I’ll say it! Sometimes, faith is overwhelming and stressful. Sometimes it is nice and easy and fun, and you are in a groove, and you are feeling good. And sometimes you are NOT. You might not be in crisis, but I think everyone who has settled into a faith-based life knows what it is like to feel adrift and disconnected spiritually. Sometimes you aren’t getting answers to things that feel big and important. Maybe you just aren’t feeling as dialed in. Maybe you don’t like going to church.[1] Sometimes you feel very connected to God, and sometimes you don’t, even when nothing in your behavior changes. And sometimes that distance makes you think and question and doubt. When I was growing up, I remember hearing that it was ok to have questions but not doubts. I found this frustrating because to me, my doubts were just questions that I took seriously. So, you are there, feeling less connected, and then you find yourself asking what is even going on. Am I even into this? Why am I doing this? Is God even real? Am I just doing this because it is habit?

If God is silent, especially when you feel entitled to His input, it can be incredibly difficult to not feel abandoned. Trying to figure out faith and belief can range from being annoying to being terrifying and isolating. Luckily, people have been asking questions about God for a long time and some of those people made amazing art about it. So here is a list of things that have felt like a balm to me in times of trouble. It wasn’t Mother Mary necessarily, but it did help me let it be.[2] None of them have answered any of my questions but they have made me feel better about the asking.[3]

Is God real? How can I know? What if I can’t know?

My Bright Abyss by Christian Wimen

What does it mean to live a life with equal parts faith and doubt? What if you never know? What if that is the point? “Faith is not some hard, unchanging thing you cling to through the vicissitudes of life. Those who try to make it into this are destined to become brittle, shatterable creatures.”

Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver by Mary Oliver

There tenderness in the mechanics of the natural world. For Ms. Mary, that points her to herself and to the divine. There is simplicity, kindness, and earnestness in these poems—there is also a whole, delightful string of poems about ducks.

The Tree of Life (Malick 2001)

Malick is not for everyone—this is slow and nonlinear. There are dinosaurs. There is a young family and a middle family and an old family all at the same time. Trust the process. Watch it on a slow Sunday afternoon. This has one of the best fictional depictions of heaven I have ever seen.  

Franny and Zooey by JD Salinger

It is hard to have relationships with each other, with ourselves, and with God. Franny and Zooey are siblings living and talking about life. This book is funny and loving and is incredibly comforting as far as making you feel ok about feeling weird about God. It is also short.

CS Lewis Apologetics

Things like Mere Christianity or Surprised by Joy are great—Mere Christianity breaks down a logical approach to Christianity; the stories, the rules, the pitch etc. Surprised by Joy is CS Lewis’s account of how he converted to Christianity from Atheism. The Screwtape Letters are letters from a senior devil to a junior one advising him on how best to temp and damn people. The Great Divorce is about the process of getting into heaven after you die. TGD is my favorite, but I have reread Mere Christianity the most—they are all worth a read. Also, The Chronicles of Narnia, if you haven’t read them, I cannot recommend enough—watch how Aslan weaves in and out of those stories, when he intervenes and when he doesn’t. He can’t be summoned because he is not a tame lion. Aslan as Jesus is the ONLY metaphor for the Savior that I can endorse.

God doesn’t care about my suffering. Well, either he doesn’t hear me, or he doesn’t care. I am dying, and I am not getting anything from the God and isn’t that His whole thing? Where is he?

The Book of Job

Yes, in the actual bible. Get a guide if you think you need it (Re-Reading Job: Understanding the Ancient World’s Greatest Poems by Michael Austin is good) and read it. What does God show Job? Why? How does his response answer Jobs question? Or does it?

Silence (Scorsese 2016)*

Catholic Portuguese priests (Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver!) go to Japan to find their former mentor. Japan tortures all priests and all followers of Christianity and makes them deny the faith. What do you do with God’s silence? Why is He silent? Does He need your protection to be holy and just? Or does that have more to do with you than Him? (I also love this movie because it made me question my assumptions about the virtue of martyrdom)

A Hidden Life (Malick 2019)

A man in Austria does not swear loyalty to Hitler during WWII. A great place to start if you have never seen a Malick movie. According to legend, Malick saw Silence and created this in response. Slow and thoughtful  and breathtakingly beautiful, like all Malick films.

The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoyevsky

The story of three (four?) brothers, sons of a violent, terrible man. One is violent, one is intellectual, one is good. Christianity and goodness are presented in all their narrative glory (do you want to be smart, or do you want to be good?) as well as the arguments against God.

I am unclean. Or am I? What does forgiveness look like and feel like? What if I am too unclean? What if I sin again?

Fleabag Season One

This is your reminder that, almost guaranteed, it could be worse. Fleabag might be the worst person in the world. This is crass and funny. There is a lot of sexual, violent, rude content (like a LOT—that is the point). What does redemption look like to and for someone like Fleabag? Or forgiveness? (Season 2 is fantastic)

East of Eden by John Steinbeck

Adam and Eve/ Cain and Abel retelling. Who are you? Your parents? Yourself? When you act badly, who’s to blame? What does forgiveness look like? Do you have to be perfect to be good?

The Complete Stories by Flannery O’Connor

This is a collection of short stories. Flannery O’Conner was a catholic in the south and wrote about grace by violence. Her Christ figures are serial murderers, nasty hypocrites, horribly deformed, or mean, spiteful old ladies. Can grace be achieved through these broken vessels? Can you still receive God’s grace if you are insufferable?

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri (2017 McDonagh)

A mother is outraged when the local police can’t find the person who murdered her daughter. What is to be done about justice, about love, about truth? How can we bear hatred and rage in others, but more importantly in ourselves?

Crime and Punishment by Dostoyevsky

A man gets away with murder and then is psychologically ripped apart by his conscience—what are the limits of redemption? You think your guilt is bad? Get a load of this guy.

Perfection is overwhelming and feels like it is demanded of me. Christ was human but was he really? Did he get ALL of this mortal experience?

The Last Temptation of Christ (Scorsese 1988)

Outlawed in a couple of countries for *blasphemy* which is spicy and fun—this takes Christ’s humanity VERY seriously and centers around one question: what if Christ wanted to live a normal life? What if he was just some guy?[4]  It works to defamiliarize you with the story of Christ in order to get you to think about it differently. To me, it was still kind of faith affirming, in spite of itself.

The Testament of Mary by Colm Tóibín

This book is written from the perspective of Mary: what if instead of being meek, humble, beautiful, submissive, accepting, silent, a virginal AND maternal, Mary was like, really pissed off about her son having to die? And angry with his followers? And resented that she is now John’s ward?

What about forever? What about death? Is time real? What is time to God?

The Death of Ivan Ilych by Leo Tolstoy

It’s a short story in which Ivan is dying with all the trappings of success, but has he really lived?  How can you die with grace? It’s very scary to think about it until you are there, and Ivan is right there. Tolstoy is kind and gentle with his characters, but also brutally honest.

A Ghost Story (Lowery 2017)

This movie is like a visual poem. It is not particularly comforting, but it is a beautiful, melancholy meditation on time and our own briefness.

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

This is an ambitious addition to this list on my part, but I love this book. Cycles repeat. Names repeat. Some women eat dirt and have magic. Men go off to war. It is us against them. The forest is alive. One eternal round. Time not real and yet is the realest thing of all.

Arrival (Villeneuve 2016) and About Time (Curits 2013)* (I didn’t link the trailer bc it is terrible, just watch the movie!)

Two movies that are very similar: sci-fi elements, themes about the elasticity of time, bittersweet love stories etc. About Time is kind of a romcom and Arrival is kind of a thriller but both ask what you would do if you knew the end—would the journey be worth it?

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[1] Join the club, you’re not special

[2] Too on the nose?

[3] A lot of the movies on this list are rated R (turns out a lot of life include sex, violence, and profanity? Crazy if true!!) I mark the ones that I recommended to my mom, so you have a base line of “Rated R but on the low end/ really not that bad” with an asterisk. The ones that don’t have that mark are probably more sexual, violent, profane, or they are funnier about it. Or they are PG-13. An essay that I really love about art and sex/ violence/ profanity is “Seeking after the Good in Art, Drama, Film, and Literature” by Travis T Anderson which actually every single person should read.

[4] Another, non-theological question this movies poses was what if everyone in Jerusalem had Italian accents but that’s just silly and fun