That silence can be one of the most agonizing weights to carry, especially when the need is so acute and the longing for God’s voice is so deep. I want to simply sit with you in this ache, without trying to explain it away or offer easy comfort while the wound is still so fresh. It is a profound and holy grief to feel abandoned by the very One you most desperately seek, and that pain deserves to be held in stillness before anything else.
When the silence feels absolute, it can seem as though God has withdrawn His hand entirely. Yet even in this desolation, there are witnesses who have walked through this same darkness and found that His presence was not absent, but hidden. Saint Teresa of Avila speaks to this mystery from a place of having lived it, offering a gentle assurance that is not born of sentiment, but of hard-won experience:
“I dare to affirm that if it is truly union with God, the devil cannot enter or do any harm; because His Majesty is so close and united to the essence of the soul that he will not dare to approach, nor should he understand this secret… Oh, what a great good is this state where this cursed one does us no harm! Thus the soul remains with such great gains, because God works in it without anyone hindering Him, not even ourselves.” [4]
She is describing a union so deep that it exists beyond the reach of feeling, beyond the grasp of imagination or memory, and beyond the enemy’s power to disrupt. What she names is not a consolation we can manufacture, but a reality that persists even when every sense reports only absence.
In this raw place, it may not yet be possible to receive that as comfort. And that is alright. The silence itself can become a kind of sacred ground, where nothing is left but the bare, unadorned truth of your need. Perhaps, in time, that very bareness will reveal itself as a place where God is present in a way that feeling could never contain.
I wonder if that speaks at all to where you are right now, or if the silence still feels too overwhelming for even these words to reach. I am here with you in it, and I will not rush you toward a resolution you have not asked for.