Some quotes today from Wishful Thinking: A Seekers ABC by Frederick Buechner. It is on a section called "Doubt". I like this because he pulls no punches. He lets us have it, both barrels. But isn’t that what being in the throes of doubt feels like? Like you’re being beaten up, spiritually, emotionally, mentally… Sometimes in the middle of all that it is helpful to know that you're not going crazy, that it is OK. Sometimes when we are finally through all of that it is helpful to know someone else has been through it, someone else has trusted God for deliverance. Enjoy.
… if you don’t have any doubts, you are either kidding yourself or you are asleep. Doubts are the ants in the pants of faith. They keep it awake and moving.
There are only two principal kinds of doubt, one of the head and the other of the stomach. In my head there is almost nothing I can’t doubt when the fit is upon me – the divinity of Christ, the significance of the church, the existence of God. But even when I am at my most skeptical, I go on with my life as though nothing untoward has happened.
I have never experienced stomach doubt, but I think Jesus did. When he cried out, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me!” I don’t think he was raising a theological issue any more than he was quoting the 22nd Psalm. I think he was looking into the abyss itself and found there a darkness that spiritually, viscerally, totally engulfed him.
When our faith is strongest, we believe with our hearts as well as our heads, but only at a few rare moments, I think, do we feel in our stomachs what it must be like to be engulfed by light.
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