When God Feels Distant

Benedict and the path back through ordinary life

I’m currently in launch and promotion season for my first published work. My wife and I are starting a new business. It’s summertime and both my kids are home from school. Somewhere along the way over the last few weeks, my soul has started to leak. I haven’t tended to it well, and the strain has become a touch too obvious.

God has felt distant.

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When I become aware of the dry spells in my soul, that awareness typically leads me back to my guides: the Sisters of Benet Hill Monastery and the Rule of St. Benedict.

I’ve spent most of the last three days at the monastery studying the Rule, Benedict’s wisdom book with the sisters. At the beginning of St. Benedict Rule is a section called the Prologue. In my opinion, it’s one of the most potent pieces of writing…ever. Few pages carry so much guidance, clarity, and wisdom. In many ways, all one really needs is the Prologue. It contains enough wisdom to guide a person for a lifetime.

One of the questions Benedict raises there is especially helpful in seasons of desolation like the one I’ve been feeling. Drawing from Psalms 15 and 115, he asks:

How do you dwell in the tent of God?

How do you find rest on the mountain of God?

It’s a question we all ask. It’s the primary question I hear in my office as a spiritual director almost every day, and it’s the question I’ve been asking myself this week.

How do we find ourselves back in the embrace of a mother holding her child?

How do we become awake once again to the Divine tent we want to dwell within?

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In the Prologue, Benedict suggests that we can see the way back into the tent. I’ll paraphrase the Rule a bit here, but two themes emerge as pathways back to God when we feel far away.

The first is to embrace justice, honesty, and compassion.

Benedict writes of those who “walk without blemish and are just in all their dealings; who speak truth from the heart and do not practice deceit; who do not wrong others or listen to slander against their neighbors.”

His ancient wisdom speaks into our modern landscape with remarkable clarity.

We live in a world that often rewards outrage more than understanding, image more than integrity, and certainty more than humility. We are constantly being invited into comparison, judgment, gossip, and tribalism. Every day seems to present another opportunity to tear someone down, assume the worst, or build ourselves up at the expense of another. As long as we embrace a lifestyle void of justice, honesty and truth, we might find the tent hard to find.

Benedict points us in a different direction.

The way back to God is not hidden behind complicated theology, powerful platforms, or people who win at all costs. It is not reserved for the loudest voice in the room or the person who successfully claws their way to the top of the economic or political ladder.

It is found in the ordinary work of becoming honest, just, and compassionate people. It is found in speaking truth, acting in love, and refusing to participate in the cycles of harm that have become so common in our culture.

Consider, for a moment, the landscape many of us inhabit every day. Social media often trains us in the opposite direction. We scroll through outrage, practice comparison, sharpen our judgments, and quietly learn to see other people as opponents rather than neighbors. We become convinced that being right matters more than being compassionate and that winning an argument matters more than understanding another human being.

Benedict would likely suggest that this way of moving through the world makes the tent difficult to recognize. Not because God has left, but because our attention has been captured by so many things that pull us away from honesty, justice, and love. The path back to God may be less complicated than we imagine. It may begin with speaking more truthfully, listening more generously, and treating the person in front of us as someone who, like us, already belongs to God.

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Secondly, Benedict makes it clear that while good deeds and justice matter, there is very little we can do to manufacture God’s presence. Our works alone do not conjure God’s nearness.

One of Benedict’s central themes, and one of his primary hopes for us, is that we learn to see God everywhere. And when he says everywhere, he means everywhere.

For this to be true, we must recognize that God’s presence does not arrive only after we’ve finally gotten our act together. God is not waiting at the finish line of our goodness. God’s presence is not dependent upon our performance.

He writes:

“These people revere God and do not become elated over their good deeds; they judge it as God’s strength, not their own, that brings about the good in them. They praise the Holy One working in them and say with the prophet: ‘Not to us, O God, not to us, but to your name give the glory.’”

What I hear in these words is an invitation to trust a grace far greater than our own effort. The tent is not something we can build on our own.

This is difficult for many of us to accept because we have been formed by a culture that tells us everything depends on us. We optimize our schedules, track our habits, chase self-improvement, and often carry the belief that if we just try hard enough we can fix ourselves or find ourselves back to God’s tent.

Benedict offers a different vision. Healthy spirituality does not place the full weight of transformation on our shoulders. Instead, it teaches us to cooperate with a God who is already present, already active, and already at work within us.

There is profound relief in this, especially during seasons when God feels distant. We do not have to force God’s presence into our lives or strive our way back into the tent. We simply begin to notice where God has been all along: in the laughter of our children, in the ache of our longing, in the work that exhausts us, and in the beauty that restores us.

If anyone is doing the heavy lifting, it is God.

And that frees us from trying to earn our way back into the tent. It allows us instead to wake up to the reality that we never left it. The invitation is not to find God somewhere else. The invitation is to become aware of the God who has already found us.

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Now there is an interesting tension in both of these approaches Benedict offers.

On one hand, he seems to be saying, “Do something! Live the way of justice, and you will find yourself back in the tent.” On the other hand, he is equally clear that it is God’s work, not ours.

This tension runs throughout Benedict’s teachings. He is never trying to get us to choose one over the other, nor does he seem concerned with neatly resolving the contradiction. Instead, he allows both realities to stand side by side. Somehow this is the spiritual way.

Our openness to God’s work and our participation in that work belong to the same movement. They are not separate things.

A faith that never expresses itself through love, justice, compassion, and action will eventually leave us wanting. Faith without works is dead, after all. Yet we must be equally careful not to believe that God’s presence depends upon our performance. The moment we begin measuring our worth, holiness, or proximity to God by what we accomplish, we find ourselves carrying the very disease of the Pharisees.

The invitation is neither passivity nor striving. It is participation. We cooperate with the grace that is already at work within us.

Benedict knew this tension well because he lived both sides of it.

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Early in his life, disenchanted with society and the state of the world around him, Benedict withdrew to a cave, following in the footsteps of the Desert Fathers and Mothers before him. He devoted himself to intense prayer, piety, and spiritual discipline.

In many ways, this early chapter of Benedict’s story mirrors much of modern spirituality. We place enormous emphasis on personal growth, individual discipline, and self-improvement. We measure progress, track habits, optimize routines, and evaluate ourselves according to how well we are performing. Even our faith can become deeply individualized. We ask questions like: Am I praying enough? Am I reading enough Scripture? Am I growing? Am I becoming more disciplined? Am I getting this right?

None of these are bad questions. In fact, they can be important ones. But they become problematic when they become the primary focus of our spiritual lives. We begin to treat spiritual formation as a private project of self-improvement. The goal subtly shifts from participating in the life of God to becoming exceptionally good at being spiritual.

As a result, we can become more concerned with personal holiness than hospitality, more interested in our devotional life than our neighbor’s wellbeing, and more focused on spiritual achievement than love itself. And over time, this inward focus can shape not only how we see ourselves, but how we see others. When we encounter people who think differently than we do, or belief systems that challenge our own, we often withdraw, judge, or distance ourselves. What could have been an encounter becomes a threat. What could have been a conversation becomes a line we refuse to cross.

We learn how to curate a spiritual life but struggle to pour that life out for others.

What emerges is a faith that may be disciplined, sincere, and morally serious, yet remains disconnected from the very people God calls us to love.

Benedict experienced this tension and how this radical nature didn’t sustain his spirituality as much as he had hoped and eventually left the cave.

What emerged was not a rejection of contemplation or spiritual discipline, but an expansion of it. He founded communities built around prayer, hospitality, work, relationship, and shared life. The goal was not simply to become holy as individuals, but to create a way of life where the presence of God could be encountered together.

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Benedict understood that our relationship with God is not revealed only in private prayer. It is revealed in how we treat one another, how we welcome the stranger, how we share responsibility, and how we participate in the flourishing of the world around us.

In Benedict’s world, prayer and work are not competing forces. They are held together in a single rhythm of life. Prayer is not an escape from the world, and work is not a distraction from God. Both become places of encounter. The daily labor of the hands and the steady turning of the heart toward God belong to the same life.

Ora et labora is not merely a slogan about balance. It is a vision of integration.

Again and again, Benedict brings us back to the same reality: real spirituality is lived in real life. It is expressed through justice, humility, compassion, honesty, hospitality, and love.

What does this mean for those of us trying to find our way back into the tent of God?

What am I to do in a season like the one I find myself in now?

Should I retreat from the world, focus on my inner life, and try to fix what feels broken? Or should I get busy, serve more people, start new projects, and hope to find God through activity?

Benedict refuses to let us reduce the question to either option.

He seems to suggest that the question itself is shaped by a division he is trying to heal, as though prayer and work are two separate roads and we must choose the more “spiritual” one. In the Benedictine imagination, there is no such split. There is only one life.

A life where prayer is not withdrawal from reality, but deeper attention to it. A life where work is not an escape from God, but participation in God’s care for the world.

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I think if I were to sit down with St. Benedict and tell him how my soul feels disconnected right now, he would not tell me to go and find the tent. He would invite me to see the tent of God in the life I am already living.

He would ask me to notice God in the middle of my ordinary days. Where is justice, honesty, and compassion showing up in my actual life right now? And where am I being invited back into them?

Because yes, there are seasons where we need retreat, silence, and prayer. There are seasons where we step back in order to see more clearly. But Benedict would never let that become an escape from life. A cave can clarify the heart, but it is not the goal of the heart.

If I am only in the cave and not in the world of people, responsibility, and relationship, I may become very aware of God in theory, but miss God in practice. And if I am only in activity without returning to prayer, I may become very busy and still lose sight of the One I am working with.

The tent is not somewhere else. It is here. Where else can I find God in my life other than by going out and living my life?

He would remind me that yes, there is work to do. There are prayers to pray, meditations to sit in, the poor to feed, my family to love. God is not encountered apart from life, but through it. Our days become the place of engagement.

But he would also caution me not to be too quick to assume I am the one doing most of the work. For it is God who is already here, already moving, already sustaining all of it. And if I can slow down enough to see clearly, I begin to realize that God has been present long before I became aware of it.

The invitation is not to strive my way into that presence, but to recognize it. To wake up to what has already been given.