Huw Raphael has posted on the question (and questioning) of faith in True Confessions.

There’s not a lot to say about these types of struggles. Everyone faces them in their own way, and with God’s grace (which you cannot see as being there at the time) you get through it. The best we can do is to pray for the person facing questions of faith. Huw, you have my prayers.

From my own struggles, and these are personal to me and may have no relevance to anyone else, I can offer the following:

The key question for me was whether I was able to deny Jesus. Going through my time of spiritual darkness (which lasted about 10 years) I was able to deny and reject a lot of things. However I was never able to deny or reject Jesus. I was tempted, and I thought about it, but I could never make that statement. I could not tell Him to go away.

Faith is a gift from God. Grace is offered to all and some take God up on the offer, some do not. Some get it right away, some never see it (or at least they won’t admit to it). Why one has faith, when another does not, is a mystery. It comes down to whether we can accept our place in relation to the One who is greater than us and the fulfillment of us.

Dark times are times of maturation. Huw comments on this. Do we replace faith in fantasies (Santa, the tooth fairy, the Easter Bunny) with faith in a seemingly more adult fantasy? Do we do this while never really maturing? Is faith simply an immature place to be? The dark times are meant to take us from childish (not childlike – which is good), to adolescent, to adult faith. They are a stop in the journey where we are challenged to grow —“ and growth hurts sometimes.

Scrupulosity is a pitfall we all face. I personally think that God is with us on our journey. He is not distant or removed from it. He knows us better than we know ourselves. If we become overly scrupulous in our actions, learning, practices – about needing to definitively know something – we miss the point of the journey. God put us on the journey in the first place. The point is to be embraced by a love that is at once personal and communal. If you must know faith in an absolute sense you will never get it. Faith is a knowing acceptance.

Some ‘adults’ never get beyond childish faith (I believe in God because mommy would be angry if I didn’t and I don’t want God or mommy to punish me) or adolescent faith (I believe because I want to be accepted in the group/community). That is why we need good and holy priests and deacons —“ to reach these people and bring them along. I fully believe that God has higher expectations of some of us. We have been given talents we must use for His glory, and for the building up of the Kingdom. God pushes us into the dark to test us and to allow us to come out on the other side at the next stage of maturity with our talents at the ready. Even when He puts us out, He never lets us go. He will continuously call us back. God doesn’t throw us to the wolves naked and alone. He’s with us the whole time.

For me, faith is the abiding presence of God in my life, a presence I cannot get rid of. Faith pushes me in ways I do not wish to go, and makes me wait for what I desire, all the while drawing me ever closer to my desire, to my love.