They (the Christians) call today “Holy Saturday.”  In fact, I’m on my way to be with them on this (Holy) Saturday.  I’ve not been in a Saturday Church Service in years, and I’m perfectly happy being a sorted and doubting insider on the outside of a dominant religious sector called Christianity.  I have many Christian friends and many friends who have no religious affiliation, then there is me who navigates the “already/not yet” of faith–that agnostic space and place.  I call this the intersection or borderland in/between the death and doubt of faith.  And so, here I sit in my office really trying to live into today–the death and doubt of Saturday, before faith, before the Alleluia, before the bodily or spiritual resurrection.  That’s where I sit today in my light-skinned Mexican body–in the space and place of the borderlands of doubt, of Agnosticism.

Its been several years since I claimed for myself the label “Agnosticism.”  It feels so right on so many days, especially today.  Its almost as if I live for the Holy Saturday.  I can neither say “yes” nor “no,” but I can always say “maybe.”  Yet today, I can say an adamant and astounding “maybe” as I move closer to the time the Holy Saturday service begins.  I wanted solemnity tonight, and I wanted darkness.  I wanted the space for doubt to live.  I wanted to be in a space and place that accentuated my doubt, my “maybe.”  And so, I’m going to stroll down into an Episcopal Church here in Denver, CO and profess my doubt, profess my “maybe.”

I cannot step into these spaces of faith without the ongoing recognition of my “in/between-ness” of the death and doubt of faith.  It is similar to my mixed-raced body and the reality that I must always recognize my Mexican heritage, though I always walk in/between being invisible to having any sort of Mexican heritage and being hyper-visible in White communities.  My religious disposition is very similar to this in that I have been trained as a Religious Scholar, with a particular focus in Christian Theology in my Master’s and Religious Ethics in my Doctoral program.  In many ways, the switch from Systematic Theology and the dogma of faith or orthodoxy is highlighted in my pursuit of Religious Ethics and my commitment to orthopraxis. For me, it is in the “doing” of doubt that I find solemnity.  It is in the gaps of faith, in the epistemological tears, that Saturday becomes Wholly Other to myself, to my body.  I find that living in/between the realities of the death and the doubts of faith rings true to the “maybes” we hear throughout life, and perhaps the ones which are closest to our bodies, to our soul.

Perhaps, as Spring comes into full-swing, the days grow longer, and the Christian Liturgical Year begins anew, the in/between-ness of the doubts and death of faith will be enlivened as the sun beams into our worlds.  Might our bodies know the doubt in a new way, and may our “maybes” compel us toward a more radically praxis oriented Ethic.  That, I contend, is a Holy Saturday and is living in the Gaps of Faith.  Certainly, it is the life of in/between-ness and a focus on the death and doubt of faith.