Breaking Faith

'I am now at a point where I no longer feel any guilt about my loss of faith’, wrote Victor the widower to me, ‘and indeed I feel a great deal happier than I have for five or six years, my depression having lifted at long last’. Victor had had much to put up with, nursing his wife through dementia for a couple of years before her death, and suffering a series of health setbacks himself as well as the sort of spiritual torpor he described to me. Non-Christians so often typify guilt as the mainspring of belief: guilt about losing that belief is a further level of contortion and you can see how relinquishing that could come as a relief – and perhaps, I might hope in Victor’s case, that might open the way to something more healthy and joyful.

Our relationship with God is a lot like our relationships with anyone else we might find ourselves loving. There are times when it’s sustained by will, by the conscious decision to keep going, even though we might not feel anything very much. Gradually that decision of will and its consequences affects the heart, the bundle of affections, habits, conceptions and perceptions which comprise our person, until it becomes impossible to imagine our own lives separate from that relationship, and out of that emerges a deep peace and serenity.

There have to be two things that make this act of sustained will reasonable, though. The first is that there is sentiment, and therefore the practised memory of sentiment, of our first encounter with God or the initial emotions that surrounded the person we love: that sustains our decision of will, waters its soil, as it were. Secondly, the object of our love has at least to be trying to love us in the same way, or the whole business becomes pathological, and not the act of a reasonable being. You have to get something back from them; they have to want to give something to you.

What, then, do we get back from God? The difference between the relationship of faith and other sorts is that faith requires that first we decide that God is there at all; and often that assertion seems to fly in the face of everything we experience. We only get something back from him once we’ve decided that he exists, and no such ambiguity is present in our other affections. The collapse of belief folds up the relationship because we can no longer see that we are receiving anything from him, and if we can’t see that we’ll be unable to sustain our belief. The two motions reinforce each other. In either case, the memory of the sentiment from which our faith grew, if there was any in first place, will wither and disappear.

There is certainly no point feeling guilt about it: like losing your love for a person, it’s just a fact. For it to change, for the stump of faith to sprout again, all those elements will have to be present afresh – the sentiment, the awareness of receiving, the possibility that God might be there. It’s such a fragile and uncertain business.