Trusting the Sense of Divine Absence

Letting Go Of Our Need to Control Might Be Just What Our Soul Needs Most

In her book Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis, Episcopal priest Lauren F. Winner muses on the experience of “God’s absence,” candidly describing a kind of theological anxiety that emerged in her spiritual life — in the midst of a failing marriage, words of judgment from another priest, and wiser words from a friend. When we, who perhaps once had an almost chummy relationship with God, suddenly find that we only meet the sacred in the experience of divine absence, do we chalk it up to sin? To God’s capricious sovereignty? Or… perhaps… to something deeper and more unknowable?

Winner writes,

Maybe this silence, this absence, is a gift. Maybe what began as punishment is being converted to gift, maybe that is how God works. Maybe this absence will become an experience of God’s strangeness, God’s mystery. You think: Maybe I am being shown something here, if I would look, if I would see.

Over the past few months I’ve been learning about “trip sitting,” the practice of accompanying a person undergoing psychedelic therapy. I’ve learned the importance of trusting the process, even when someone might be having what seems to be a “challenging” or “difficult” moment with the medicine. As one psychedelic therapist explained to me, a good sitter refrains from trying to fix or manage another person’s experience, even if it looks to be terrifying. “We let them go through their process,” she said. “Sitters don’t let their emotional needs get in the way of a person’s healing journey.” We live in a society that seems to be afraid of difficult feelings, and that this fear might often prevent us from discovering what we can learn from the shadow dimensions in our own hearts and souls.

Maybe this principle can be applied to the experience of what seems to be the absence of God — as well as to the challenges that can arise from the sustained practice of meditation. It’s not something anyone can control or fix (either for ourselves or for someone else). When we lay down our defenses and our egoic attempts to manage every detail of our spiritual lives, God sometimes might suddenly seem to go away. But the sooner we relax into the mystery of it all, the more quickly we might learn that “God” points to something much bigger than an imaginary friend; and that the very silence of our knowing opens out into an abyss of unspeakable blessings and grace.

Quotation source: Lauren F. Winner, Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis, Kindle edition, p. 20.