When God Seems Silent

When God Seems Silent

Teresa of Ávila was one of the great mystics of the Christian tradition. Yet her personal letters, discovered centuries after her death, reveal decades of spiritual darkness — an apparent absence of God's felt presence so severe and prolonged that she sometimes wondered if she had lost her faith entirely. The letters devastated her admirers at first. But many found in her honesty a gift: the acknowledgment that seasons of God's silence are real, survivable, and not necessarily signs of spiritual failure. One biographer wrote: 'She continued to serve, to pray, to love — even when she felt nothing in return. And the silence, she eventually understood, was not absence. It was a different kind of presence.' The darkness had been doing something in her that light could not.

Psalm 22 is the psalm Jesus quoted from the cross: 'My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?' This psalm doesn't end in despair — by verse 24, the psalmist declares that God has not hidden His face. But the opening verses don't rush past the experience of silence. They stay in it, name it, cry out within it. God's silence is not God's absence, but it doesn't always feel that way in the night season. What do you do when prayer feels like shouting into a void? You keep praying. You name the silence honestly, as the psalmist does. You hold on to what you knew to be true before the silence began. And you trust that the God who seems absent is doing something your senses cannot register. The silence will not last forever.