When Faith Falters: Finding My Way Back to Believing

I recently sat across from a young Catholic priest – only ordained a few years – who surprised me. He had real-world life experience, the kind you don’t always see in clergy, and he listened without trying to fix me. I told him I was struggling with my faith, something I’ve lived with my entire life. Despite decades in the church and a catholic school education, I have reached a point where the rituals feel mechanical, the prayers quiet, and the presence of God not nearly as certain as it once was.

People Are Different

Instead of offering tidy spiritual explanations or sermon-ready metaphors, he said something simple and startling:

“You think with your head. So, take a cerebral route back to faith. Use logic. Use what’s real to you.”

He also suggested something no priest had ever told me before: to read the kinds of spiritual works that embrace science rather than stories handed down through centuries. Not fairy tales, not legends, not metaphorical accounts meant to comfort, but writings that explore the intersection of faith and measurable reality.

Books by thinkers who ask, What can we prove? What does science reveal about consciousness, creation, energy, morality, or even the possibility of something beyond ourselves? He alluded that for some people, faith doesn’t grow from ancient narratives, it grows from evidence, from the astonishing things we now understand about the universe, the brain, the origin of life, and the mysteries science hasn’t solved yet.

If faith is going to become real for me again, it has to be built on things my mind can hold, and for the first time, that actually feels like a doorway I might be able to walk through.

Doubt Can Be a Tool

It was the first time someone in the Church told me that doubt didn’t disqualify me, that perhaps, for some of us, faith needs to be worked out the way we solve problems, answer questions, or learn to stand again after life has knocked us down.

And life has knocked me down as it has at one point of another for all of us!

This time of year is always bittersweet. My mother died 33 years ago, suddenly and without warning, just outside the church she had faithfully attended. I was young and heartbroken, and I carried rage toward God longer than I want to admit. People around me meant well, but their platitudes fell flat. “God has a plan,” they said. “One day you’ll understand.” But when you lose your mother days before Christmas – the holiday she brought to life with beauty and wonder – those words feel small.

Even now, more than three decades later, her death casts a shadow over every holiday season. A specter of grief that arrives on schedule. And yes, I have had many happy Christmases since then, years filled with laughter, family, gifts, and life moving on the way it does. But Christmas has never been the same. Loss changes the emotional temperature of everything it touches.

Maybe You Understand That

Maybe you, too, have discovered that grief doesn’t disappear, it integrates. It becomes part of the landscape of who we are.

Over the years, I tried to continue my faith the way I thought I should: attending Mass, saying the prayers, doing the things I was raised with. Yet I felt increasingly disconnected. In my work in hospice and eventually the funeral profession, I witnessed others facing losses that were overwhelming. Young individuals dying too soon, families shattered, parents begging God for comfort. I hoped God came through for them, truly I did. But the silence I felt in my own life made it hard to believe He ever heard me.

And so, for a long time, I carried an unspoken belief:

IF God is there, He must not be paying much attention.

Faith Isn’t All or Nothing

But here’s the thing that priest reminded me of, faith isn’t all or nothing. It isn’t binary. Human beings have seasons of belief, seasons of doubt, and seasons where all we can do is sit quietly and wait for the lights to flicker back on.

What if doubt isn’t the end of faith – but part of it?

What if the path back doesn’t require pretending we’re not hurt, or angry, or disillusioned?

What if the most honest prayer is simply: “I’m here. I’m struggling. But I’m still trying.”

For me, this year is about trying. Not in the way I once did – not trying to force belief or silence the questions, but trying to build a relationship with faith that fits the woman I am today. A woman shaped by love, grief, loss, resilience, and life experience. A woman who has learned that emotions don’t disappear with time; they settle in.

Faith Evolves

The priest told me something else that stayed with me:

“Faith doesn’t have to feel the way it used to.”

And maybe that is the most comforting truth of all.

We grow. Life changes. We become different people than we were at 20, 40, or even 60. Maybe faith must grow with us, not remain frozen in the form we learned as children.

As we move through another holiday season – one that may be joyful for some and heavy for others – I am giving myself permission to:

• Feel the grief without guilt.
• Celebrate the memories without pretending they aren’t bittersweet.
• Let faith be a journey instead of a verdict.

If you are reading this and your faith feels thin, or silent, or distant… you are not alone. Many of us in midlife and beyond are reevaluating what we believe, how we believe, and what we want faith to mean going forward.

Maybe the goal isn’t to return to the faith we once had.

Maybe the goal is to find the faith that can hold who we are now.

And if that requires thinking, questioning, reasoning, and rebuilding slowly? Then that isn’t failure. That is devotion in disguise.

As this season unfolds, with its mix of joy, memory, and meaning, I wish you a holiday filled with peace; peace in your home, peace in your heart, and peace in whatever you believe, or are still searching to believe. May we all enter the new year with gentleness, compassion for ourselves, and the understanding that every journey of faith, grief, love, or healing is individual and deserves patience and grace.

Your Thoughts:

What experiences have changed the holidays for you? Do loss and grief interfere with the season’s celebrations?