I stopped believing in God when I was 12. The thing is, I miss God. I feel a deep sense of loss and heartache whenever I happen to sit in a quiet church. Is it possible to grieve for the loss of an entity in whose existence I no longer believe?

Dear Mona,

Whenever I read your postcard, I go back to the poem “Spring and Fall” by Gerard Manley Hopkins. Your question is whether one can grieve for the loss of something in whose existence one no longer believes. - Hopkins suggests that it may not be obvious what one is grieving for, and that what sorrow springs from, may be the loss and death that belongs to human life. When you sit in a quiet church, you may feel the loss of the God you don’t believe in, but what you are aware of then and there is deep human loss. That’s how I see Hopkin’s suggestion, but I can’t go into the rest of what the poem expresses. (He himself doesn’t write from a loss of God.)

I’d also suggest that the sense of loss that you describe was profoundly felt by Iris Murdoch. You can see it in the essay “On God and Good”. In response to what she takes to be the loss of God, she suggests that we might try to live instead with the Idea of the Good as a transcendent object of attention, but she says she isn’t sure how far her positive suggestions about Good make sense. Readers of Murdoch will see this part of her philosophy in very different ways, and will struggle to find how to do justice to her own attempts to see clearly.

Cora Diamond