When Suffering Breaks Us Open: Finding God When Our Prayers Go Unanswered

in the end, suffering is not merely a problem; it is a mystery. And mysteries are not solved. They are entered into.

This post is for my friend Scott whose son Ben is really unwell at the moment. Please dear brothers and sisters, keep Scott, Ben and their family in your prayers at this difficult time for them.

For some us, there are moments in life when horror doesn’t simply test our faith, it shatters the very structure on which our faith once rested. No tidy answer, no easy consolation, and no well-intentioned verse of Scripture can touch the rawness of that kind of pain and we just exist through it.

Back in June on Catholic Unscripted, I explored this a little. In August, the leader of the opposition party here in the UK publicly explained how hearing of one terrible event erased her own faith. This led me to write about what she said and to explore how faith persists or even grows despite the shock of lives torn apart by evil or tragedy, the moments when prayers seem to fall into a void, and when God often seems achingly silent. I have found myself revisiting those questions again, not academically but personally, because a close friend of mine is presently enduring a suffering that cuts right to the soul. His young son has been enduring relentless fitting, robbing him of sleep and leaving the whole family heartbroken and exhausted. His father is a faithful Catholic, but you can hear the question in his voice now — are my prayers being answered?

Walking beside him has stirred something deep in me. Because I, too, have walked through a darkness no parent ever imagines.

I lost my daughter, Ruth, in a car crash in 2009. She was just seven years old.

Nothing prepares you for that kind of rupture. It does not simply wound; it unravels. Every assumption, every quiet sense of stability, every natural hope for the future, all laid utterly bear and torn apart in a moment. It’s not that I remember the numbness, the disbelief, the sheer disorientation of grief. I live it every day. It is still with me, as raw and real as ever. But even more than that, I remember the silence. The absence of anything remotely resembling what I had prayed for, the understanding that what I was praying for was not anything that could be real. And the terrible realisation that life would never, ever be the same.

And yet, and this is the dreadful paradox: that loss, that horror, that chasm of grief did not kill my faith. It did the opposite.

It confirmed it.
It deepened it.
It convinced me of its truth.