When Faith Freezes: Rediscovering God After A Daughter's Death

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Louise sat before me; hands folded in her lap. Her diminutive frame the polar opposite of her towering intellect.

Her face bore the unmistakable marks of a soul trying hard to stay composed in the face of overwhelming grief. At eighty-two, she still carried the poise of the distinguished scholar she once was – a retired professor of African-American studies at a large university – she had spent her life teaching others how to articulate struggle and influence in the same breath. Yet here, in the quiet of my office, speech itself seemed like an intrusion.

Now she was simply a mother.

A mother who had lost her only daughter.

Her daughter’s death had been as brutal as it was sudden.

Cancer. Fast, merciless, uncooperative with both medicine and prayer. And when Louise thought the worst had already come, the daughter’s husband – a ruthless, controlling man – had her cremated immediately, refusing Louise even the simple mercy of goodbye. She sent her prayers to the heavens like incense only to feel them fall back as ash.

“I don’t think my prayers get past the ceiling these days.” She has a rich, vivid way with words.

“I don’t know if this makes sense,” she told me. “But it feels like the negative emotion – the solid block of ice inside of me – has broken apart this last week. Now it feels like blocks of ice stacked in my chest. Sometimes I think they’re melting, and sometimes I think they’re just shifting.”

Her metaphor was exquisite and exact.

I learned quickly to expect nothing less from her. The psyche has its tectonic movements, sometimes noticeable only to the one standing at the epicenter.

I’ve also learned the importance of listening for metaphors like that. They’re the soul’s fingerprints. Grief – real grief – doesn’t weep; it crystallizes. It preserves what was unbearable to touch. You don’t melt that kind of ice by forcing warmth upon it; you sit in the cold long enough for the heart’s temperature to rise naturally again.

I let her words sit.

Grief is its own unique element, like water or like fire. It behaves according to its own physics. To comfort too soon is to interrupt nature.

“I’d like to share something with you,” I said. “Carl Jung was a brilliant psychologist, he once wrote: ‘That which you most need to find will be found where you least want to look.’”

Louise closed her eyes briefly and nodded slowly in a silent show of thanks - as though I’d given her something of great value. She stared at me with quiet intensity. “None of us are immune to its consequences,” I said. “Including me.”

Her eyes flicked toward mine – dark, steady, intelligent even through tears. She knew what I was implying: that the place to look was precisely the one she still feared – the place of her anger at God and the meaning of her daughter’s death.

“You’re well on your way to understanding; you're asking the right questions, Louise. I can tell you where you need to go if you want me to, but be warned: it will be hurt and you won’t like it.” I said gently.

“No,” she said quickly, almost sharply.

“Don’t tell me. It might hurt too much. I’ll think about it when I’m alone.”

Then she whispered, “But I know you know.” Her refusal wasn’t rejection; it was a sacred boundary, a recognition that some truths must be discovered in solitude.

In that moment, I was struck by a paradox as old as the faith we shared – that we often resist healing the very wound that would set us free.

Like Jacob on the banks of the Jabbok, she was wrestling with the Divine, unwilling to let Him bless her until she had first demanded an answer. And perhaps that is in part what faith really is – not childish obedience, not simple serenity, but the courage to enter a Dark Night of the Soul without a map [1]. The Psalms of lament do not explain suffering; they give it language.

Some of the crosses we bear are not solved; they are endured [2].

There, in that exchange, something quietly sacred unfolded. Jung was right: truth hides behind the door marked 'Enter at Your Own Risk'. It’s the psychological twin of Christ’s theological paradox: only by losing your life will you find it. Both demand the same thing: courage to step into what feels like death in order to discover what’s indestructible.

I press on, “When Jung spoke of what we most need residing in the place we least want to look, he wasn’t speaking about facing your fears. He was speaking about integrating them. The shadow contains the lost, unsavory parts of our faith. The doubts, the rage, the despair – these aren’t the enemies of our soul; they are its exiled children.”

That brought another brief stint of silence from her.

Not the sterile silence of emotional shutdown, but the charged stillness that precedes revelation.

When she left the office that afternoon, I could still feel the chill she had described. Those blocks of ice in her chest, heavy and cold, but no longer inert. But something in her had shifted ever so slightly. Perhaps that was the beginning of the thaw.

I am convinced that every human being, sooner or later, must confront that frozen chamber inside themselves. It’s the place where grief and God meet and glare at one another across the cold silence. It’s there, in that confrontation, that the ice begins to crack. It is there that faith ceases to be an inherited creed and becomes a living part of us.

We pray for solid ground, but faith often begins with the sound of breaking. We ask for comfort and receive confrontation. We cry for deliverance and God hands us a mirror.

But that, perhaps, is what redemption actually looks like from the inside: the slow, perilous thaw of everything we’ve sealed away from life and love. And when it finally melts, the water doesn’t drown us.

It baptizes us.

Louise’s blocks of ice were not her enemy; they were her truth, waiting to flow again. And though she told me not to tell her where to look, I suspect she already knows. Because when the ice finally breaks, it does not reveal emptiness, it reveals living water.

And as Jung foresaw (and Job, David, and Paul all knew) the deepest encounter with our Creator is found not in the sanctuary of understanding, but in the dungeon of our most dreaded feelings.

The place we least want to look is the place where resurrection hides.

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[1] First introduced by St. John of the Cross in 1578, A Dark Night of the Soul is a profound crisis in which a person experiences deep inner turmoil, feelings of abandonment by God, intense suffering, and a near complete loss of consolations in faith. This leads to a purifying process that strips away faux attachments and ultimately fosters a deeper union with God.

[2] The cross is a universal symbol of suffering. When Christ says, “Pick up your cross and follow me” (Matt. 16:24), He’s inviting us to endure suffering.