The Experience and Correlates of God’s Silence among Christians

Jacek Prusak,Jakub Wasiewicz

doi:10.3390/rel12070532

Jacek Prusak, Jakub Wasiewicz

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/rel12070532

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Journal: Religions	Publication Date: Jul 14, 2021
Citations: 2	License type: CC BY 4.0

Affiliation: Jesuit University Ignatianum, Institute of Psychology

Abstract

The aim of the study was to find out if Christians experience God’s silence and if so, what are its correlates during the COVID-19 pandemic. The second purpose of the study was to identify the connections between the experience of God’s silence and depressive mood disorders and the impact of God’s silence on other spiritual experiences. The study was conducted online on a group of 771 people, mostly Christians. The experience of God’s silence was declared by 82.1% of the respondents. This experience does not depend on the sex of the respondents, but correlates with their age. The experience of God’s silence is commensurate with the joy that comes from having a relationship with God through daily spiritual experiences. Additionally, the conducted research shows that experience of God’s silence resembles a state rather than a permanent feature with a visible ending, which is associated with a change in the image of God. The consequences of experiencing God’s silence need not to be negative. The conducted research shows that the most frequently mentioned effect of this experience is the strengthening and consolidation of faith.

Highlights

What people look for in religion is a way to establish contact with the invisible other, and thanks to this relationship they want to feel differently in their life (Luhrmann 2020).This sense of closeness and relationship with the invisible other understood as God or as the divine or holy is investigated in many ways in the psychology of religion and spirituality— through the presence of religious or spiritual experiences (Underwood 2013)
The experience of God’s silence is commensurate with the joy that comes from having a relationship with God through daily spiritual experiences
To determine the experience of God’s silence and the presence of other spiritual experiences, we used a questionnaire of our own design

Summary

Introduction

What people look for in religion is a way to establish contact with the invisible other, and thanks to this relationship they want to feel differently in their life (Luhrmann 2020) This sense of closeness and relationship with the invisible other understood as God or as the divine or holy is investigated in many ways in the psychology of religion and spirituality— through the presence of religious or spiritual experiences (Underwood 2013). The COVID-19 pandemic significantly affected many domains of human life, including the religion and spirituality of Christians (Dein et al 2020) Research conducted among this population before the pandemic (see Exline et al 2015) showed that God was more often experienced as loving (caring and forgiving) than as cruel (rejecting/hostile) or as remote (distant/inaccessible). A survey study on the effect of faith and spirituality on coping with the consequences of coronavirus among

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