Why does God feel so far away?

A lot of people who ask this question are not new to faith. They have prayed, they have read, they have done the things — and right now, none of it feels like anything. Maybe it has been a few weeks. Maybe it has been years.

That experience has a long, well-documented history in the Christian tradition, and most of the people who eventually became known for their nearness to God passed through long stretches of it. You are not failing at faith. You are inside a chapter the tradition has names for.

A short, honest answer

The Christian claim is that the felt presence of God and the actual presence of God are two different things, and that the second does not disappear when the first does. That sounds like a dodge until you sit with the Bible's own treatment of it.

A few terms first

For readers without the background:

• The Bible is the collection of Jewish and Christian sacred texts. It has two parts: the Old Testament (older, written between roughly 1500 BC and 400 BC) and the New Testament (first-century AD writings about Jesus and his followers).
• The Psalms are a long collection of 150 prayers and poems in the Old Testament.
• Jesus of Nazareth was a Jewish religious teacher who lived in first-century Palestine and was executed by the Roman government around 30 AD on a cross. The Christian claim is that he was also God in human form.
• The gospels are four short biographies of Jesus' life — Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John — written by his followers within decades of his death and now part of the New Testament.
• The Holy Spirit (often just the Spirit) is, on the Christian view, God's presence active in the world and in people; one of the three persons of the one God in Christian doctrine.
• Prayer, in the Christian-specific sense, is talking to God — sometimes in words, sometimes wordless. The Christian tradition treats prayer as conversation, not performance.
• Savior, in Christian writing, is a title for Jesus — the one who does the saving, the one who makes people right with God.

What the tradition actually says

There is a phrase from a sixteenth-century Spanish Catholic monk named John of the Cross — "the dark night of the soul" — that became the standard name for this experience. He described long seasons in which prayer feels dead, scripture feels flat, and God feels absent. He thought it was not a failure but a stage. He thought it was, paradoxically, a way God deepened people: by withdrawing the spiritual feelings they had been confusing with him.

Mother Teresa, the well-known twentieth-century Catholic nun, was discovered after she died to have lived inside something like this for almost fifty years. She wrote about it in letters never meant for the public: "There is so much contradiction in my soul, no faith, no love, no zeal." She did not stop. She wrote those letters while running one of the most physically present ministries of the twentieth century.

You are not the first person to feel this. You are very far from it.

What Christianity actually claims

1. Felt absence is not actual absence.

A short verse from a New Testament book called Hebrews defines faith as "confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see." The verse takes for granted that there will be things you do not see. The tradition has always assumed that the experience of God's presence comes and goes, even while his presence does not.

2. The Bible writes these seasons down rather than censoring them.

Psalm 22 begins, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" — the very line Jesus quotes from the cross, according to the gospel of Matthew. Psalm 42 — "as the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you" — is the prayer of someone who feels parched, not full. The Old Testament book of Isaiah speaks directly to "the one who walks in the dark, who has no light," and tells them to keep going. These are not corrections of the experience. They are scripture inside the experience.

3. Jesus prayed felt absence out loud.

The hardest verse in the gospel accounts is from Matthew, chapter 27: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" Jesus prays it from the cross, quoting Psalm 22. Whatever else that means — and Christians have spent two thousand years on what it means — it means God himself knows what it is to ask where God is from inside the worst of it. If you are praying felt absence right now, you are praying a prayer Jesus prayed.

4. The Spirit prays through you when you can't.

Paul (one of the earliest Christian writers), in a letter to Christians in Rome: "the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans." If your prayer life right now is mostly silence, exhaustion, or one-sentence groans, that is a prayer the New Testament has a category for. It is not a holding pattern before real prayer; the New Testament calls that real prayer.

5. An ancient Hebrew prophet gives the language.

An Old Testament prophet named Habakkuk, writing around 600 BC, ends his book with this — after pages of complaint: "Though the fig tree does not bud and there are no grapes on the vines… yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will be joyful in God my Savior." That is not a feeling. It is a decision made in the absence of feeling. The Christian tradition has always held that this kind of faith — faith in the dry — is a more durable thing than faith in the wet.

What could be going on

A few honest possibilities:

• You confused a feeling for the thing. If your early experience of God was characterized by emotion, the absence of emotion can register as the absence of God. The tradition's strong claim is that these are not the same.
• You are exhausted. Spiritual flatness often has a physical floor. Long sleep, real rest, food and movement do not solve everything, but they undo more than people think.
• Something is unaddressed. Sometimes the distance is not about God; it is about a relationship, a habit, a grief, a half-conversation in your own head with someone who is no longer there. The flatness will not lift until that one is dealt with.
• You are in a chapter that just is one. Sometimes there is no fixable reason. The tradition's word for this is honest: the dark night. It is not a problem to solve; it is a season to endure with company.

What about right now

If felt distance is what you came here with, you do not have to feel near to talk about it. Our chat is free, private, and in your language. We will not pretend the distance is not real.

Where this comes from in the Bible

• Psalm 22:1–2 — the language Jesus used on the cross, written a thousand years earlier
• Psalm 42:1–3 — thirst, tears, and the question "where is your God"
• Isaiah 50:10 — instructions to the one walking in the dark
• Habakkuk 3:17–18 — joy as decision, not as feeling
• Romans 8:26 — the Spirit prays through wordless groans
• Hebrews 11:1 — faith as confidence in what is not seen
• Matthew 27:46 — Jesus prays felt absence from the cross