The Quiet Hour

Sunday morning. Before the sermon. Before the hymns and the handshakes and the small talk in the lobby about weather and health and grandchildren who are growing too fast. There's a moment when the church is almost empty and the light comes through the colored glass and falls on the pews like a hand that doesn't ask anything of you. I come here not because I'm sure. I come here because I'm not. Certainty is easy. It's the doubt that needs a building— a place with high ceilings and old wood and the smell of a hundred years of people bringing their questions to the same room and leaving without answers but somehow lighter. The woman in the third row closes her eyes. I don't know what she's asking for. But I know that the asking is its own kind of answer. Faith is not what you know. It's what you do with what you don't. I fold my hands. Not because I was taught to. Because my hands need somewhere to go when the rest of me is trying to be still. The organ starts. The room fills. The ordinary Sunday becomes something that has no name but everyone in the room recognizes. Maybe that's God. Maybe it's just people sitting together in their not-knowing. Either way, I'll be back next week.