When reading the Bible says nothing to you

The equation almost everyone makes on their own — if I feel nothing, my faith has cooled — appears nowhere in the biblical text. What does appear, with considerable frequency, is the opposite: people described as faithful going through long stretches in which God does not answer, does not appear and does not console.

It is worth separating two things that guilt mixes together. One is faith, which is adherence to something held to be true. The other is the emotional reaction to that adherence, which fluctuates with sleep, grief, stress, medication, age and a dozen other factors outside your control. The second does not measure the first, and no Christian tradition has taught that it did.

What changes when this becomes clear is small and is not nothing: you stop spending what energy is left trying to work out what you did wrong.

Psalm 88 is the strongest argument in this article, and it is not our argument: it is a fact about the canon. The psalmist declares that he cries out day and night, that he prays at first light, that he does everything expected of someone who prays — and says, in plain words, that he is rejected and that God turns his face away from him.

What makes this psalm different from all the others is the ending. It does not turn. There is no change of tone of the kind that appears in most psalms of complaint, no promise resumed, no daybreak. The last line is the removal of every companion — friend, neighbour and acquaintance, all put far away — and there is no verse after it.

It is in the Bible of both traditions, it is read in the liturgy and it has never been corrected by anyone. If the only acceptable outcome for a period of darkness were resolution, that psalm would not have survived the first compilation. It survived because the experience it describes is real and needed words — and because anyone inside that experience needs a text that does not end before it does.

The question everyone asks is how long this takes, and the honest answer is that it is not known. The biblical texts on the subject carry no deadline: they carry the question “how long”, repeated, with no answer attached. Anyone promising a number is inventing it, and the invented number charges dearly on the day it passes and nothing has changed.

There is an asymmetry worth naming, because it is the real datum. Psalm 13 opens with four “how long” questions and ends in declared trust. Psalm 88 begins similarly and ends in the dark. Both are in the same book, and the book does not explain why one turns and the other does not. That is all the information available, and anything beyond it is guesswork.

One thing usually left out is worth adding: in some texts, the hiding is attributed to God, not to a failure on the part of the one searching. That does not make the experience more comfortable, but it removes from it the reading that there is a mistake of yours to be located.

There is a scene in the Old Testament usually read as a minor episode which is quite useful here. Elijah, right after the greatest public success of his career, flees into the desert, sits under a bush and asks to die. What he receives first is not a vision, a rebuke or an explanation: it is food and sleep. Twice. Only after that does anything else come.

The plain reading is exactly that: physical exhaustion produces symptoms that look precisely like spiritual discouragement, and the text treats the body before treating anything else. Anyone reading the Bible and feeling nothing after months of bad sleep, in a job that consumes everything, or shortly after a loss, is probably facing a problem the reading did not cause and will not solve.

And it is worth saying what almost no text of faith says clearly: if the absence of response is not confined to the reading — if nothing else holds any interest, if sleep and appetite have changed, if this has been going on for weeks — then the matter has stopped being spiritual and become clinical. Seeing a doctor or a psychologist at that point is not a sign of small faith; it is the same thing as treating pneumonia instead of praying about it.

This is neither news nor a recent discovery: the Christian traditions have been describing this state for centuries, with different words and a fairly similar diagnosis. Knowing the name your own community gives to what you are living through tends to relieve more than any advice, because it reveals that the experience is catalogued rather than exceptional.

The list below is not a method and does not produce feeling. Nothing here makes the text speak again, and promising that would repeat the very error this article is trying to undo. It is only what people who have been through such periods report doing in order not to abandon the practice while it gave nothing back.

If you came here because of somebody else, this is the useful section. The book of Job provides, without meaning to, the best manual on the subject: the three friends get the first move entirely right and get everything wrong from the moment they open their mouths.

What they do right is to arrive, sit on the ground and stay seven days in silence, because they saw the sorrow was too great. What they do wrong is what comes next — explaining the cause, suggesting the hidden sin, proposing the formula for a solution. The verdict Job gives on that service is one of the harshest lines in the book.

Translated into today: do not say God is testing them, that there is a purpose, that they just need more faith, that you know someone who went through this and improved in two months. Asking how they are and staying nearby without solving anything is less, looks like little, and is the only part those three did well.