In many ways, we, individually and collectively as a society, struggle with doubt about God. Why does God always seem so hidden? Why doesn’t He reveal Himself in concrete ways we can see so that there can be no doubt about His existence? Jesuit priest and theologian Karl Rahner wrote that “We just don’t have the eyes to see God because our eyes aren’t attuned to that kind of reality.” Fr. Rolheiser writes that we struggle with doubt because we can’t picture God’s existence, imagine God’s reality, or feel God’s presence in our normal ways. At a certain point, our minds, imaginations, and hearts simply run out of gas, out of room, out of feeling, and leave us dry, unable to nail down the reality of God the way we’re used to nailing down most everything else. The reality of God is elusive to our conscious minds and hearts because we can’t picture, imagine, or feel God in the usual way we do these things. The world is not God and we can’t walk around the landscape of spirit in the same way as we stroll around in this world. God and the other world are spirit and we are being invited into a reality whose hugeness is beyond conception, whose silence is beyond language, and whose reality is beyond the physical and all that we can see, touch, taste, smell, and feel in the normal way. God is life, light, love, energy, vastness, and simplicity beyond our categories. God has a different metaphysics. In a world where the physical defines everything, it can be difficult to believe in anything else. But even as our thoughts and feelings about God can seem empty, we are as people of faith, in our more important decisions and values, riveting ourselves ever more firmly to God and the other world. Such are the dynamics of faith. Sometimes what feels like doubt and atheism is the beginning of real belief and real growth.