He goes to church every Sunday with his wife and his kids. He sings the songs. He listens to the sermons. He bows his head when everyone else does.
He has been doing this for eleven years.
He has never told his wife that he doesn’t believe any of it.
Not because he wants to deceive her. Because he genuinely wishes he could. He has tried. He has prayed, in the most literal sense, for the ability to pray. He has asked to be given what the people around him seem to have been given.
It hasn’t come.
There are people in every congregation who are there because they want to belong to something. Who love the ritual and the community and the sense of meaning, without being able to access the certainty underneath it. We don’t talk about them. The conversation about faith assumes you either have it or you’re working on getting it back. Nobody has a space for the ones who genuinely want it and simply can’t reach it.
I don’t know what he should do. Tell her. Stay quiet. Keep trying. Stop trying. I don’t think there’s a clean answer here.
What I keep coming back to is the loneliness of sitting in a room full of people who feel something you can’t feel. Of wanting something that others seem to receive without effort.
Is wanting to believe the same as believing? Is reaching toward something the same as touching it?
Doubt is not the opposite of faith. They coexist in most people who have thought seriously about either. But there’s a particular version of doubt that doesn’t announce itself as doubt. It just shows up as absence. As going through all the right motions and feeling nothing in return.
He keeps going back. Maybe that counts for something. Maybe the wanting is its own kind of faith. Or maybe he’s just a man sitting in a pew every Sunday, hoping this is the week something changes.
Either way, he shows up.
Some things worth sitting with:
- Is there something you perform belief in that you haven’t been honest about?
- Have you ever wanted to believe something that you simply couldn’t reach?
- What does it mean to keep showing up to something even when you’re not sure why?
It connects, in its own way, to She Told Her Mother She Still Had Faith. That Wasn’t Entirely True..
Inspired by a real story shared anonymously online.