“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
— Matthew 27:46, NIV
I cannot leave You.
That is part of the pain.
I cannot turn my back on You cleanly. I cannot simply walk away from Christ, from the altar, from the priesthood, from the Gospel, from the strange and stubborn love that still keeps something in me facing toward God.
I may be angry.
I may be numb.
I may be spiritually exhausted.
I may be questioning almost everything.
But I cannot leave.
So instead, I find myself standing outside the house, feeling like the bad child. The one who has been sent away. The one who does not know what he did wrong. The one looking through the window, wondering why the warmth is inside and he is out here in the cold.
And Lord, I need to say this plainly:
For God’s sake, I am Your priest.
Should that count for something?
Should there not be some word?
Some sign?
Some warmth?
Some sense that You remember the one You called?
I am not asking for riches. I am not asking for applause. I am not asking for a plaque on the wall or some dramatic reward for being faithful.
I am asking for the things that seem connected to Your own mission.
A road.
A door.
A place to serve.
A way to offer the Eucharist.
A community to love.
A sign that this calling still has somewhere to go.
And instead, so much of the time, there is silence.
Not peaceful silence.
Not contemplative silence.
The kind of silence that makes the soul wonder whether it has been forgotten.
Yes, I know I have blessings. I have food. I have housing. I have clothing. I have medical care. I have a car. I have family. I do not want to pretend I am suffering in every possible way when I am not.
But spiritual starvation is still real.
A person can have food in the house and still feel like the soul is starving.
A person can have shelter and still feel exiled from God.
A person can have the basics of survival and still have a hole inside where divine warmth used to be.
That is where I am.
I hear people say, “Everything we have is from God. Just have faith. God will provide.”
And maybe that is true in ways I cannot see right now.
But sometimes, from inside this dark night, it feels like I am the one providing. I work. I push. I figure things out. I try to hold life together. I have been helped by family and by human hands. Maybe grace is moving under all of that. Maybe God is hidden inside ordinary provision.
But I cannot feel it.
And I am tired of pretending I can.
I am tired of giving polished answers to an unpolished wound.
I am tired of saying the right religious thing when what I really want to say is:
Lord, where are You?
Why did You call me if You were going to leave me running in circles?
Why give me a priesthood and no clear place to pour it out?
Why give me Eucharistic hunger and an altar that feels behind glass?
Why give me a flame and then let me feel locked away from it?
There are days when the old darkness looks familiar to me.
I want to be very clear: I am not going back to it.
That is not what this is.
I am not planning to return to old ways of numbing, self-destruction, unhealthy love, or chasing pain just to feel alive. I know those roads. I know where they lead. I know they are not freedom.
But sometimes grief remembers them.
Sometimes the wounded part of me looks back and says, “At least then we felt something.”
At least then there was something to chase.
At least then the pain had music.
At least then the darkness answered in a way this silence does not seem to.
That is not desire.
That is lament.
That is the soul admitting how exhausted it is.
That is the child in me saying he misses even the wrong rooms because at least they had doors.
But I know better.
I do.
The old darkness was not salvation. It was not home. It was not love. It was not freedom. It was survival dressed up as rebellion. It was pain trying to become a personality. It was a cage with better lighting.
I am not going back.
But I am grieving the fact that faith, right now, does not feel like the freedom I thought it would.
Faith feels like standing outside the house.
Faith feels like knocking.
Faith feels like loving Someone I cannot feel.
Faith feels like being unable to leave and unable to rest.
And that makes me question things I was once afraid to question.
Why am I Christian?
What is the point of this?
Have we misunderstood something for two thousand years?
Have we built too much hope on words, systems, institutions, and traditions that human beings have constantly twisted into violence?
Your people, Lord, have done terrible things in Your name.
Wars.
Hatred.
Abuse.
Exclusion.
Colonization.
Shame.
Silence.
Control.
Queer people wounded with Scripture.
Women diminished with Scripture.
The poor blamed with Scripture.
The outsider rejected with Scripture.
The stranger feared with Scripture.
And I know that is not all of Christianity.
I know there are saints.
I know there are healers.
I know there are hidden holy ones.
I know there are people feeding the hungry, welcoming the stranger, praying for the dead, standing with the rejected, loving without applause.
But the damage is real.
And I am tired of pretending the damage does not make faith harder.
Sometimes Your message of hope and love feels buried under so much human cruelty that I can barely find it.
Sometimes I look at the world — war, sickness, famine, greed, climate destruction, poverty, religious nationalism, churches closing, people losing faith, people using Your word as a weapon — and I wonder where You are in all of it.
Are You hidden?
Are You silent?
Are You waiting?
Are You working in ways I cannot see?
Or are we speaking into the dark and calling the echo God?
I hate that I can even ask that.
But I can.
That is where the dark night has taken me.
It has not made me peaceful.
It has not made me serene.
It has not made me into a stained-glass saint.
It has made me honest in ways I did not ask to be honest.
I do not trust easily right now.
I do not trust television.
I do not trust news.
I do not trust the internet.
I do not trust politicians.
I do not trust institutions.
I do not trust preachers who have too many answers.
Some days I barely trust my own mind because it runs in circles until every road looks poisoned.
And yet, here I am, still speaking to You.
That is the contradiction.
If I were truly done with You, why am I still addressing You?
If I no longer believed at all, why does Your silence still hurt?
If You meant nothing to me, why does the hole where You used to feel close feel so enormous?
Maybe faith is not certainty right now.
Maybe faith is the fact that I cannot stop talking to the God I am angry with.
Maybe faith is the ache that remains after the warmth is gone.
Maybe faith is the child outside the house who has not walked away from the door.
I do not know.
I only know this:
I cannot leave.
But I cannot feel at home.
I cannot stop loving You.
But I cannot stop asking whether loving You has broken something in me.
I cannot stop being Your priest.
But I do not know what my priesthood means when the altar feels locked, the people seem absent, and the God who called me feels far away.
So this is my prayer today.
Not a pretty prayer.
Not a clean prayer.
Not a prayer fit for a greeting card.
A prayer from outside the house.
Lord, if this is a test, I do not understand it.
If this is purification, it feels like abandonment.
If this is formation, do not leave me alone in the construction dust.
If this is love, come closer, because I cannot recognize it from here.
Do not let me confuse numbness with death.
Do not let me confuse old darkness with home.
Do not let me walk away from the table because I am tired of waiting outside the door.
Do not let bitterness become the only voice I trust.
Do not let my anger become my religion.
Do not let the wound become my god.
Answer the child outside the house.
Answer the priest You called.
Answer the soul that cannot leave You and cannot feel You.
Give me something more than silence.
Give me something more than memory.
Give me some sign that the locked door is not the end of the story.
Because I do not know how much longer I can keep calling this emptiness faith.
But I am still here.
Still angry.
Still numb.
Still wounded.
Still not going back.
Still not walking away.
Still facing the house.
Still knocking.
Still listening for Your footsteps on the other side of the door.