When God Feels Silent
There are seasons when heaven seems closed, when prayer feels like speaking into the wind. The psalmist knew this ache well: “How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?” (Psalm 13:1). Those words, ancient yet urgent, belong not only to David but to all who have waited in the dark and heard nothing in return.
The Reverend Kay Dennis, Deacon
Episcopal Diocese of the Central Gulf Coast
We are taught to look for God in revelation, in voice and vision, in answered prayer. Yet much of faith—perhaps most of it—is lived in the waiting, in the long hush between question and response. The silence of God is not necessarily the absence of God. More often, it is the shape of divine love working beyond our sight—hidden, misunderstood, but never withdrawn.
What we call silence may not be emptiness at all but mystery. It is not a void but a presence too deep for sound. In those stretches of unanswered prayer, we are stripped of our illusions about control and certainty. We begin to discover that faith is not a bargain—“I pray, You answer”—but a relationship grounded in trust, held together by the One whose timing and ways exceed our comprehension.
When Jesus cried out from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” he entered the deepest silence of all—the silence of abandonment. And yet that cry was itself an act of faith. He still called upon God, still believed enough to ask why. The silence did not break the bond; it revealed its depth. The cross becomes the paradoxical place where divine love hides in what looks like defeat, where the absence of sound becomes the presence of grace.
Silence, then, can be its own form of revelation. It can shape our souls more profoundly than words ever could. In the noise of our lives—our screens, our anxieties, our constant commentary—silence can become a mercy. It invites us to stop rushing toward resolution and to let God be God. It teaches us how to wait without panic and how to listen without demanding.
When God feels silent, perhaps the invitation is not to fill the space but to inhabit it—to sit at the tomb before the stone is rolled away, to linger in the stillness of Holy Saturday when all seems lost. Faith is not proven on the bright morning of Easter but in the endurance of the waiting night.
Maybe the quiet we dread is not punishment but preparation. Maybe the absence we feel is the sacred emptiness where something new can be born. When we stop insisting that God speak in the ways we expect, we may finally begin to sense the subtler rhythms of divine presence: a nudge, a peace, a small mercy that arrives unannounced.
And perhaps then we realize that the silence itself was never empty—it was the language of love spoken in a register our hearts were not yet tuned to hear. So, if heaven feels still and your prayers echo back unanswered, take heart. God is not gone. The Word has not vanished. It waits, like seed beneath the soil, to rise in its own time, whispering the oldest promise: “Be still, and know that I am God.”