The Hidden God: Writing Faith Without Preaching It

It’s a strange thing, writing Catholic fiction in an age that neither expects nor necessarily wants it. There is always the temptation to explain. To overstate. To reassure the reader (and perhaps oneself) that grace is at work, that suffering has meaning, that redemption lies just around the next scene. But literature—good literature—has never worked that way. And neither, if we’re being honest, does God.

The God I write is hidden. Not absent, but veiled. Not tame, but free. And that’s the only way He belongs in fiction.

The Problem with Explaining Faith

Modern Christian fiction often falls into one of two traps. The first is didacticism—where characters become mouthpieces for theological points, and the story bends under the weight of its own intentions. The second is sentimentalism—where spiritual truths are softened into vague reassurance, stripped of their scandal and blood. In both cases, the result is the same: fiction that no longer rings true, because it no longer resembles life as we live it.

If God does not explain Himself in the Book of Job, or in the silence of Gethsemane, then why should we feel compelled to do so in fiction? The aim is not to declare meaning, but to let it be wrestled with. To let it emerge. Slowly. Uneasily. Sometimes never fully.

Presence in Absence

In my novels, the question of God is often one of presence without visibility. A healer kneels over a dying man’s body, not knowing if the prayer matters. A priest buries a child in the snow, unsure if his own sins have disqualified him from interceding. A mercenary stares at a broken relic and curses it, only to find himself unable to throw it away.

These are not sermons. They are scenes. Moments in which the possibility of God’s presence leaks through the cracks, never confirmed but never quite denied. And that uncertainty—that sacred tension—is where fiction does its best work.

Suffering as the Veil

In medieval theology, suffering is not merely a curse to be removed but a veil through which grace may be glimpsed. I try to carry that forward in my writing. I don’t explain the faith. I let it hurt. I let it hunger. And in that ache—whether in siege or sickness, betrayal or silence—the reader may feel something akin to what the saints called the dark night of the soul.

The goal is not to present tidy conversions or miraculous endings. It is to hold suffering long enough that the reader sees the shape of the cross in it. And even then, I don’t say it aloud. I show it in silence, in torn flesh, in a whispered prayer that receives no answer.

Faith as Embodied Drama

In my world, faith is not a lesson learned. It is a wound carried. It is incarnational. Lived through cracked hands, spoiled bread, blood-matted hair. My characters don’t articulate doctrines. They endure. They bury. They remember. Sometimes they break.

But always—always—something sacred hovers near. Not proven. Not solved. But sensed.

This is the theological mode of Flannery O’Connor and Shūsaku Endō, of Bernanos and Graham Greene: a mode that understands faith not as a resolution but as a crucible. It is a slow burn, not a bright flare.

Why “Christian Fiction” Doesn’t Need to Be Safe

The modern category of Christian fiction has often confused virtue with safety, clarity with conversion. But the Gospels are not safe stories. Nor is the Incarnation. The writers I admire—Christian or not—understand that literature must be free to bleed, to question, to suffer.

Great Catholic fiction bears mystery. It doesn’t shove grace down the throat—it lets grace disturb. The reader must be allowed to doubt, to hunger, to walk the long road home without a map.

That is how I write. Not with answers, but with echoes. Not with clean endings, but with haunted ones. Because that is what belief feels like when it is real.

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