Doubt Walks in to a Bar

Happy New Year!

Let's start it like a joke:

If Atheism and Faith walked into a bar, and they sat down at neighboring tables kind of glancing over at each other and pretending to be absorbed in their phones, the door would open and, much to their mutual confusion, they'd both jump up to greet the newcomer. She'd be all cool and sassy and like "Heyyyyy, you two should really get to know each other," and her name would be Doubt.

Why? Because doubt is the constant. It's the space we can all meet, no matter what our creeds and conscience dictate. It's the big ol' soccer field where we dispense with the pinnies and just play Shirts vs. Shirts onward into infinity, because we're all on the same team when it comes to just not being sure about stuff.

There are levels, of course. I'm pretty far removed from "Is there a God at all," though I still have moments. I'm confident that even the most strident atheists I know occasionally stray towards at least the possibility of the Divine. But really what I'm wondering is what kinds of conversations we can have in this bar at the end of the universe, which I imagine looks like of like that dive in Raiders of the Lost Ark where Marion pretends to lose in a drinking contest and then walks away with all the Nepalese rupees because she is just that badass.


Doubt this, mothertrucker.

What can be said, before the Nazis come in and throw us way off course? And let it be noted that even though I can drink and ruminate and play imaginary soccer with the best of them, I am actually on a team.

And I do actually think the other one is misguided.

And I spend a lot of time thinking about how something in my life's calling is to help others walk with Doubt through Unbelief and into Faith.

But what might that look like? Because I am unswerving in my conviction that, though atheists might be getting some enormous and centrally crucial things wrong, they are getting SO VERY MUCH RIGHT. It is so strange and funny and beautiful to me that my own strange and funny and beautiful (and developing) sense of purpose has been upheld and supported in so many instances by friends who would never profess to any kind of belief in God.

It's like some kind of crazy Holy Spirit sucker punch, and it makes ME crazy because what might happen if they could just sit with their doubt long enough for one of those tiny instances of "what if?" to come along? I think I can make a pretty compelling case about why the narrative that guides my life begins and ends with a God who-- if I may Sparknote one of my priests-- lovingly created and still more lovingly restored the world, and what that has meant for me and what it could mean for them, too.


Speaking of: This exists? Who reads this?

I attended church twice on Christmas Eve. I took communion the first time and went up for a blessing the second time and came back and sat in my pew with all my hopes and worries and humanness right at the surface (probably due to that glass of wine at dinner), and I watched the people coming back from the altar rail. And there were so many new and diverse faces, short people and tall people and people walking back down the aisles "the right way" and confused newcomers causing traffic jams by going out the in-door, and it made me cry.

Because look at all that beauty. Look at all those lovely people shining with love for others and held in the greatest, deepest Love of all, many of them with no concept of it and just there because Grandma said so. And how insignificant and significant that ignorance was, all at the same time, and how the gift of the Incarnation is a gift for everyone, and how we're free to accept it or leave it wrapped up. And oh, if every one of us could just open that gift and be open to it, how might the world look then?

And then I jumped from thinking about the diversity of strangers in front of me to the diversity of people I knew, and how, if I could hold the world's largest celebration and have every dear one from every walk of my life be there-- in all of their Doubt and Fear and Loveliness-- I would want that celebration to be a Eucharist.

The church is in decline. Yes, it would be a wonderful thing to grow the church and swell its membership and its coffers and attendant ability to step out into the world in faith and give concrete aide, create concrete change, but outside of the numbers game I just want everyone to understand the amazing and steadfast Love of God. Period, end of story, Full Stop.

But the Church is the institution set up to help make that a reality, and I love and support it in all of its problems and foibles. How can I help the Church operate from that central core, and do it with honesty and integrity and an equal measure of the Love that empowers the Church to exist in the first place?

Because sign me up there-- that's the fight I want. There's my long hours slog and my working lunches and my endless meetings. Keep me up at night worrying about that. My heart sings for all of the trappings of what we call "work" if that labor can be intertwined with helping others understand and grow in their relationship to that rock-like, eternal, abiding Love.


There's the cup of a carpenter.

All punning aside, that would be my Holy Grail.