Is it okay to doubt? Is questioning your faith and/or God okay? Growing up, I often heard that no, these things were not okay. The Church believes these principles, that was the way it was, and I was okay with this because I loved my Catholic faith. When I started studying Theology, taking my faith at face value started to be challenged. I still loved my Catholic faith, but there was this tension beginning to form between what I was learning in the classroom and my personal faith journey. This tension led to some pondering, a lot of questions, and even some doubt. This tension is not something that is bad, as some of these topics such as the Trinity, the nature of Jesus and God, or heresies are hard topics to grasp at face value. When I first started to notice this tension, I told a priest that I was working with at the time about it. His advice was that this tension is not bad – to lean into it and pray with it. As these tensions would arise and were thought about, pondered, and prayed about, I began to see that my faith and understanding of it ended up growing.
Outside the classroom, this tension still continues. I have been blessed many times to share in another’s faith journey, and at times I have been able to look into that person’s eyes and see the pain and questions. Sometimes there is little I can say or do to bring comfort or ease the burden of another, and I find myself asking, “How do I care and show the love of Christ to this individual in front of me.” There are no words to understand why a young person dies or the sufferings of the elderly. There are little ways to help persons who feel like they have been rejected by their faith community and its members to still feel loved by God. Many questions set in when we hear about people we know choosing to do acts we struggle to understand, or we question the good in the world when we can turn on the news at night to the number of shootings that happen in our streets and around the country almost every day. When we look around our world, there are plenty of places where we can see this tension.
We can look within our church, within our families, within ourselves and see the tension and our own brokenness. It is here that the tension still exists – between the faith journey of life that can sometimes be raw and painful and a theology that while can offer hope, cannot explain away the pain. We can look in the Gospels and see Thomas, the infamous one who shows this doubt; thus, we call him “Doubting Thomas.” But we must not forget how that story ends: Thomas after doubting comes to believe and made a huge act of faith proclaiming, “My Lord and my God.” This tension, this doubt is not bad, but it is also not a place to stay, rather a place to pray through. Maybe then we can continue to grow in our own faith, so we too are able, despite the tension, to make our own proclamation of faith.