Every human being if they’re honest has faced the existential grief of the moment’s affliction. To suffer it is to be human. It is the microcosm of Psalm 88. It is every case and situation of a doubting and a blow to one’s confidence that cannot be explained, except that it is harrowing the emptiness of it.
This is humanity’s lowest common denominator, and it’s not just those with bipolar disorder and depressive disorders who suffer it. Everyone has been afflicted in that moment when they’ve experienced what comes with a trauma, a betrayal, a triggering for what undoes you, when you feel abandoned, etc.
It doesn’t matter who you are, everyone experiences times in their life when they feel existentially alone, and for believers, when they feel God’s abandoned them. This is precisely why we have reminders in the Bible that God never leaves us nor forsakes us; but this is not our reality, for which the psalms like Psalm 88 faithfully attest. So, while God never does leave us nor forsake us, we do experience the opposite.
The person who denies the concept of the dark night of the soul, where God’s presence is apparently completely annulled in our consciousness, misses out of on a vital component of their humanity. They don’t see that reality that Paul spoke about in Philippians 1 where ‘to live is Christ and to die is gain’. While we’re here, we’re far from home, because much of life doesn’t make sense.
The person who doubts and struggles and admits their anxiousness and depressed thoughts is a person who does not struggle with their human condition. They’re at peace as much as they can be about the existential grief of the moment’s affliction.
That moment may be a moment, or a series of moments, lasting minutes, an hour or more, or a day or more. Such a continuous series can last and last, or it may simply be the fleeting nature of a thought that causes their hope to crash.
There’s nothing a Christian or anyone else should feel inadequate about. Reading the Bible more or praying more won’t remove from them the risk of such grief occurring.
What puts us closer in touch with this spiritual phenomenon is loss itself—the loss of a relationship, a loved one, a hope, a dream, etc.
Suffering loss and being connected with the phenomenon of grief is mere human parlance, and sadly no faith or belief system will prevent it, that is at least we’ve truly loved and lived.
To love is to lose, just as it is to live is to die. So faith is no protection against loss but those who venture forward in their faith through their grief—particularly when they cannot ‘feel’ God—are the true heroes of the faith, for they believe in and follow God even when it feels like God’s not there. Their compensation is a deeper and mightier faith.
The truest faith on earth is when you face spiritual desolation and still look up for God’s help. Especially when your eyes are worn out from crying, in sheer exhaustion, your heart aches and it hurts to think, but then you still cannot help but continue to hope in God, now that’s the realest faith there is.
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