Have you ever felt like God is silent - or absent?
I have - many times. It’s disorienting - a pain that I feel in my bones.
Does this mean that God does not exist? How do we understand these experiences?
One story that has helped me through such seasons is the experience of Mother Teresa. Known globally for her work with the poorest of the poor in Calcutta, India, Mother Teresa founded the Missionaries of Charity. She became a global symbol of compassion and selfless service.
But despite her public persona of perpetual cheer, her private letters reveal a profound spiritual struggle. For instance, in a letter to Rev. Michael Van Der Peet in September 1979, she wrote:
Jesus has a very special love for you. [But] as for me–The silence and the emptiness is so great–that I look and do not see,–Listen and do not hear.
As reported by TIME:
Although perpetually cheery in public, the Teresa of the letters lived in a state of deep and abiding spiritual pain. In more than 40 communications, many of which have never before been published, she bemoans the “dryness,” “darkness,” “loneliness” and “torture” she is undergoing. She compares the experience to hell and at one point says it has driven her to doubt the existence of heaven and even of God. She is acutely aware of the discrepancy between her inner state and her public demeanor. “The smile,” she writes, is “a mask” or “a cloak that covers everything.”
Another reporter illuminates her struggle, quoting from these sections of her letters:
Please pray specially for me that I may not spoil His work and that Our Lord may show Himself – for there is such terrible darkness within me, as if everything was dead," she wrote in 1953. “It has been like this more or less from the time I started ‘the work.’”
Then in 1956: “Such deep longing for God – and … repulsed – empty – no faith – no love – no zeal. (Saving) souls holds no attraction – Heaven means nothing – pray for me please that I keep smiling at Him in spite of everything.”
At first, I was surprised by what her letters revealed.
But then I felt gratitude: it means that I am not alone in these experiences.
After I resigned from RZIM in January 2021, something snapped inside me. As I processed how the board and senior leaders had manipulated my faith to hold onto power, misuse donor funds, and cover up abuse, I felt disoriented. I’ve spoken about that experience here. It’s an intense story.
But as I looked in the Scriptures, I found comfort in the Psalms.
Psalm 22 starts off on a bleak note:
My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?
Why are you so far from my deliverance
and from my words of groaning?
My God, I cry by day, but you do not answer,
by night, yet I have no rest.
As I read through it, I feel that it sounds like what Mother Teresa experienced - and is familiar to what I endured.
But then verse 21 takes a startling, shocking turn. At the start of verse 21, we read of the Psalmists’ many troubles.
Save me from the lion’s mouth,
from the horns of wild oxen.
And then, out of nowhere:
You answered me!
I will proclaim your name to my brothers and sisters;
I will praise you in the assembly.
Somehow, in some way, amidst his deepest, most painful abandonment by God, the Psalmist testifies that God answered his prayers, and he is energized to praise God again.
So, how long did the Psalmist wait for God to answer him? We don’t know.
Even deeper, this is the prayer that Jesus quotes on the cross.
This connection is particularly meaningful because it shows us that Jesus, in his humanity, also experienced a profound sense of abandonment. The more I meditate on God as the glorious Creator of all things, the more shocking it is that God would voluntarily identify with us in our most helpless and despairing moments.
(What does it mean that Jesus was abandoned by God? That’s a complicated question we’ve discussed).
So, does this answer the question of why God is silent at times, to me or to you?
No, I don’t know that it does.
I think there’s a mystery here, and I don’t have an answer to explain it.
What I do know is that sitting in silence, with other Christians who have felt God’s absence, and meditating on Psalms like Psalm 22, over time, somehow, in a way beyond my ability to put into a formula, restored my relationship with God to a place of deeper connection.
I’m curious to hear how others have experienced this and what, if anything, has helped them in these painful seasons.