space of the sanctuary. My questions belong on the altar as my only offering to God.

With all its faults, I still associate the church with the pursuit of truth and justice, with community and shared humanity. It’s a place to ask the unanswerable questions and a place to be on sojourn. No other institution has given me what the church has: a space to search for God.

Second: My doubt is actually part of my faith."

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So many thoughts here: I fully, completely, and whole-heartedly agree with her-- our doubts belong in church, and our doubts are (core! central! important!) parts of our faith. I also think it's completely fine and valid that she left the church when she needed to leave it.

On my own journey I never completely abandoned the notion of being a believer in community, though there were plenty of difficulties in identifying just what and where that community was. I was out on a kite-string for a really long time, and I needed to be in the wind; I needed to have those doubts. I needed to feel that they were as welcome in church as I was.



What's the role of the church with regard to those who struggle?

What can we do to both validate the search and searcher while making a compelling case for life in Christ?

I think the successful navigation of these two questions is central to the need and desire for growth in mainline Protestant denominations AND, blowing it waaaaay the heck on outward, that beautiful hope and goal that the community of believers may be one as Jesus and the Father are one.

No tidy answers here, though. Just lots to think about, but if the Avengers can assemble...why can't we?