My grandfather kept a small wooden cross above his bed his entire adult life. When he died, we found a note tucked behind it that none of us had ever seen, just a few lines, in his handwriting, that said he was not sure what he believed anymore, but that he kept coming back to Easter because he could not explain it away. He was eighty-one when he wrote it.

I think about that note more than I probably should.

There is something almost absurd about building a faith on absence. No relic, no inscription, no remains. Just a hollow space where a body should have been. And yet here we are, two thousand years later, still arguing about it in seminaries and hospital corridors and the quiet of minds that cannot quite let the question go. My grandfather was not a theologian. He was a farmer who went to Mass every Sunday and doubted every Monday. And he kept showing up anyway. That feels more like resurrection faith to me than most of what I have read about it.

The Gospel accounts of Easter morning are not triumphant. They are disorienting. The women arrive at dawn and find nothing. Peter runs to check and goes home confused. Faith does not spring up clean and confident from the empty tomb, it stumbles into the light, blinking. That detail matters, and we tend to skip past it. Doubt is not the enemy of resurrection faith. For most of the people who have ever held it, doubt has been its closest companion.

Here is something nobody says out loud in most churches: faith can become furniture. Familiar, unremarkable, easy to stop seeing. You keep it around because it has........

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