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He realizes his questions—did the Flood really happen?—are "banal," but they feel urgent. He fantasizes about life without faith ("If you had no faith — you could smoke pot with no guilt. — You could have sex with multiple partners. — You could vote Democrat. You could spend all your time playing Frisbee golf"). He wonders if he should still raise his hands and dance in church, even though he feels hollow and would rather be knitting or tending a garden than praising the Lord.

The book, of course, ends (I was sad when it did), but Dodd's Christian journey does not. When a new Christian hits that first bump of doubt, what he wants most is a resolution. He wants the struggle to be Over. But, says Dodd, "there is no simple Over in terms of my faith, or my doubt. Both are still with me strongly. I still doubt. I think of it as an affliction, a disorder called Doubt. I wake to questions in the morning. Some days they hassle me all day long; other days they seem petty and foolish."

And so he comes not to an Over, but to "a silent rest — in the middle." It is a middle, and a silent rest, that most of us know.

Patton Dodd may well encounter some naysayers, who will ask what business he has writing a spiritual memoir when he's not yet 30 (at least, some naysayers wondered that about me when I published a memoir at 24). And, to be sure, should Dodd turn again to the story of his conversion and his early Christian life when he is 65, he will likely write a quite different book. But the power of this memoir is how well Dodd captures the messiness of faith—messiness that surely is still there at 65, but is perhaps more obvious, even sometimes more vulgar, at 25.

My Faith So Far makes clear that one doesn't need to have everything neatly tied up before stepping into church; one doesn't have to have answers to all those nagging existential questions before meeting Jesus; indeed, it is being in church, and spending time with Jesus, that teaches us how best to ask the questions. My Faith So Far is good companionship along the way.

Lauren F. Winner is the author of Girl Meets God: A Memoir (Random House, 2003). Her book Real Sex: The Naked Truth about Chastity will be published by Brazos in April.

Copyright © 2005 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

My Faith So Far is available from Christianbook.com and other book retailers.

More about Patton Dodd is available from his weblog.

More information, including two excerpts, is available from the publisher.

Dodd is also a contributing editor for Killing the Buddha, the Submission Director of the Independent Film Festival of Boston.

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December (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48