There are seasons in the life of every Catholic when faith feels less like a certainty and more like a question. The prayers feel empty. Mass feels routine. God feels distant, or worse — absent. You go through the motions and wonder whether any of it is reaching anyone at all.
If this is where you are right now, you are not alone. And you are not failing. Some of the greatest saints in history passed through exactly this kind of darkness — and came out the other side with a faith that was deeper, quieter, and far more resilient than anything they had before the struggle began.
This post is for the Catholic who has not given up — who is still showing up, still asking, still wanting more — but who does not quite know how to move forward. Here is what the Church, Scripture, and centuries of spiritual wisdom have to say about growing in faith precisely when it is hard.
Understand What a Faith Struggle Actually Is
It Is Not the Same as Losing Your Faith
The first and most important thing to understand is that struggling in your faith is not the same as losing it. In fact, the very fact that the struggle hurts — that you miss the closeness, that you want it back — is itself evidence that faith is still alive in you. You cannot grieve the absence of something you never cared about.
Doubt and difficulty are not the enemies of faith. Indifference is. The person who is wrestling with God is still in relationship with God. Jacob wrestled with God through the night and came away with a blessing and a limp — changed by the encounter, not destroyed by it (Gen 32:24-28).
The Church Has a Name for This
St John of the Cross called it the Dark Night of the Soul — a period of spiritual dryness and desolation in which the consolations of prayer are withdrawn not as punishment but as invitation. God is weaning the soul off spiritual feelings so that it can learn to love Him for who He is, not for how He makes us feel.
St Thérèse of Lisieux spent the last eighteen months of her life in almost complete spiritual darkness, unable to feel the presence of God she had known so vividly as a young woman. She continued anyway. She called it her greatest act of faith. She is now a Doctor of the Church.
Your struggle does not disqualify you. It may be the very thing God is using to form you.
Return to the Basics Without Shame
Show Up Even When You Do Not Feel Like It
One of the most counterintuitive truths of the spiritual life is that you do not wait until you feel ready to pray — you pray, and the feeling sometimes follows. Faith is not primarily a feeling. It is an act of the will. You can choose to orient yourself toward God even on the days when nothing inside you seems to respond.
Go to Mass even when it feels dry. Sit in the pew even when the words wash over you. Light a candle even when you have nothing to say. These are not empty gestures — they are acts of fidelity, and God honours fidelity far more than fervour.
Keep Your Prayer Simple
When faith is struggling, elaborate prayer routines often collapse under their own weight. This is not a failure — it is a signal to simplify. A single honest sentence prayed from a place of exhaustion is worth more than a polished hour prayed from habit alone.
The Jesus Prayer — “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner” — has sustained Christians through centuries of darkness. It asks for nothing except mercy. It assumes nothing except need. On the hardest days, it may be enough to simply repeat it slowly and mean it.
Go to Confession
Sometimes a struggling faith is connected — not always, but sometimes — to unconfessed sin that has quietly created distance. The Sacrament of Reconciliation is not only for forgiveness. It is an encounter with the mercy of God that has a way of breaking open something that has been closed. Many Catholics have walked into confession feeling spiritually dead and walked out with something quietly restored.
Feed Your Faith Intentionally
Read Scripture Daily, Even a Little
The Word of God is not passive. “Indeed, the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword” (Heb 4:12). Even five minutes of slow, attentive Scripture reading each day keeps a channel open between the soul and God. Do not read for information. Read for encounter. Sit with a single verse. Let it ask something of you.
The Psalms are particularly good for seasons of struggle because they do not pretend. Psalm 22 begins with “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” — the same words Jesus cried from the Cross. If that prayer was good enough for the Son of God, it is good enough for you.
Read About the Saints
One of the most practical things you can do when your faith is struggling is to read about people who struggled before you and came through. Not the sanitised, stained-glass versions — the real ones. Read the letters of St Thérèse of Lisieux, the journals of Thomas Merton, the autobiography of St Augustine. These are accounts of real human beings who failed, doubted, fell, and were caught.
The communion of saints is not a museum. It is a community of witnesses who have walked the road ahead of you and are cheering you on (Heb 12:1).
Find a Spiritual Director or a Trusted Priest
The Catholic tradition has always understood that the spiritual life is not meant to be navigated alone. A spiritual director — a trained priest or religious who walks with you in prayer — can offer discernment, accountability, and the simple gift of being heard. If a formal spiritual director is not accessible to you, a trusted and prayerful priest can serve a similar function. Do not underestimate the grace that flows from speaking your struggle out loud to another person in faith.
Let Suffering Teach You What Comfort Cannot
Struggling Is a Form of Participation in the Cross
The Catholic faith does not promise that following Christ will be easy. It promises that suffering, united to the Cross, is not wasted. “I am now rejoicing in my sufferings for your sake,” Paul writes from prison, “and in my flesh I am completing what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church” (Col 1:24).
When faith is hard, you are participating in something real. You are learning to love God without the reward of feeling His presence. You are learning to trust without evidence. These are not lesser forms of faith — they are more mature ones.
Ask What God Might Be Doing
Spiritual struggle rarely arrives without an invitation embedded in it. It is worth sitting quietly with the question: what might God be trying to free me from in this season? Sometimes the answer is an attachment — to comfort, to control, to a particular image of God that has become too small. Sometimes it is an invitation to a new depth of surrender. Sometimes it is simply the formation of patience and endurance that can only come through waiting.
“We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose.” — Rom 8:28
Hold On to What You Know, Not What You Feel
Faith, in its deepest form, is not about feeling close to God. It is about believing that God is close to you even when you cannot feel it. The Catechism defines faith as “the theological virtue by which we believe in God and believe all that he has said and revealed to us” (CCC 1814). It is an act of the intellect and the will, held in place by grace — not an emotion that rises and falls with circumstances.
On the days when nothing feels true, return to what you know. You know that God exists. You know that Jesus rose from the dead. You know that you have been baptised into His death and resurrection. You know that the Church has stood for two thousand years on the testimony of people who gave their lives for these truths. Hold on to what you know, and let the feelings catch up in their own time.
“Lord, I believe; help my unbelief.” — Mk 9:24
This is one of the most honest prayers in the entire New Testament. A father brings his suffering child to Jesus and confesses in the same breath that he believes and that he doubts. Jesus does not turn him away. He heals the child. Bring Him your mixed-up, struggling, half-believing heart. It is enough to begin.
A Prayer for Those Struggling in Faith
Lord, I will be honest with You. I am struggling. The faith that once felt alive feels distant right now, and I do not know how to close the gap on my own.
I believe — but help my unbelief. I want to trust — but I need Your grace to do it. I have not walked away, and I do not want to. I am here, even in the dryness, even in the silence, even when I have nothing to bring but my need.
Do what only You can do. Open what has been closed. Soften what has grown hard. Remind me of who You are when I have forgotten how to remember.
I place this struggle into Your hands. I trust that You are at work even in what I cannot see or feel. And I ask that when this season passes — as all seasons do — I will know You more deeply than I did before it began.
Amen.
