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Elie Wiesels Loss of Faith

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What to Do When You Feel You Are Losing Your Faith

Tiara Blain, MA, is a freelance writer for Verywell Mind. She is a health writer and researcher passionate about the mind-body connection, and holds a Master's degree in psychology.

Ivy Kwong, LMFT, is a psychotherapist specializing in relationships, love and intimacy, trauma and codependency, and AAPI mental health.  

Luis Alvarez / Getty Images

What Is Faith?

Why faith is important.

• Explanations

Living through a pandemic, natural disasters, racial discrimination, and the sporadic adversities that accompany everyday life, it can often feel as if you are losing your faith. You might not only lose faith in the higher power you worship, but you might also feel a loss of faith in humanity, loved ones, or in yourself.

Many people experience feelings like this, especially when it feels like you have no control over what is going on in your life and the world around you. It is when we are consumed by all the uncertainties of life that faith is needed most, but also when it’s the most difficult to grasp.

It’s definitely easier to have faith when everything is going well but it's a lot more challenging when they are not. That is why it is important for us to recognize when we start having these feelings and work towards reestablishing or holding on to our faith, especially during troubling times. 

At a Glance

Losing your faith can involve the loss of connection with the things you believe in, whether it's your religion, your values, or humankind. It can be a devastating feeling that undermines your confidence, convictions, and well-being. No matter why it's happening, there are steps you can take to cope. Acknowledging your emotions, reconnecting with spirituality, practicing gratitude, and finding social support may help. Let's take a closer look at why your faith might be floundering and what you can do about it.

First, let’s get into what faith is exactly. The term "faith" is defined as "a strong belief in something or someone" or a "belief in the existence of God; strong religious beliefs or feelings."

According to the Journal of the Society of Christian Philosophers, faith is having belief in something without an apparent reason. The Christian Bible describes faith as "the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things unseen." (Hebrew 11:1 KJV).

Most people correlate faith with trust in God, the Universe, or a Higher Power. Faith means believing in the existence and presence of our higher powers in our lives, even though we cannot physically see them.

Since a higher power is not something you see in the physical sense (as with other sources we put our trust in at times), if you no longer feel the impact of these things in your life, you may begin to lose faith in them.

Many religious texts associate faith with belief and trust in God and seeking God during times of hardship. The Christian Holy Bible’s book of Psalms as well as The Jewish sacred text, The Tanakh, book of Misheli says “What time I am afraid, I will trust in thee.” (Psalms 56:3, Misheli 56:3)

There may be times when you don’t feel the presence of God or loved ones. It is actually when feeling a disconnect from these things that you can lean into your faith the most.

Most people express that they possess faith, but it is when faith is tested that one must put mere words into fruition. It is often when an individual has no reason to have faith in something, that they can actually practice the virtue of faith.

The Islamic Holy Quran states “But as for those who believe, and do good works — their Lord will guide them because of their faith.” (Quran, 10:10)

Believing that God will work a miracle during an insurmountable situation, having  confidence  that the impossible is possible, or trusting that what is happening is part of a greater plan—these are examples of faith. 

Having faith, whether it is in a religious belief or in yourself, gives you a sense of confidence, belongingness, and conviction. Such faith can give you the resolve and strength to remain resilient in adversity.

Research has also shown that having faith can positively affect physical and mental health.

Losing your faith can take a toll on your resilience and undermine your sense of belongingness. But it can also be an opportunity to grow, build a stronger sense of self-awareness, and cultivate new beliefs that are more closely aligned with your current values, goals, and needs.

Reasons You May Feel A Loss of Faith

There are various reasons why one may begin to feel a loss of faith. Some examples are: 

• Depression  
• Uncertainty 
• Trauma  
• Betrayal 

Major life changes can also cause you to reassess your beliefs. For example, divorce, job loss, or the death of a loved one might shake up your spiritual convictions.

People also lose faith if they reevaluate their beliefs in light of new information. Encountering people who don't uphold the values they claim to believe in can shake up a person's sense of faith. Witnessing hypocrisy or abuse among faith leaders or learning information contradicting your previous beliefs can also create a crisis of faith.

These challenges can make it harder to feel the faith you used to experience. They can also contribute to symptoms of apathy and anhedonia that make it difficult to care about things you used to be concerned with.

Faith is very important in spirituality , which benefits mental and physical well-being. One older study found that participation in spiritual activities was beneficial for those who felt depression was caused by losing faith.

Many often equate depressive feelings with loss of faith. Religious struggles are also associated with higher levels of depression.

If ever you feel that you are losing your faith, you may want to consider the following suggestions.

Acknowledge and Accept What You Feel

In these moments it is important to first not judge yourself for these feelings. They are justifiable, and you shouldn’t feel guilt or shame . Accept that these are your feelings and show yourself compassion .

It’s best to acknowledge what you are feeling, accept them for what they are, and then address them by exploring what could be causing them. Then, you can seek help from others, like a loved one or counselor, if necessary. 

Try Meditation or Prayer

Take some time for yourself to meditate and pray. This can help you become more in tune with your spirituality and may be really impactful when feeling as if you are losing faith.

Meditation  and prayer are excellent practices to connect with a higher power and your beliefs because they can deepen presence, acceptance, and peace.

Count Your Blessings

Gratitude goes a long way! Whenever you feel a bit lost or unfulfilled, try to think about the people and things in your life that you are grateful for. There is always something in life to appreciate; sometimes, it requires taking a step back to acknowledge what is right in front of us.

Experiencing gratitude can have powerful effects on your mental well-being. So, try writing in a gratitude journal to list out everything you feel grateful for.

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Talk It Out

Think about reaching out to someone you trust for advice. If you are feeling confused or overwhelmed, sometimes it helps to talk these things out and seek opinions from reliable sources.

There are times in everyone's lives when they can use a listening ear and open arms from the people they care for. Sometimes people put up a tough exterior and don’t reach out to people who genuinely do care because they don’t want to burden them or show vulnerability.

It may be time to let down walls and open up about your feelings. You never know, that person might need this talk just as much as you do.

Spend Time With Loved Ones

At times when an individual isn't feeling their best, they shouldn't rule out the option of simply getting together with people that it just feels good to be around.

Social support is often an impactful aspect of a person's spiritual being that offers great benefits to quality of life. A community of people who are there for one another, who show up when it matters, and put in the effort to positively influence each other's lives is what social support is all about.

During difficult times, support systems live up to their role in an individual's life.  A little social interaction with those that you enjoy spending time with may just help you feel more connected to spirituality and faith. 

Consider Counseling

A faith-based therapist or a spiritual counselor can help you discover why you might be feeling that you are losing your faith. In your sessions, you will be able to safely sort out your emotions and feel them without judgment.

Engaging in counseling or therapy may support you in deepening your understanding of your relationship with your faith. If your faith has been shaken or broken, it may take some time to heal and recover your faith, and you are encouraged in being patient with yourself and the process.

Engage in Acts of Kindness

Sometimes all of the troubling circumstances that are going on around someone begin to get to them more than they realize. When the world begins to look hopeless it may be beneficial for a person to feel as if they have some control of the good being contributed to the world.

Engaging in genuine acts of kindness , like volunteer work or donations, may help put a little faith back into humanity. Acts of kindness are associated with life satisfaction.

With acts of kindness, people are able to get out of their own heads and be reminded that they are a part of the bigger picture.

Attend a Place of Worship

Religious institutions—such as a church, temple, mosque, synagogue, or other place of worship—represent a community of people with a shared belief that can commune together in worship and the enrichment of faith.

Gathering with those who have similar beliefs as yourself can help when you feel you are losing your faith.

Research shows that, when people attend church, they often feel a sense of encouragement, strength, belongingness. Moreover, faith in their higher power might even be restored.

Take a Break

Sometimes people need a reset button to remember who they are and what they believe in. It is easy to become so wrapped up in everyday life that a person begins to lose touch with themselves and their faith.

This is why it’s important to take a break from daily routine and take a breather. Consider spending some time in nature , which is a great way of connecting with your spirituality. Doing so may offer a sense of serenity.

You may even want to consider a nature retreat or small getaway to reconnect with yourself and what matters most to you. 

Take The Time to Reflect

Take the time to consider what in particular could be the source of you feeling the way you do. It is possible that it is a variety of things in your life that are causing you to feel a loss of faith. Whether it is stress , trauma, grief, or just feeling a disconnect from God and the world around you, it is important to assess these emotions .

Speaking with a therapist or loved one can also help determine what makes you feel this way and better understand why.

Reflecting on your relationship with God and your belief systems may be beneficial. Others may have significantly influenced your faith more than you realize or are comfortable with. It is normal to have religious beliefs taught during childhood and throughout your life that may conflict with you or no longer resonate during this time.

Remember that your beliefs and faith can develop or change as you grow, so try not to be  judgmental  of yourself if they evolve. Take time to reflect on what you believe, what is working, what is no longer working, and what you feel may be the best way to proceed.

Keep in Mind

Feeling lost, uneasy, and withdrawn happens to the best of us, sometimes at the most unexpected times. Although one does not always have control over what is going on in the world around them or even situations happening in their own lives, they do have authority over how they perceive and react to these experiences.

One should not judge or dismiss their feelings, but it is, however, important that they don’t dwell on thoughts that result in amplifying  negative emotions  too long, because it is easy to become overwhelmed by them.

When challenging moments do appear, consider engaging in activities that help you reconnect with yourself, those you care about, and your relationship with your ever-evolving spirituality and faith.

Merriam-Webster Dictionary. Faith .

Taylor C. Reason, Faith, and Meaning ," Faith and Philosophy: Journal of the Society of Christian Philosophers . 2019; 28(1). doi:10.5840/faithphil201128112

Koenig HG. Maintaining health and well-being by putting faith into action during the COVID-19 pandemic .  J Relig Health . 2020;59(5):2205-2214. doi:10.1007/s10943-020-01035-2

Wittink MN, Joo JH, Lewis LM, et al. Losing Faith and Using Faith: Older African Americans Discuss Spirituality, Religious Activities, and Depression. J Gen Intern Med. 2009; 24(402). doi:10.1007/s11606-008-0897-1

Lucchetti G, Koenig HG, Lucchetti ALG. Spirituality, religiousness, and mental health: A review of the current scientific evidence .  World J Clin Cases . 2021;9(26):7620-7631. doi:10.12998/wjcc.v9.i26.7620

Wojnarowska A, Kobylinska D, Lewczuk K. Acceptance as an emotion regulation strategy in experimental psychological research: What we know and how we can improve that knowledge .  Front Psychol . 2020;11:242. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00242

Fekete EM, Deichert NT. A brief gratitude writing intervention decreased stress and negative affect during the COVID-19 pandemic .  J Happiness Stud . 2022;23(6):2427-2448. doi:10.1007/s10902-022-00505-6

Harandi TF, Taghinasab MM, Nayeri TD. The correlation of social support with mental health: A meta-analysis .  Electron Physician . 2017;9(9):5212-5222. doi:10.19082/5212

Chollou KM, Shirzadi S, Pourrazavi S, Babazadeh T, Ranjbaran S. The role of perceived social support on quality of life in people with cardiovascular diseases .  Ethiop J Health Sci . 2022;32(5):1019-1026. doi:10.4314/ejhs.v32i5.17

Buchanan KE, Bardi A. Acts of kindness and acts of novelty affect life satisfaction. Journal of Social Psychology. 2010;150(3):235-237. doi:10.1080/00224540903365554

Grim BJ, Grim ME. Belief, behavior, and belonging: How faith is indispensable in preventing and recovering from substance abuse [published correction appears in J Relig Health. 2019 Aug 21;:].  J Relig Health . 2019;58(5):1713-1750. doi:10.1007/s10943-019-00876-w

By Tiara Blain, MA Tiara Blain, MA, is a freelance writer for Verywell Mind. She is a health writer and researcher passionate about the mind-body connection, and holds a Master's degree in psychology.

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Loss of Faith in Elie Wiesel's Night Essay Example

Depending on religion and beliefs, one often looks up to God, (or another higher power) to protect them from evil. Faith can be difficult when a repetition of awful events occur, leading one to wonder if the higher power they believe in is present. In the holocaust, many people in the Jewish community start to question God’s power when witnessing the brutality Jews are facing in the concentration camps. In Night by Elie Wiesel, witnessing and being a victim of abuse from the concentration camps cause Elie to lose faith, going from deeply religious, to deteriorating faith, to having lost all faith in God. 

Despite the rumors circulating about the concentration camps, at the beginning of the book, Elie faith is strong. In Sighet, Moshe the Beadle teaches him about the Kabbalah, and together they pray. Elie and Moshe stay in the synagogue praying and listening to God even “after all the faithful had gone” (Wiesel 5). Elie’s strong faith before the concentration camp is significant because it shows that he believes and trusts in God, even though he can’t fully comprehend Gods plan. After being deported to the first concentration camp, Auschwitz, two men walked to retrieve water. When they came back, they told the false information they have received to the other Jews, stating that they are in a labor camp, families will stay together, and the conditions are good. Elie, as well as the rest of the Jews who have learned the new give “thanks to God.” (Wiesel 27). Elie’s faith in God once he arrives at the concentration camp stays strong. In spite of witnessing harsh punishment from the Kapos in the concentration camp, Elie’s faith remains strong. When he receives new shoes for work, which are in good condition regardless of the mud covering them, Elie thanks God “in an improvised prayer” (Wiesel 38). Elie praying to God even after seeing the abusive Nazis is important, because it shows that Elie remains faithful. 

When Elie continues to witness the cruelty of the Nazi’s against the Jews, Elie’s faith begins to deteriorate. When the Nazis are hanging an innocent child, they force all of the Jews to watch. One Jewish man asks where God is, and Elie hears a voice inside his head telling him God is “hanging here from these gallows” (Wiesel 12). This implies Elie’s new decline in faith because he believes God is in the child being hanged, unable to help the Jews. On Rosh Hashanah, Elie was the opposite from ready to celebrate. After just witnessing a boy being hanged, Elie is angrily asking his God why he continues to trouble “these poor people's wounded minds, their ailing bodies?” (Wiesel 66). Elie’s faith is never the same after the hanging and watching the many innocent lives that are taken by the Nazis, he continues to question God throughout the book. 

Elie’s faith has already started to deteriorate but witnessing more abuse towards the Jewish community at the concentration camp for a long time causes Elie to have no more faith in God. After watching many Jews suffer, Elie has lost faith in God. When he is thinking back to the past concentration camps Elie questions God for watching as their “fathers, our mothers, our brothers end up in the furnaces?” (Wiesel 67). Although he probably knows earlier, Elie is angry his mom and sister have been killed in the crematorium, and this directly effects Elie, because his immediate family is killed, without any remorse, making it seem like God is not there.  At this point, Elie has trouble finding any faith in God. When Elie watches Rabbi Eliyahu’s son betray his father, leaving his side when they are running. In desperation to not betray his father, Elie starts to pray to God “in whom [he] no longer believed” (Wiesel 91). Elie has been whipped, verbally and physically abused, and is struggling for survival. He now has no more faith in God, but despite his beliefs, is willing to pray for loyalty to his father. 

In Elie Weasel’s Memoir Night, the concentration camps Elie suffers through turn him from a religious person, to struggling with faith, to having lost his faith in God. When an unfortunate event occurs, humans tend to either gain or loose faith. Like Elie Wiesel’s loss of faith, due to the abuse he witnesses and undergoes in the concentration camps, many feel loss of faith due to traumatic experiences. In the twenty first century, there are many people suffering and dying because of corona, which can lead to loss of faith for some. By writing Night, Elie Wiesel is trying to show one must experience a traumatic event to truly test their faith.

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Elie Wiesel

Ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions.

One of the main themes of Night is Eliezer's loss of religious faith. Throughout the book, Eliezer witnesses and experiences things that he cannot reconcile with the idea of a just and all-knowing God.

At the beginning of the narrative, Eliezer declares, "I believed profoundly." He is twelve years old and his life is centered around Judaism—studying the Talmud during the day, praying at the synagogue at night until he weeps with religious feeling. He wants to study the cabbala (Jewish mysticism), but his father says he's too young. Despite this, Eliezer finds a teacher in town, a poor man named Moché the Beadle , and the two of them pore over cabbalistic questions. Eliezer's faith in God is shared by many of his fellow Jews in the town of Sighet. On the trains to the concentration camps, people discuss the banishment from their homes as trial sent from God to be endured—a test of faith.

But Eliezer's belief in God begins to falter at the concentration camps of Birkenau-Aushwitz. Here the furnaces are busy night and day burning people. Here he watches German soldiers throw truckloads of babies and small children into the flames. The longer he stays in the concentration camps, the more he sees and experiences cruelty and suffering. People treat others worse than they would livestock. He can no longer believe that a God who would permit such nightmare places to exist could be just. The fact that many Jews do continue to pray, to recite the Talmud, and to look for comfort in their faith while in the concentration camp amazes and confounds Eliezer. That people would still pray to a God who allows their families to be gassed and incinerated suggests to Eliezer that people are stronger and more forgiving than the God they pray to. Later, as more people die, and others around him lose hope, starve, and succumb, Eliezer ceases to believe that God could exist at all. He is not alone in his disillusionment. Akiba Drumer (whose faith helps Eliezer endure for a while) as well as a rabbi whom Eliezer talks to, also eventually come to believe that God's existence is impossible in a world that contains such a large-scale, willful horror as the Holocaust. The final nail in the coffin, for Eliezer's faith, comes at Buna, where the prisoners are gathered to watch the hanging of a young boy. A man in the crowd asks, "Where is God now?" Eliezer's internal response is that God is that boy on the gallows. The boy dies slowly as the prisoners are forced to watch.

Having and Losing Faith in God ThemeTracker

Having and Losing Faith in God Quotes in Night

Loss Of Faith In Night By Elie Wiesel

Due to the challenges faced daily by the Jews in the holocaust, many of these people including Elie lost faith in god. Many people in the world today find themselves stuck in a position where they also lose all faith in god. They give up, no longer believe in faith and find themselves in a deeper whole and this is exactly what Elie Wiesel did. Elie could not accept the silence and he had rebelled against his religion of believing in faith. However, it is debatable whether Elie completely lost faith in god but it is clear he drastically changed from his past perspective on his religion.

In the beginning of the novel Elie was a strong believer of faith, but never knew the answer to why. For example, Wiesel states, ““He had watched me one day as I prayed at dusk. "Why do you cry when you pray?” he asked, as though he knew me well. "I don't know," I answered, troubled. I had never asked myself that question. I cried because something inside me felt the need to cry. That was all I knew. "Why do you pray?" he asked after a moment. Why did I pray? Strange question. Why did I live? Why did I breathe? "I don't know," I told him, even more troubled and ill at ease. "I don't know" (4). Elie questioned why he prayed, cried while praying and had multiple questions as to why things were as they were. Elie was a firm believer and always chose to never deny god's existence. For example Wiesel states, “Some of the men spoke of God: His mysterious ways, the sins of the Jewish people, and the redemption to come. As for me, I had ceased to pray. I concurred with Job! I was not denying His existence, but I doubted His absolute justice” (45). Elie was always praying for things to get better, to gain a relationship with god. Although we see Elie as a firm believer in the beginning of the novel things start to change. 

Elie started losing faith quickly and not expectedly. Elie questions why he should bless the god when he is doing harm to Elie and his surrounding people. For example, Wiesel states, “Blessed be God’s name? Why, but why would I bless Him? Every fiber in me rebelled. Because He caused thousands of children to burn in His mass graves? Because He kept six crematoria working day and night, including Sabbath and the Holy Days? Because in His great might, He had created Auschwitz, Birkenau, Buna, and so many other factories of death? How could I say to Him: Blessed be Thou, Almighty, Master of the Universe, who chose us among all nations to be tortured day and night, to watch as our fathers, our mothers, our brothers end up in the furnaces? Praised be Thy Holy Name, for having chosen us to be slaughtered on Thine altar” (67). Elie doesn't understand why he should be blessing someone who's doing harm and hurting him after everything Elie has been doing for his god. Elie starts to wonder throughout the novel what his god is. For example, Wiesel states, “What are You, my God? I thought angrily. How do You compare to this stricken mass gathered to affirm to You their faith, their anger, their defiance? What does Your grandeur mean, Master of the Universe, in the face of this cowardice, this decay, and this misery? Why do you do on troubling these poor people’s wounded minds, their ailing bodies” (66). Elie doesn’t know who his god is and doesn’t understand why he's putting so much hurt on people who don’t deserve it. Although we can tell Elie is starting to lose all the faith he's put towards his god, Elie begins to change his mind. 

Elie suddenly begins to plead for forgiveness for his loss of faith. Elie finally realized he needs forgiveness in his life. For example, Wiesel states, “I knew that my sins grieved the Almighty and so I pleaded for forgiveness. In those days, I fully believed that the salvation of the world depended on every one of my deeds, on every one of my prayers. But now, I no longer pleaded for anything. I was no longer able to lament. On the contrary, I felt very strong. I was the accuser, God the accused. My eyes had opened and I was alone, terribly alone in a world without God, without man. Without love or mercy. I was nothing but ashes now, but I felt to myself to be stronger than this Almighty to whom my life had been bound for so long. In the midst of these men assembled for prayer, I felt like an observer, a stranger” (68). Elie realized he was alone and needed his God to rely on. He needed him to be there for him through it all. Now that Elie realized he needed his god, he had so many questions, where was god? For example, Wiesel states, “Were there still miracles on this earth?” (76). Elie was in major of a miracle. He was begging god to change something, anything. He came back to his god, and he needed him more than ever.

Although Elie’s perspective changes throughout the novel on his views of his faith. We realize he needs his god. To count on his sins, to plead for forgiveness and lastly to help his people. Elie rebelled against his religion but soon realized he needed to gain his faith back. He needed to be forgiven, he needed to be helped, he felt so alone. God will always be there when you need him as long as you are faithful to him. 

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Growing My Faith in the Face of Death

I spent a lifetime counseling others before my diagnosis. Will I be able to take my own advice?

I have spent a good part of my life talking with people about the role of faith in the face of imminent death. Since I became an ordained Presbyterian minister in 1975, I have sat at countless bedsides, and occasionally even watched someone take their final breath. I recently wrote a small book, On Death , relating a lot of what I say to people in such times. But when, a little more than a month after that book was published, I was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, I was still caught unprepared.

On the way home from a conference of Asian Christians in Kuala Lumpur in February 2020, I developed an intestinal infection. A scan at the hospital showed what looked like enlarged lymph nodes in my abdomen: No cause for concern, but come back in three months just to check . My book was published. And then, while all of us in New York City were trying to protect ourselves from COVID-19, I learned that I already had an agent of death growing inside me.

I spent a few harrowing minutes looking online at the dire survival statistics for pancreatic cancer, and caught a glimpse of On Death on a table nearby. I didn’t dare open it to read what I’d written.

My wife, Kathy, and I spent much time in tears and disbelief. We were both turning 70, but felt strong, clear-minded, and capable of nearly all the things we have done for the past 50 years. “I thought we’d feel a lot older when we got to this age,” Kathy said. We had plenty of plans and lots of comforts, especially our children and grandchildren. We expected some illness to come and take us when we felt really old. But not now, not yet. This couldn’t be; what was God doing to us? The Bible, and especially the Psalms, gave voice to our feelings: “Why, O Lord, do you stand far off?” “Wake up, O Lord. Why are you sleeping?” “How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?”

A significant number of believers in God find their faith shaken or destroyed when they learn that they will die at a time and in a way that seems unfair to them. Before my diagnosis, I had seen this in people of many faiths. One woman with cancer told me years ago, “I’m not a believer anymore—that doesn’t work for me. I can’t believe in a personal God who would do something like this to me.” Cancer killed her God.

What would happen to me? I felt like a surgeon who was suddenly on the operating table. Would I be able to take my own advice?

One of the first things I learned was that religious faith does not automatically provide solace in times of crisis. A belief in God and an afterlife does not become spontaneously comforting and existentially strengthening. Despite my rational, conscious acknowledgment that I would die someday, the shattering reality of a fatal diagnosis provoked a remarkably strong psychological denial of mortality. Instead of acting on Dylan Thomas’s advice to “rage, rage against the dying of the light,” I found myself thinking, What? No! I can’t die. That happens to others, but not to me . When I said these outrageous words out loud, I realized that this delusion had been the actual operating principle of my heart.

The cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker argued that the denial of death dominates our culture, but even if he was right that modern life has heightened this denial, it has always been with us. As the 16th-century Protestant theologian John Calvin wrote, “We undertake all things as if we were establishing immortality for ourselves on earth. If we see a dead body, we may philosophize briefly about the fleeting nature of life, but the moment we turn away from the sight the thought of our own perpetuity remains fixed in our minds.” Death is an abstraction to us, something technically true but unimaginable as a personal reality.

Read: When medicine and faith define death differently

For the same reason, our beliefs about God and an afterlife, if we have them, are often abstractions as well. If we don’t accept the reality of death, we don’t need these beliefs to be anything other than mental assents. A feigned battle in a play or a movie requires only stage props. But as death, the last enemy, became real to my heart, I realized that my beliefs would have to become just as real to my heart, or I wouldn’t be able to get through the day. Theoretical ideas about God’s love and the future resurrection had to become life-gripping truths, or be discarded as useless.

I’ve watched many others partake of this denial of death and then struggle when their convictions evaporate, and not just among the religious. I spent time as a pastor with sick and dying people whose religious faith was nominal or nonexistent. Many had a set of beliefs about the universe, even if they went largely unacknowledged—that the material world came into being on its own and that there is no supernatural world we go to after death. Death, in this view, is simply nonexistence, and therefore, as the writer Julian Barnes has argued, nothing to be frightened of. These ideas are items of faith that can’t be proved, and people use them as Barnes does, to stave off fear of death. But I’ve found that nonreligious people who think such secular beliefs will be comforting often find that they crumple when confronted by the real thing.

So when the certainty of your mortality and death finally breaks through, is there a way to face it without debilitating fear? Is there a way to spend the time you have left growing into greater grace, love, and wisdom? I believe there is, but it requires both intellectual and emotional engagement: head work and heart work .

I use the terms head and heart to mean reasoning and feeling, adapting to the modern view that these two things are independent faculties. The Hebrew scriptures, however, see the heart as the seat of the mind, will, and emotions. Proverbs says, “As he thinketh in his heart, so is he.” In other words, rational conviction and experience might change my mind, but the shift would not be complete until it took root in my heart. And so I set out to reexamine my convictions and to strengthen my faith, so that it might prove more than a match for death.

P aul Brand , an orthopedic surgeon, spent the first part of his medical career in India and the last part of his career in the U.S. “In the United States … I encountered a society that seeks to avoid pain at all costs,” he wrote in his recent memoir . “Patients lived at a greater comfort level than any I had previously treated, but they seemed far less equipped to handle suffering and far more traumatized by it.”

Why is it that people in prosperous, modern societies seem to struggle so much with the existence of evil, suffering, and death? In his book A Secular Age , the philosopher Charles Taylor wrote that while humans have always struggled with the ways and justice of God, until quite recently no one had concluded that suffering made the existence of God implausible. For millennia, people held a strong belief in their own inadequacy or sinfulness, and did not hold the modern assumption that we all deserve a comfortable life. Moreover, Taylor has argued, we have become so confident in our powers of logic that if we cannot imagine any good reason that suffering exists, we assume there can’t be one.

But if there is a God great enough to merit your anger over the suffering you witness or endure, then there is a God great enough to have reasons for allowing it that you can’t detect. It is not logical to believe in an infinite God and still be convinced that you can tally the sums of good and evil as he does, or to grow angry that he doesn’t always see things your way. Taylor’s point is that people say their suffering makes faith in God impossible—but it is in fact their overconfidence in themselves and their abilities that sets them up for anger, fear, and confusion.

When I got my cancer diagnosis, I had to look not only at my professed beliefs, which align with historical Protestant orthodoxy, but also at my actual understanding of God. Had it been shaped by my culture? Had I been slipping unconsciously into the supposition that God lived for me rather than I for him, that life should go well for me, that I knew better than God does how things should go? The answer was yes—to some degree. I found that to embrace God’s greatness, to say “Thy will be done,” was painful at first and then, perhaps counterintuitively, profoundly liberating. To assume that God is as small and finite as we are may feel freeing—but it offers no remedy for anger.

Another area of head work for me had to do with Jesus’s resurrection. Ironically, I had already begun working on a book about Easter. Before cancer, the resurrection had been a mostly theoretical issue for me—but not now. I’m familiar with the common charge that any belief in an afterlife is mere wish fulfillment without grounding in fact—and that belief in Jesus is in the same category as faith in the Flying Spaghetti Monster. But over the past 20 years, I’ve been drawn to the work of the British biblical scholar N. T. Wright, who mounts a historical case for Jesus’s bodily resurrection.

Read: What people actually say before they die

I returned to his material now, with greater skepticism than I had previously applied. I didn’t want to be taken in. But as I reread his arguments, they seemed even more formidable and fair to me than they had in the past. They gave me a place to get my footing. Still, I needed more than mental assent to believe in the resurrection.

The heart work came in as I struggled to bridge the gap between an abstract belief and one that touches the imagination. As the early American philosopher Jonathan Edwards argued, it is one thing to believe with certainty that honey is sweet, perhaps through the universal testimony of trusted people, but it is another to actually taste the sweetness of honey. The sense of the honey’s sweetness on the tongue brings a fuller knowledge of honey than any rational deduction. In the same way, it is one thing to believe in a God who has attributes such as love, power, and wisdom; it is another to sense the reality of that God in your heart. The Bible is filled with sensory language. We are not only to believe that God is good but also to “taste” his goodness, the psalmist tells us; not just to believe that God is glorious and powerful but also to “see” it with “the eyes of the heart,” it says in Ephesians.

On December 6, 1273, Thomas Aquinas stopped writing his monumental Summa Theologiae . When asked why by his friend Reginald, he replied that he had had a beatific experience of God that made all his theology “seem like straw” by comparison. That was no repudiation of his theology, but Thomas had seen the difference between the map of God and God himself, and a very great difference it was. While I cannot claim that any of my experiences of God in the past several months have been “beatific,” they have been deeper and sweeter than I have known before.

My path to this has involved three disciplines.

The first was to immerse myself in the Psalms to be sure that I wasn’t encountering a God I had made up myself. Any God I make up will be less troubling and offensive, to be sure, but then how can such a God contradict me when my heart says that there’s no hope, or that I’m worthless? The Psalms show me a God maddening in his complexity, but this difficult deity comes across as a real being, not one any human would have conjured. Through the Psalms, I grew in confidence that I was before “him with whom we have to do.”

The second discipline was something that earlier writers like Edwards called spiritual “soliloquy.” You see it in Psalms 42 and 103, where the psalmist says, “Why are you cast down, O my soul?” and “Bless the Lord, O my soul. And forget not all his benefits.” The authors are addressing neither God nor their readers but their own souls, their selves . They are not so much listening to their hearts as talking to them. They are interrogating them and reminding them about God. They are taking truths about God and pressing them down deep into their hearts until they catch fire there.

I had to look hard at my deepest trusts, my strongest loves and fears, and bring them into contact with God. Sometimes—not always, or even usually—this leads, as the poet George Herbert wrote, to “a kind of tune … softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss, exalted manna … heaven in the ordinary.” But even though most days’ hour of Bible reading, meditation, soliloquy, and prayer doesn’t yield this kind of music, the reality of God and his promises grew on me. My imagination became more able to visualize the resurrection and rest my heart in it.

Most particularly for me as a Christian, Jesus’s costly love, death, and resurrection had become not just something I believed and filed away, but a hope that sustained me all day. I pray this prayer daily. Occasionally it electrifies, but ultimately it always calms:

And as I lay down in sleep and rose this morning only by your grace, keep me in the joyful, lively remembrance that whatever happens, I will someday know my final rising, because Jesus Christ lay down in death for me, and rose for my justification.

Read: Why I hope to die at 75

As this spiritual reality grows, what are the effects on how I live? One of the most difficult results to explain is what happened to my joys and fears. Since my diagnosis, Kathy and I have come to see that the more we tried to make a heaven out of this world—the more we grounded our comfort and security in it—the less we were able to enjoy it.

Kathy finds deep consolation and rest in the familiar, comforting places where we vacation. Some of them are shacks with bare light bulbs on wires, but they are her Sehnsucht locations—the spaces for which she longs. My pseudo-salvations are professional goals and accomplishments—another book, a new ministry project, another milestone at the church. For these reasons we found that when we got to the end of a vacation at the beach, our responses were both opposite and yet strangely the same.

Kathy would begin to mourn the need to depart almost as soon as she arrived, which made it impossible for her to fully enjoy herself. She would fantasize about handcuffing herself to the porch railing and refusing to budge. I, however, would always chafe and be eager to get back to work. I spent much of the time at the beach brainstorming and writing out plans. Neither of us learned to savor the moment, and so we never came home refreshed.

A short, green Jedi Master’s words applied to me perfectly: “All his life has he looked away to the future, the horizon. Never his mind on where he was. ” Kathy and I should have known better. We did know better. When we turn good things into ultimate things, when we make them our greatest consolations and loves, they will necessarily disappoint us bitterly. “Thou hast made us for thyself,” Augustine said in his most famous sentence, “and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in Thee.” The 18th-century hymn writer John Newton depicted God as saying to the human soul, “These inward trials I employ from pride and self to set thee free, and break thy schemes of earthly joy that thou would find thine all in me.”

T o our surprise and encouragement, Kathy and I have discovered that the less we attempt to make this world into a heaven, the more we are able to enjoy it.

No longer are we burdening it with demands impossible for it to fulfill. We have found that the simplest things—from sun on the water and flowers in the vase to our own embraces, sex, and conversation—bring more joy than ever. This has taken us by surprise.

This change was not an overnight revolution. As God’s reality dawns more on my heart, slowly and painfully and through many tears, the simplest pleasures of this world have become sources of daily happiness. It is only as I have become, for lack of a better term, more heavenly minded that I can see the material world for the astonishingly good divine gift that it is.

I can sincerely say, without any sentimentality or exaggeration, that I’ve never been happier in my life, that I’ve never had more days filled with comfort. But it is equally true that I’ve never had so many days of grief. One of our dearest friends lost her husband to cancer six years ago. Even now, she says, she might seem fine, and then out of nowhere some reminder or thought will sideswipe her and cripple her with sorrow.

Yes. But I have come to be grateful for those sideswipes, because they remind me to reorient myself to the convictions of my head and the processes of my heart. When I take time to remember how to deal with my fears and savor my joys, the consolations are stronger and sweeter than ever.

​When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Loss of Faith in Night by Elie Wiesel

One of the main themes of Wiesel’s ‘Night’ is faith in God. Throughout the book the faith of the narrator, Eliezer, undergoes many assaults. In the beginning we see his ‘totalistic and zealous commitment to God’, as Downing describes his state of faith (62). Eliezer grew up believing, that everything in this world is emanation of God, who possesses both goodness and omnipotence, and there is a spark of God’s light in every human’s soul. So, he lived in a good world, ruled by good God. He did… till one day his habitual life ceased to exist. He faces the Holocaust, and it turns all his life and his beliefs upside down.

That is when he begins first to ask God different questions, then to question the very existence of God. Facing sufferings often becomes a crucial point, at which a person decides, whether to continue believing in God or not. This was also true with Eliezer. This was always true – even the Bible, filled with the stories of various men and women of faith, depicts their doubt, their spiritual struggles, and sometimes their indignation with God. So did Job, so did this little boy, Eliezer.

Probably, the turning point for Eliezer was, when he saw a boy, dying slowly, hanging on gallows. Wiesel, in this scene, shows discouragement and loss of believe of many people: ‘Behind me, I heard the same man asking: Where is God now? And I heard a voice within me answer him:… Here He is – He is hanging here on this gallows’ (Wiesel 72).

Eliezer called those moments as moments, that murdered his God, his soul and turned his dreams to dust (Wiesel 43). He could not bless God’s name, he could not plead God for anything anymore. Every fiber in him rebelled, when hearing anything about God or watching somebody worshiping God (Wiesel 74). He became the accuser, God the accused (Wiesel 10).

But in spite of that, in the following chapters we see constant emersion of his faith: ‘And, in spite of myself, a prayer rose in my heart, to that God in whom I no longer believed. My God, Lord of the Universe, give me strength never to do what Rabbi Eliahou’s son has done’ (Wiesel 97). He claims, that his God is dead, but at the same time he adds: ‘Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself’, assuming that God exists (Wiesel 43).

As Job, a character from the Bible, he thought, that God had put him into darkness, but, as notices Bloom, ‘questions remain concerning … whether the leading into darkness is indeed the end’ (60). For Job it became a new starting point, a thrust to a better understanding of God. Night seems to be the end of something. The author himself says the following about his book: ‘In Night … I wanted to show the end, the finality of the event. Everything came to an end – man, history, literature, religion, God. There was nothing left. And yet we begin again with night’ (qtd. in Bloom 66).

‘Night’ is the first book of a trilogy by Wiesel, called ‘Night, Dawn and Day’, so we can see a little hint, that light will return again, that there is some hope left. All spiritual wonderings and warfare of the main character will end up with Eliezer’s better comprehension of God, as someone, who is not easy to grasp, and he never will be.

Works Cited

Bloom, Harold. Elie Wiesel’s Night , New York City, NY: Infobase Publishing, 2009. Print.

Downing, Frederick L.. Elie Wiesel: A Religious Biography , Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2008. Print.

Wiesel, Elie. Night ; Dawn ; Day , Amsterdam, the Netherlands: Aronson, 1985. Print.

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