Your experience is not uncommon, not that it makes it any less painful. You’re like a sailing ship following the stars for navigation, and suddenly those stars dimmed and then extinguished. You no longer know where you are or what you’re looking for. There’s a quote attributed to Seneca: “To the man who knows not to which port he is sailing; no wind is favorable.” That’s you right now.
Your question doesn’t specify which religion you believe in, so I’ll strive to write for applicability. I’m using Christian terminology, but even if you are not Christian I hope you consider my meaning in terms that would be a better fit to you.
What’s happened is that the Holy Spirit is no longer guiding you. The Holy Spirit is like the wind; you can’t catch it with your hands or chase it down. It can’t be trapped in a bottle or summed up in a formula or summoned like a holy concierge. It comes to you only when you abandon any attempt to control it and allow yourself to be acted upon by it. You’ve been able to do that before, and what a euphoric, mystical thing it is to know God guides your path. Only now, your sail is slack and you’re in the doldrums, wondering if your faith can provision you until the wind returns.
The Psalmist says; “While I felt secure, I said, “I shall never be disturbed. You, Lord, with your favor, made me as strong as the mountains.” Then you hid your face, and I was filled with fear. (Ps 30:7-8.)
I can’t tell you when things will change. Faith is a process of formation, not a trophy you’re awarded at the end of a God Quest. It is built on religious education and with your life’s experience, including the experience of God’s absence. But I have been where you are. To me it was doubt, wondering if the prayers I’d memorized were just so much wasted effort. I figured if Jesus was coming back to redeem us, he wouldn’t have waited 2000 years to do so, so I concluded that Jesus was probably just a very nice man, if a deluded one. I decided people pray to Jesus because it was the path of least resistance, or because they feared death. I was closed off as a stone because of the pain I observed all around me.
Trying to catch the wind, I swapped religions and lived as a Jew for two years. Those two years were like deliberately putting my left shoe on my right foot, and yet I stuck with it thinking that if I just tried a little bit harder the Spirit would come back for me. In any case, Judaism preaches a doctrine of acts: what you do matters, how you feel about it doesn’t. That appealed to my doubt. But I was still closed off, still trying to command the Holy Spirit to do what I wanted and trying to make God follow my plans. I ended up falling out of Orthodox Judaism and found myself stuck in a theological DMZ; I wasn’t going back, but I wasn’t ready to move on either.
But faith in God doesn’t mean you will never have a bad day, or even a bad year, or that bad things can’t happen to you. Nor does faith mean that you will always get what you want in this life, because that’s up to other people for the most part. Faith is the certainty that come what may God has a purpose for you, and this purpose was important enough for him that you were created and brought to this exact place and moment. God feels far from you, but he suffuses Creation and by extension yourself, because you are part of Creation.
The Spirit guided me out of that wilderness, but it took two more years, more bad things happening to me, and another act of redemption before I could feel faithful again. What changed, that my restoration of faith was then and not some earlier time? Well, it could be the Spirit, which is beyond my control, but it was more likely my openness to its call. The wind can’t move a stone, but it can move a sail. I had to be prepared to be acted upon by the Holy Spirit before it could move me anywhere. Likewise, you must use what strength you have to turn yourself towards God’s will, which is probably not going be the future you envisioned for yourself. This is the humility of faith; you give up your own self-image of what success looks like so that the Holy Spirit can show you what success feels like. You need the strength to be available to those possibilities if you want to move on.
You write that missed holidays during COVID and the acknowledgement that one doesn’t need holidays made your religion feel meaningless to you. I’d like you to consider that the relative importance of various holidays has waxed and waned in every religion during its history. After the Temple was destroyed in AD 79, the Jews spent a generation trying to figure out what Yom Kippur meant without a burnt sacrifice. The Puritans banned Christmas because they felt Christmas celebrations were decadent and irreverent; imagine what they would have thought of Christmas now.
The Sabbath exists to stop you from working on urgent, important, but ultimately meaningless tasks. Think about your own death: in the end, will you have wished you spent more time with your friends and family, or more time at work? The Sabbath was ordained to give you an opportunity to do things that are meaningful to you; whether you observe it on Friday or on Sunday doesn’t matter. Holidays are observed for the benefit of the people; they are educational opportunities, a moment to immerse yourself totally in the event being observed, and even a chance to consider what you’ve done so far and what you want to do in the future. God doesn’t actually need us to do anything, it’s we who need God and this is why people have held religious observances since we became human.
So that is all great preaching, you must be thinking, but what am I supposed to do? This is a process called discernment, and only you can do it for yourself. Discernment is when you stop and listen for God’s call to your purpose. You can’t make the wind blow, but you can rig your sail and prepare yourself for the day the Holy Spirit returns to fulfill its promise to you. You can talk to your priest, start a diary, and give yourself room to consider what matters to you and how you want to spend this limited time you have in your life. I think that once you really know yourself, you will be able to feel the Spirit once again and know which direction you need to go.
I’m praying for you fam
Stan
