{"id":27562,"date":"2026-09-07T09:19:57","date_gmt":"2026-09-07T13:19:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/?p=27562"},"modified":"2026-09-07T10:54:09","modified_gmt":"2026-09-07T14:54:09","slug":"27562","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/?p=27562","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"&quot;Saturn&quot; by Sleeping At Last (Official Lyric Video)\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/9wRjbBd-_io?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">The Dance of Faith and Doubt<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>Sunday, September 6, 2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Father Richard Rohr reflects on the place of doubt in a mature life of faith:&nbsp;<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Basic religious faith is a vote for some\u202fcoherence, purpose, benevolence, and direction in the universe.\u202fUnfortunately, the notion of faith that\u202femerged\u202fin the West was much m<strong>ore a rational assent to the truth of certain mental beliefs rather than a calm and hopeful trust that God is inherent in all things, and that this whole thing is going somewhere\u202fgood.\u202f&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I worry about \u201ctrue believers\u201d who cannot carry any doubt or anxiety at all. People who are so certain always seem, like Hamlet\u2019s queen, to \u201cprotest too much\u201d and try too hard. <strong>To hold the full mystery of life is always to endure its other half,\u202fwhich is the equal mystery of death and doubt<\/strong>. <strong>To know anything fully is always to hold that part of it which is still mysterious and unknowable<\/strong>. [1]\u202f&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Doubt and faith are actually correlative terms.\u202fPeople of great faith often suffer bouts of great doubt because they continue to grow. Mother Teresa experienced decades of this kind of doubt, as was revealed after her death. In a letter to a trusted spiritual director she wrote, \u201cDarkness is such that I really do not see\u2014neither with my mind nor with my reason.\u00ad\u2014The place of God in my soul is blank.\u2014There is no God in me.\u201d [2] The very fact that people were scandalized by this demonstrates how limited is our understanding of the nature of biblical faith.\u202f\u202f&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It seems a movement from certitude to doubt and through doubt to acceptance of life\u2019s mystery is necessary in all encounters, intellectual breakthroughs, and relationships, not just with the Divine. Human faith and religious faith are much the same except in their object or goal. <strong>What set us on the wrong path was making the object of religious faith \u201cideas\u201d or doctrines instead of a person.<\/strong> Our faith is not a faith that dogmas or moral opinions are true, but a<strong> faith that Ultimate Reality\/God\/Christ is accessible to us\u2014and even on our side.\u202f[3]\u202f\u202f&nbsp;<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Our youthful demand for certainty eliminates most anxiety on the conscious level, so I can see why many are tempted to remain in such a control tower. We do not have enough experience of wholeness to include all its parts yet. First-half-of-life na\u00efvet\u00e9 includes a kind of excitement and happiness that is hard to let go\u202fof unless we know there is an even deeper and tested kind of happiness out ahead of us. But we do not know that yet in the early years, which is why <strong>those in the second half of life must tell us about it. Without elders,\u202fa society perishes socially and spiritually.\u202f&nbsp;<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It\u202f is probably necessary to eliminate most doubt when we are young; doing so is a good survival technique. But such worldviews are not true\u2014and they are not wisdom.<strong> Wisdom happily lives with mystery, doubt, and unknowing and, in such living, ironically resolves that very mystery to some degree.\u202f[4]\u202f\u202f&nbsp;<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>===============<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Before and After Doubt<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>Monday, September 7, 2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Labor Day (U.S.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote\">\n<p>When grounded in an experience of Love, doubt does not represent a step backwards but is a necessary condition for any movement forward.&nbsp;<br>\u2014Richard Rohr&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p><em>CAC core faculty member Brian McLaren speaks of doubt as an essential part of his growth in faith, from a focus on \u201corthodoxy\u201d or right belief to \u201corthopraxy\u201d or right living.&nbsp;<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Before doubt, I thought that faith was a matter of correct beliefs. My religious teachers taught me so: that if I didn\u2019t hold the right beliefs, or at least say that I held them, I would be excommunicated from my community, and perhaps, after death, from God\u2019s presence. They taught me this not to be cruel but because they themselves had been taught the same thing, and they were working hard, sometimes desperately, to be faithful to the rules as they understood them. I tried to do the same, and I would still be doing so today if not for doubt.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Doubt chipped away at those beliefs, one agonizing blow at a time, revealing that what actually mattered wasn\u2019t the point of beliefs but the clear window of faith, faith as a life orientation, faith as a framework of values and spirituality, faith as a commitment to live into a deep vision of what life can be, faith as a way of life, faith expressing itself in love.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>For all those years, when I said, \u201cI believe,\u201d I thought I understood what I was doing. But more was going on, so much more\u2026.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Looking back, I now see that underneath arguments about what I believed to be true&nbsp;<em>factually<\/em>, something deeper and truer was happening&nbsp;<em>actually<\/em>.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>For example, whether or not the creation story happened&nbsp;<em>factually&nbsp;<\/em>as described in Genesis, I was committing myself to live in the world as if it&nbsp;<em>actually<\/em>&nbsp;were a precious, beautiful, meaningful creation, and as if I were too\u2026.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>What mattered most was not that I&nbsp;<em>believed&nbsp;<\/em>the stories in a factual sense, but that I&nbsp;<em>believed in<\/em>&nbsp;the meaning they carried so I could act upon that meaning and embody it in my life, to let that meaning breathe in me, animate me, fill me\u2026. <strong>Whether I considered the stories factually accurate was never the point; what actually mattered all along was whether I lived a life pregnant with the meaning those stories contained. To my surprise, when I was given permission to doubt the factuality of my beliefs, I discovered their actual life-giving purpose\u2026<\/strong>.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Doubt need not be the death of faith. It can be, instead, the <strong>birth of a new kind of faith, a faith beyond beliefs, a faith that expresses itself in love, a deepening and expanding faith that can save your life and save the world.<\/strong> <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>=======================<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h1 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><a href=\"https:\/\/substack.com\/app-link\/post?publication_id=1824508&amp;post_id=214164041&amp;utm_source=post-email-title&amp;utm_campaign=email-post-title&amp;isFreemail=true&amp;r=2dkj2&amp;token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjozOTkyMzY2LCJwb3N0X2lkIjoyMTQxNjQwNDEsImlhdCI6MTc4ODYwOTk1MSwiZXhwIjoxNzkxMjAxOTUxLCJpc3MiOiJwdWItMTgyNDUwOCIsInN1YiI6InBvc3QtcmVhY3Rpb24ifQ.H-AmPdAjXzvxt9g0N76gSuJiqFWxrZW6DFQPjkHwxmU\">Where Exactly Did Jesus Ascend To?<\/a><\/h1>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-table\"><table><tbody><tr><td><a href=\"https:\/\/substack.com\/@peteenns\">ODDS AND ENNS<\/a>.    SEP 5<\/td><td><a href=\"https:\/\/substack.com\/@peteenns\"><\/a><\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><a href=\"https:\/\/substack.com\/redirect\/377e320b-05de-485b-b15a-f7753604bc33?j=eyJ1IjoiMmRrajIifQ.ND0qR5RKsmVnltuWgIlyr3BY7uwq2Kt9ZzX29UJK4cg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/substackcdn.com\/image\/fetch\/$s_!i9GX!,w_1100,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep\/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fe5717c0b-b041-4819-9e3a-da6a4e65c5ee_1524x1662.png\" alt=\"\"\/><\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-table\"><table><tbody><tr><td><\/td><td><\/td><td><\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Ascension&nbsp;<\/em>&#8211; John Singleton Copley (1775)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>There\u2019s one scene at the beginning of Acts that is worth looking at more closely.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Jesus has been raised from the dead. He spends forty days with his disciples. And then this happens:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote\">\n<p><em>\u201cAs they were watching, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight\u201d (Acts 1:9).<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p>The disciples stand there looking up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Then two men in white robes appear and ask, \u201cMen of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven?\u201d Jesus, they say, has been \u201ctaken up from you into heaven\u201d and will return in the same way they saw him go.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So let\u2019s just notice what Luke is describing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Jesus goes up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>A cloud takes him out of sight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The disciples keep looking up toward heaven.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Jesus has gone to heaven, and at some point he will come back the way he left.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em><strong>Where exactly did Jesus go?<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I don\u2019t mean that as a gotcha question. I mean it as a very basic question about how we read the Bible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Because if we read Acts 1 as a description of Jesus physically traveling from one location in the universe to another, we have a problem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Whatever we think heaven is, it is not located behind cloud cover.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>We know what is up there. Atmosphere. Space. Planets. Stars. Galaxies. There is no point at which, if you travel far enough upward, you leave the physical universe and arrive at God.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Of course, someone might say, \u201cPete, you\u2019re being ridiculously literal. Luke isn\u2019t giving us a NASA report.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Fair enough.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But that doesn\u2019t quite solve the problem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>What\u2019s with the Cloud?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Odds &amp; Enns &#8211; A Substack by Pete Enns is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Before we make fun of ancient people for thinking God lives behind a cloud, we need to slow down.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Clouds mean something in the Bible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>At Sinai, God descends in a cloud (Exod. 19:9; 24:15\u201318). In Daniel 7, \u201cone like a son of man\u201d comes \u201cwith the clouds of heaven\u201d into the presence of the Ancient One (Dan. 7:13).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And Luke himself has already used this imagery.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>At the Transfiguration, a cloud overshadows Jesus and the disciples, and the voice of God comes from it: \u201cThis is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!\u201d (Luke 9:34\u201335).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So when Luke tells us that a cloud receives Jesus at his ascension, the point probably isn\u2019t simply that Jesus got high enough in the atmosphere that he disappeared into a cloud bank.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The cloud signals the divine presence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em><strong>Jesus is entering the presence of God.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>That helps.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But it doesn\u2019t make the problem go away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The symbolism is still working within an ancient way of imagining the cosmos.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Heaven is up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Jesus goes up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The disciples look up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And Jesus will someday come back from where he went.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>And It\u2019s Not Just Luke<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Other New Testament writers talk this way too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Ephesians says that God raised Jesus from the dead and \u201cseated him at his right hand in the heavenly places\u201d (Eph. 1:20).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Hebrews says Jesus \u201cpassed through the heavens\u201d (Heb. 4:14) and entered \u201cheaven itself\u201d into the presence of God (Heb. 9:24).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And 1 Peter says Jesus \u201chas gone into heaven and is at the right hand of God\u201d (1 Pet. 3:22).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This language is all over the New Testament (Acts 2:32\u201336; 3:21; 5:31; 7:55\u201356; Rom. 8:34; Eph. 4:8\u201310; Phil. 2:9\u201311; Col. 3:1; 1 Tim. 3:16; Heb. 1:3; 6:19\u201320; 8:1; 10:12; 12:2; Rev. 3:21).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Jesus is above.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>God is in heaven.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Jesus has gone there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And Jesus is now at God\u2019s right hand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Of course, \u201cseated at the right hand of God\u201d is biblical royal imagery, especially from Psalm 110:1:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>\u201cThe LORD says to my lord, \u2018Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool.\u2019\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The New Testament writers aren\u2019t necessarily picturing two enormous chairs somewhere above the clouds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But that observation can also become a way of avoiding the issue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The language may be symbolic, but symbols come from somewhere. They make sense within a way of imagining reality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And the ancient biblical writers imagined the cosmos differently than we do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Jesus Doesn\u2019t Get a Free Pass<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Christians have gotten fairly accustomed to acknowledging that the Old Testament reflects an ancient way of understanding the cosmos.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Genesis reflects such an ancient way, as does the flood story. The psalms talk about waters above the earth, the foundations of the earth, and the heavens stretched out like a tent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Fine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Ancient people thought ancient thoughts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But things get more uncomfortable when we move into the New Testament.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And more uncomfortable still when Jesus is involved.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But Jesus doesn\u2019t get a free pass.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>If we take the incarnation seriously, Jesus was an ancient person.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>He wasn\u2019t a twenty-first-century person temporarily dressed in first-century clothing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And the people who experienced Jesus, remembered Jesus, and wrote about Jesus were ancient people, too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>They understood reality using the categories available to them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>That shouldn\u2019t surprise us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It\u2019s what human beings do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>So What Happened at the Ascension?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I don\u2019t think our options are simply (1) that Jesus literally traveled upward through the atmosphere until he reached the place where God lives, or (2) the whole story is nonsense.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Maybe Luke\u2019s cosmology is the vehicle rather than the point.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Jesus\u2019 earthly mode of presence has ended.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Jesus has returned to the Father.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Jesus has been vindicated and exalted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Jesus now participates in the rule of God.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And the Spirit will empower Jesus\u2019 followers to continue what he began.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Those are enormous theological claims.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But I don\u2019t want to wrap everything up too neatly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>What exactly does it mean to say that Jesus \u201creturned to the Father\u201d once we stop imagining heaven as a place above us?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Where is the risen Jesus?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>What does it mean to say Jesus is \u201cwith God\u201d?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>What does it mean to say Jesus is \u201cseated at the right hand of God\u201d?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Is that language about location? Divine presence? Authority? Participation in God\u2019s life? Some combination of all of them?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I don\u2019t think those questions have easy answers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And maybe that\u2019s the point.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The ascension is a particularly clear example of something we encounter everywhere when reading the Bible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The Bible comes to us from another world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Not just another language or another culture, but another way of imagining reality itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Our job is neither to pretend that the ancient world is ours, nor just discard the Bible because it isn\u2019t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Our job is harder, and more interesting:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>To ask what these ancient writers were trying to say about God within the world as they understood it.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>And then to ask what it might mean for us to say it now.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">A Question to Contemplate:<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Where in my life am I still demanding certainty, when I might instead be invited into trust, wonder, and mystery?<br><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Dance of Faith and Doubt Sunday, September 6, 2026 Father Richard Rohr reflects on the place of doubt in a mature life of faith:&nbsp; Basic religious faith is a vote for some\u202fcoherence, purpose, benevolence, and direction in the universe.\u202fUnfortunately, the notion of faith that\u202femerged\u202fin the West was much more a rational assent to the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27562"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=27562"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27562\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27573,"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27562\/revisions\/27573"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=27562"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=27562"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=27562"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}