Why Does God Feel So Distant? — The Restless Heart of Augustine
⏱ 11 min read
You have not stopped believing in Him. The faith is still in place. The verses are still on the wall. The chair you used to sit in for prayer is still beside the window. What has gone is the felt-sense of Him — the warmth, the nearness, the small inward confirmation that He was in the room with you while you read. You can still pray. You no longer feel that you are heard. The distance has been there for a few months now, or perhaps a year, or perhaps long enough that you have stopped marking when it started, and you have not been able to tell anyone, because the people who would care most would worry, and the people who would worry least would offer the kind of advice the distance has already survived.
This is a slow walk through Augustine’s answer to that exact felt-distance. He wrote about it sixteen hundred years ago, in the small library of his early years called the Confessions, and his diagnosis is, even now, the steadiest one the church has. If a journal feels like a steadier home for the months of distance, the Prayer Journal for Women was built as a quiet place for the practice of staying with God even when the felt-sense has gone — which is the practice most likely to bring it back.
What Augustine knew about distance
Augustine spent the first thirty-two years of his life away from God. Not in disbelief — he believed in something for most of those years — but in a long restless searching, through philosophy, through worldly ambition, through the Manichean sect, through a long unwilling-to-give-up relationship he stayed in for a decade and a half. The Confessions is the record of those years, written backwards from his conversion at thirty-two, and the question it is quietly asking on every page is the same one you are asking now. Where were You. Why did You feel so far. Why did the searching take this long.
He answers the question slowly, across thirteen books. The shortest version of the answer is the line everyone quotes, and the line is worth reading slowly because the modern eye usually skips over its real claim:
“Thou awakest us to delight in Thy praise; for Thou madest us for Thyself, and our heart is restless, until it repose in Thee.”
— Augustine, Confessions Book I
Our heart is restless. Notice the present tense. The restlessness is not a stage to be passed through. It is the ongoing condition of the heart that has been made for God and has not yet come into permanent rest in Him. Even Augustine, after his conversion, did not lose the restlessness. The Confessions is written by a man who is on the other side of conversion and is still describing the heart as restless. The conversion did not end the restlessness; it gave it its true direction.
The felt-distance you are inside of, then, is not a sign that something has gone wrong with your faith. It is a sign that your heart is still functioning. The heart made for God is restless in His felt-absence because that is what hearts made for God do. The distance you are feeling is not the failure of faith. It is the felt evidence that your faith has not been transferred to anything else — that nothing in the earthly city has been able to replace the rest the heart was made for. The distance hurts because the heart is still oriented correctly. (For the wider posture of staying with God across a long quiet stretch, when you feel spiritually dry — the practice for the year God goes quiet is the close companion piece to what follows, and reading them in either order will steady the same year.)
The second passage — the silent God who is not absent
Augustine, who watched God’s silence stretch across his whole young adulthood, did not pretend the silence away. He named it. The harder line in the Confessions, and the one to keep near the page through the distant season, is small:
“Thou then heldest Thy peace, and I wandered further and further from Thee, into more and more fruitless seed-plots of sorrows, with a proud dejectedness, and a restless weariness.”
— Augustine, Confessions
Thou heldest Thy peace. He does not soften it. He does not explain it. He says, plainly, that there was a long stretch in which God held His peace and Augustine wandered — and the wandering was not the proof of God’s absence, even though it felt like it at the time.
Look at what is in those two phrases. A proud dejectedness. That is a specific spiritual state — the dejection of the soul that is not getting what it wants from God, mixed with the pride that refuses to ask for what it really needs. A restless weariness. That is the other shape distance takes: a tiredness that has no rest in it, because the wandering is itself exhausting. Augustine names them both. He is describing, with sixteen-hundred-year-old precision, the felt-texture of the distant season you are in.
And he names them backwards — from the safety of having come out the other side. The Confessions is written by a man who can now see that God’s holding of His peace was not the proof of His absence. The peace He held was not abandonment. It was the long patience of a God who was working in the wandering soul in ways the wandering soul could not yet see, and who would, when the time was right, speak again.
This is the diagnosis that the modern quick-comfort piece cannot offer. The felt-distance you are in is real. The God who is silent in it is not absent. The silence is a real silence; the wandering is a real wandering; and the work being done by God in the silence is also real, even though you will not be the one to fully see it from the inside. (The version of this on the page — a small evening practice that does not require God to speak before you can write — is what the Prayer Journal for Women was designed to hold: a quiet structure that lets the believer remain in honest contact with God across the months His felt-presence is held in peace.)
Pause in the body for a moment
The chest that has been tight since the distance began — let it loosen by half a breath. Let the shoulders, which have been carrying the absence as a permanent weight, lower by an inch. Let the head, which has been bent slightly downward through the long months of feeling unheard, lift by a small degree. The body has been carrying the distance physically as well as spiritually. The chronic small bracing that comes with feeling unheard has become its own quiet exhaustion.
Let the body, for one slow breath, un-brace. The God Augustine is describing is not less present in the un-braced body than in the braced one. The lifting of the head is not the manufacturing of a feeling He has not yet given. It is the small recognition that the body can stop performing the distance even before the felt-presence has returned. The lifting precedes the feeling. The body, lifted, makes the soul more available for whatever He does next.
The third passage — the love that has been there all along
The line in the Confessions that does the real work of the felt-distance question is the one that, when Augustine writes it, breaks the small reader who has been carrying the distance long enough to recognise herself in it. It is short. It is addressed directly to God. It is the line worth keeping near the page across the rest of this season:
“Thou light of my heart, Thou bread of my inmost soul, Thou Power who givest vigour to my mind, who quickenest my thoughts, I loved Thee not.”
— Augustine, Confessions
I loved Thee not. He is writing this after his conversion, looking back at the long years of distance, and what he sees is that the felt-distance was not the absence of God. It was the absence — or the smallness, or the unawareness — of his love for Him. God had been the light of his heart, the bread of his inmost soul, the power giving vigour to his mind, the one quickening his thoughts, the whole time. The distance was not God’s withdrawal. The distance was Augustine’s own slow recognition, which had not yet caught up to the reality of God’s nearness.
This is the unbinding the distant believer has been needing. The felt-distance is not always evidence that God has gone quieter. Sometimes it is evidence that the soul has not yet caught up to a God who has been present all along — closer to the heart than the heart is to itself, light to it, bread to it, the power quickening every thought it has been thinking, including the thought He feels far. The closeness has been the ground the felt-distance has been walked on the whole time.
This is not the same as saying just remember God is near and the distance will go. That is the quick-comfort version, and it would not have helped Augustine, and it will not help you. The closeness Augustine names is not summoned by your remembering. The closeness is already in place. The remembering is small. What Augustine is offering is the diagnosis underneath the distance: the felt-far God you are praying to has been, the whole time, the light of your heart and the bread of your inmost soul. The feeling has lagged. The reality has not.
What the slow practice looks like
If you have read this far and you are wondering how to live inside the distance until it lifts, the practice is small. It is not the practice that makes God return; God has not gone. It is the practice that keeps the soul in honest contact with Him through the months His felt-presence is held in peace.
The first part of the practice is to keep going. The chair beside the window. The verse in the morning. The small evening prayer. The Sunday gathering. The practices that built the faith in the years before the distance are the practices that hold it across the distance. You will not feel them working. You are not required to feel them working. The point of the slow practice in a distant season is not the feeling but the keeping — the staying-in-the-room of a soul that has decided, with Augustine, that the silence of God is not abandonment.
The second part of the practice is to name it. Not to a friend who will worry, necessarily, but to God — and on a page. The distance, brought into prayer, is less corrosive than the distance carried alone. Lord, You feel far. I do not feel You. I am here anyway. That short prayer, prayed across weeks, is a small Augustinian practice — the bringing of the proud dejectedness and the restless weariness into the company of the God who is still there, and the trusting that He receives the bringing even when He holds His peace in response. (For the wider grammar of the prayer that brings the loud unanswered thing to God, prayer for anxiety and overthinking is the close cousin piece, applied to a different texture of the same unanswered hour.)
The third part is to expect the return slowly. Distant seasons in Augustine’s writing — and in the writing of every saint who has walked one — do not end abruptly. The felt-presence does not flick back on like a light. It returns by degrees. A line in a sermon that lands differently than it has in months. A morning the chair is, briefly, warmer than the one before. A quiet inward sense that the room is not as empty as it was. The signs are small. The distant season is leaving by inches. You are not required to look for the inches. They will accumulate, and you will notice them on a Wednesday in November and be unable to say when they began. (For the evening practice that has held the same distance across the longest stretch, what is evening devotion — the quiet-time sweet spot is the slow companion piece, and for the wider shape of healing devotionals built for the long quiet seasons, faith-based healing devotionals that don’t spiritualize the wound is the home of the practice you are quietly being invited into.)
What if the distance has been there for years
Augustine’s distance lasted, depending on how you count it, between fifteen and thirty years. He was thirty-two when the felt-nearness of God arrived as a settled, visible thing. He had been searching, in fits and starts, since he was a boy. The Confessions, written in his forties, is the record of a man who can now see that the long distance was not God’s absence — but he could not see it then. He could only stay.
If your distance has been long, you are in the company of saints whose distance was longer. The point of the long staying is not the felt-return on a particular Tuesday. The point is the slow construction of a soul that has learned, with Augustine, that the felt-distance does not have the last word. The God who has been the light of your heart and the bread of your inmost soul the whole time will, in His timing, be felt again. Until then, the staying is the work, and the staying is enough.
If the wider question of suffering has braided itself into your distance — and for most distant believers, it has — Augustine’s answer in City of God on suffering is the sibling piece, and Spurgeon on the minister’s fainting fits is the slow companion for the days the distance has begun to feel like depression.
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The distance, named and slowly held
Why does God feel so distant. Augustine’s answer is the steadiest the church has. The heart is restless because it was made for God. The silence is not abandonment. The closeness has been the ground the felt-distance has been walked on the whole time. The practice is the slow staying — the chair, the verse, the named prayer, the lifted head — until the felt-presence returns by inches, as it did for Augustine, as it has for every saint who has stayed.
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Prayer Journal for Women.
