Sometimes it is a hiding in the two a.m. darkness.
Sometimes it is a wrestling with something only partly known.
Sometimes it is a stumbling around in the dusk that is almost nightfall.
It is a doubt about God that is common to all who are awake and alive. Whether you believe in God and at times doubt His existence or you disbelieve in God and at times doubt His absence, it is an experience of humanity.
Frederick Buechner speaks of head doubt and stomach doubt.
Head doubt can happen at any time and about anything at all. I can doubt the existence of God, the true fabric of reality, even the evidence of my own senses if the mood is right. When these doubts descend, I usually keep living my life as I have been living, continue to act as though I still believe, and in the end it eventually comes out right.
I have never experienced stomach doubt. Perhaps only those who whose faith is the strongest, the saints among us, have experienced this kind of doubt.
I believe that Jesus did. When He cried out “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?” I believe that He was engulfed in stomach doubt. He had, as Buechner said, “looked into the abyss itself and found there a darkness that spiritually, viscerally, totally engulfed Him.”
I don’t know that I am strong enough to withstand that kind of doubt.
