Regaining faith

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Glennc1

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I have been Christian my entire life, and Catholic since 2000. I allowed myself to fall away from going to Mass regularly, and recently have struggled to hold onto my faith at all. About two weeks ago, I started going to Mass each week. I met with the priest at my parish about this, which helped some but not enough.

I guess the worst part of this is, at the age of 54, I’ve started to realize like never before that my life here is limited, and I have become very unsure of what happens after my death here. I never really had a picture of Heaven in my head, I just always believed that my Christian faith would lead somewhere very nice after death.

I told my priest I feel like I’m just going through the motions without really having fullness of faith. He said perhaps I need to just go through the motions for a while as I search for my faith.

Any other thoughts?
 
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Are you reading stories of the Saints? Perhaps you could join in some Lenten discussion group after Ash Wednesday ,or a group praying the rosary .
Spend some time with Our Lord quietly at adoration.
I can pray for you
 
Your priest is a wise man.

Not sure if you are married, but, when one has been married for a long time, there are times when we don’t have the “feelings” but we keep “going through the motions” until the feelings return.

Does your Parish offer a subscription to Formed.org? If not, it costs about the same as Netflix and is a wealth of Catholic material.
 
Hi Glenn,
My name is Frank. When did you stop going to Mass regularly and was there a specific reason ? I am 55 and right there with you thinking about how fleeting our life is on Earth. Decades have flown by. Your priest is right, but of course you must go to Mass every Sunday. I have been struggling muchly with my devotions the last several weeks. My job is a huge stumbling block to my faith right now. I understand.
 
Sometime in the last 5 or 6 years I stopped going to Mass regularly. My wife and I divorced about 13 years ago, and I kept up going to Mass to set a good example for my daughters. It seems like somewhere in their teen years, they were just less interested in their weekends with Dad because they just had other things to do. When they stopped coming for weekends, I just lost interest in a lot of things, including going to Mass.

It wasn’t really a planned thing, it just gradually happened.
 
Yeah, “fake it till you make it” isn’t bad advice. Just concentrate on doing your faith as opposed to how it feels. Your own feelings may follow later.
 
We often associate “love” with a feeling, but there’s another component to it. Love, even if the feeling is weak or faded, is about doing something for the good of another. That is a large component; that it’s really about what we will in our lives and what we do.

Faith, I think, is sometimes the same way. Many saints went through periods of spiritual dryness, in which they felt weak in faith, felt like they had little faith at all… But I think, like love, a huge part of faith and trust is what we will and what we do. You call it “going through the motions,” but you’re still doing, and doing when the feeling is weakest takes a great deal of trust, a great deal of faith.

I hope that feeling and belief rekindles inside you, but I also suggest continuing to trust and to “do.” In this way, you can work towards rebuilding that relationship. Don’t forget to pray. Again, sometimes it’s about doing, if not feeling, even if it’d be easier to have both.

God bless you.
 
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I, like the others, agree with your priest. Let Jesus take his time, patience is something we all need in this path of ours. We go at God’s pace, not ours, always. So as the priest said, just go through the motions and see what happens, in other words let Jesus lead you. Believe me, I do not say this lightly as it is not an easy thing to do. You are not the first or the last to want to rush ahead, but we are called to follow Jesus, not lead him, he knows the way we don’t. Pray for patience and yep go through the motions. God bless you.
 
To increase your faith start with prayer. St Teresa of Avila said prayer is the greatest of all gifts, the vehicle through which God grants us favours, the beginning of all virtue.
 
GhostOfBBM said:
Yeah, “fake it till you make it” isn’t bad advice. Just concentrate on doing your faith as opposed to how it feels. Your own feelings may follow later.
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This.
Simply showing up at mass (obviously with a will to be there and an openness to the Lord) is actually quite a good start. Grace (God’s free gift to us with helps and strengthens us) builds on nature and we receive grace through the sacraments and, in particular, the Eucharist.
 
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Have you tried going to confession more frequently? Maybe a retreat? I could really use a good retreat, just don’t want to run into one that doesn’t really promote the faith.

Also, as Catholics we are required to go to weekly Mass on Sundays.
 
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First, it is a grace - a gift from God - to be realizing, now, that time in this life is limited. God is calling you to get serious about your very soul, and the eternity that is approaching.

When you were baptized, you were given great spiritual treasures: faith, hope and holy charity, as well as precious gifts of the Holy Spirit. The sad fact is, many, many Catholics live lives of blatant inattention to these treasures, and rather than living according to the light of those treasures and gifts (the light of God!), they live according to the social norms and cultural standards in which we are immersed.

To put it another way, instead of living lives in grace, founded on holy supernatural faith, we live lives on the natural plane. It is like the man who built his house on sand, and not on a rock:
Mat 7:24 “Every one then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house upon the rock;
Mat 7:25 and the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat upon that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock.
Mat 7:26 And every one who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house upon the sand;
Mat 7:27 and the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell; and great was the fall of it.”
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What to do? The inner, spiritual “interior life” given at Baptism is intended to grow, to be strengthened, to be lived! And as long as God gives us the breath of life on this earth, we still have time to do that. We need Him. We need His Word, His Truth, His Spirit - we need to listen to Jesus, and build a life on Him - He is the Rock.

I urge you to turn to Holy Scripture, and listen to it. Listen to Jesus! Give serious time to listening and learning from Him. “Feed” your soul with the Bread from the table of His Words, Holy Scripture. If you will do this, He will begin to lead you, and teach you, and guide you. In Him, we can find rest for our souls.
 
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