Room for Doubt

As I was listening to my housemate practice her sermon for Sunday, she spoke these words which took me back to my Weekly College Worship days and those many moments of reading Frederick Buechner, when I had so many questions and needed more than mental resilience to keep moving forward in my faith. My friend described how, on a college campus where she was awash in many new kinds of Christian groups, she found a home in a small, ecumenical group of students, in a faith space that allowed room for doubt. These words hit me and reminded me too of my Davidson days. I remembered the immediate sense of peace and belonging that I felt when I first began participating in Weekly College Worship. I was something of a religion-ophile: I often attended many different kinds of services; I was the only "white girl" in the Gospel Choir, for instance, and I was comfortable being part of Intervarsity as well as the more progressive Methodist Fellowship. There, in the space of Weekly College Worship however (WCW), we were allowed to be human. Not to give up on our faith or the power of God's presence in the world, but to admit to ourselves as well as to each other that somedays we don't have it all together and that we can be thankful to our God, who also understands what it means to be human. So... room to doubt. In a world of rhetoric that sometimes undulates, making stark contrasts between belief and unbelief, it was in this little space where I was free to be my whole self and proclaim my passion as well as my worries... that I found soul-siblings whom I deeply love. Gratitude.