Help my unbelief

But what do you do when with all the sleepless wrestling and the furrowed-browed prayers and the ceaseless questions and the best-intended efforts, even that seems out of reach? What happens when the very reality of God (or of a God who is good) seems too much for you to claim ownership of? How do you keep going while in the middle of a full-blown spiritual collapse?

It often isn’t a matter of just being more determined or more “religious.” Most of the time, people have reached these desperate moments despite continually reading the Bible, praying, volunteering, attending church services, and trying to believe. They haven’t refrained from those disciplines; in fact, they often are as devout and engaged as ever, only these pursuits no longer yield the clarity, confidence and comfort they once did.

As a spiritual director, many people come to me in that barren spiritual dryness, and they almost always carry the crushing guilt of failure. They are grieving deeply, feeling helpless to get back what they’ve lost, and angry at themselves for not being faithful enough to conjure up the belief that used to come as a simple given. And they’re often pretty ticked off at God too.

If you’re in that place right now, I won’t pretend there’s any easy way out or a simple path back to faith. I can’t even promise that you’ll ever find your way back, at least not to what you used to call belief. It may be a very different experience in the future.

So, what can you do right now?

You might continue to pray or read the Bible or find a new church—but maybe it’s something else.

Maybe it’s about asking yourself what you still know to be true, about the goodness of people, about the things that matter to you, about the gifts you’ve been given.

Maybe today, it’s just about what’s right in front of you: about what you can see and hear and touch and smell and taste. Maybe the best thing you can do right now is to experience all the things that you can know and simply receive them with gratitude: a delicious meal, the evening breeze, some music that moves you, the laughter of your best friend, the depth of a relationship, the smell of your child’s head as you hug them. Those measurable and tangible things can form a working theology of beauty and awe, and gratitude.

Maybe just accepting these great, pure, measurable gifts and presently cherishing them is all the faith you can have right now, and that’s OK. Maybe that’s as close to proof of the Divine as you can consent to. To simply live and to find appreciation in the living is itself a spiritual pursuit; it is a holy thing. And as you do this, you may find that this contentment is the straighter pathway back to what you’ve lost. It may clear the road to God that has been cluttered by sadness, disappointment, doubt and yes, even religion.

But don’t lay that expectation on yourself right now because that would only turn this gratitude into a means to an end, a result to achieve, another religious exercise to evaluate. For now, just receive the goodness and pleasures of this day and allow them to speak to and surprise you. You may find there the beginning of a new season of faith.

And don’t feel guilty, and don’t worry about what anyone else says. You’re the one walking this road, and you understand it in ways they never will.

And above all, don’t worry about God. If God is indeed God, then God is big enough to handle your doubts and knows exactly what you’re going through and why belief is such a struggle right now.

You may have indeed lost your faith, or you may have just lost your way a bit. Either way, this might be a good time to breathe, look around, and find joy in what is beside and around you as you travel.

If that is all the faith you can muster right now, let it be so. But above all, reader, be gentle with yourself so you can be gentle with others.