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St. Gabriel and All Angels

''Those who take their religion seriously commonly go through a period, sometimes a
long period, when they experience the apparent absence of God. The ideas, images,
concepts which they have previously used in thinking about God or addressing him
have suddenly become meaningless and unreal.

The person feels as if God is absent or does not exist. The reason for this disagreeable
phenomenon is ...

that while the intuition is seeking for a deeper, more genuine knowledge of God,
psychic energy is drawn away from consciously held beliefs and ideas towards a
dark knowledge, a knowledge of the heart, an awareness of God speaking through
the deep center. It is the action of God himself in an unexpected and unfamiliar
mode that makes God seem absent. The difficulty is made more formidable from
the fact that God is most surely to be found close to those areas of ourselves that
have been repressed and shut away from consciousness.''

from The River Within by Christopher Bryant