A Skeptic's Spiritual Seeking

I’ve been thinking a lot about Saint Thomas the Apostle, AKA “Doubting Thomas.”

I’ve talked about my current spiritual journey back toward Catholicism and my experience attending Mass in other posts, but I wanted to share some thoughts.

I don’t fully agree with all of the Church’s dogma, but I’ve found myself drawn to something else entirely: its tradition, metaphor, art, history, mysticism, and heritage, all woven together into something that feels lived rather than purely intellectual.

In particular, I find a strange kind of comfort in the way the Catholic Church tends to hold tension rather than flatten it into a simple black-and-white ideology. It does not always resolve contradictions. It often contains them.

That feels important to me.

I find myself returning to the image of the twelve apostles. A group of people drawn from radically different backgrounds, ideologies, and values, all gathered around Jesus, who preached love, forgiveness, healing, and radical care for the marginalized.

And yet they did not agree with each other. They could not have been more different. Matthew, the tax collector. Simon the Zealot. Thomas, who questioned what others accepted.

And still, they were held together.

This same pattern runs through much of Catholic tradition. It is not only the apostles, but the mystics and saints who also hold this tension in different forms: Saint John of the Cross writing from the “dark night” of longing and absence, Saint Teresa of Ávila balancing ecstatic interior experience with structure and discipline, Julian of Norwich speaking of mercy and reassurance through uncertainty, and even Thomas Aquinas building careful, reasoned theology alongside mystery that cannot be fully explained. Different temperaments, different ways of encountering God, all within the same tradition.

I feel like I’ve often been, or am, something like an eternal prodigal son or doubting Thomas, someone who loves deeply but struggles with certainty, someone who wants meaning but also cannot pretend certainty where there is none.

What moves me is not that Thomas is corrected or removed, but that he is still given a place among the apostles. He is not discarded for his doubt. He is not asked to become someone else in order to belong.

Instead, he is met.

And in that meeting, I find a pattern that seems to hold true for me… whether one reads it as historical fact, spiritual truth, or metaphor: difference is not erased in order for belonging to exist. It is precisely within difference, tension, and uncertainty that connection remains possible.

I may not fit neatly into what people want to define as “Christian,” “Catholic,” or “believer in God.” I have my own eclectic spiritual practice, and I think that’s the point. I can hold hope, faith, and love in the same heart without needing it to be fact, without needing it to align with dogma, or to agree with all those who claim to follow “God” in order to be met.

As Thomas famously says in the Gospel narrative, “My Lord and my God.”

The Incredulity of Saint Thomas (Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, c. 1601–1602)