Most people who find their way to spiritual direction arrive having already spent months — sometimes years — in a place they could not name. The practices that once sustained them have gone quiet. The certainty has thinned. They have not stopped believing. They have stopped being able to perform their belief.
They arrive apologetic, as if they have done something wrong. As if faith were a fire they were supposed to tend and they fell asleep on the job. They want to know how to get back to where they were. How to recover the thing they have lost.
I understand the instinct. But I want to say something clearly: you cannot go back, and if you could, you would not want to.
The Wall — the term we use in spiritual direction for this long season of dryness, disorientation, and apparent divine silence — is not a malfunction. It is not a punishment. It is a passage. Every serious spiritual tradition in human history has named some version of it, because every serious spiritual tradition has had to reckon with the same observation: the soul does not grow by accumulating more. It grows by being stripped of what it thought it needed.
This is not comforting news, at least not at first. The stripping is real. The silence is real. The disorientation is real. I do not want to paper over that with language that makes it sound more romantic than it feels from the inside. From the inside, it often feels like failure. Like absence. Like you have been abandoned by the very thing that once made sense of your life.
But here is what I have observed, over and over, in the people I have had the privilege of accompanying through this passage: what falls away in the Wall is not faith. It is the scaffolding around faith — the performance, the certainty, the need to have it resolved and explainable. The scaffolding serves a purpose in the earlier seasons. It is not a fraud. But it is not load-bearing, and eventually the structure underneath has grown strong enough that the scaffolding can come down.
What is load-bearing is exactly what remains when everything else is gone. That is what the Wall is revealing.
The question people almost always ask, somewhere in the middle of this passage, is: how long? And the honest answer is that I do not know. The Wall does not run on a schedule. What I can say is that the people who move through it with the most integrity are the ones who resist two opposite temptations: the temptation to rush it by manufacturing an experience that feels like resolution, and the temptation to make it permanent by deciding the silence means something is definitively absent.
The Wall requires a third way: remaining. Not performing. Not despairing. Just staying with what is actually true in the present, without forcing it toward an outcome.
This is where spiritual direction becomes most useful — not as a source of answers, but as a companion in the waiting. Someone who has made this passage themselves, or who has accompanied enough others through it to know its particular geography, can help you read the terrain. Not to rush you across it. To help you stop interpreting the landscape as evidence that you are lost.
You are not lost. You are in the middle of something.
The Wall is not the end of your story. Every person I have ever seen come through it says the same thing on the other side: I would not trade it. Not because it was not hard. Because of what it made possible that nothing else could have.