We hear a great deal about faith these days.  In America, Christian churches grow larger and larger by the hour, gain louder and louder voices in the media, and move politicians to tailor their messages in order to win over this or that sect of voters.  Religions go to war for their faith, and kill for their faith every day. 

An awareness of faith, in the modern world, is inescapable.  Yet the loudest voice of all--and the only one, in the end, that matters--is the voice of personal faith that we, as individuals hear, letting us know what we believe about the meaning of life and the world. 

And sometimes that individual voice tells us things that we don't want to hear: like, for example, that we no longer believe in the religion we grew up with, or that we no longer believe in God at all. 

Sometimes, our personal search for answers leads us to a single conclusion: there are no answers, or at least none we'll know for any time soon.  We feel, in other words, that we've lost our faith.  And we can find it very hard to Get Over It.

A loss of faith can be devastating to a person, just because of what religion is.  Religion is one of the only systems of thought that attempts to provide answers about troubling questions: what happens to us after death?  What do we call good, and what do we call evil?  And what's the reason behind all of existence?  Religion is such a force in our society because it purports to answer these questions about life, death, and morality.  A loss of religion, then, is fundamentally a loss of familiarity, of certainty, of answers: a feeling that we don't know anything anymore about what's important to us.  We feel that we no longer know the answers to questions about the meaning of life.

But don't we?

Find an object associated with whatever religion you've formerly associated yourself with: a book of Bible picture-stories, a Star of David, a copy of the Qu'ran.  The more personal meaning the object has had to you, the better: your personal voice will lead you to the right object.  Take a long look at the object and think about it, plus whatever memories are associated with it.  Maybe someone gave it to you as a gift for a birthday, or for your first day of church or temple.  Maybe you bought it when you were feeling depressed and lost due to a failed relationship.  Maybe you were very ill at one point and someone tucked the object into your shaking hand.

Think about a time in the past when you've held or used this object, a time when you felt a sense of religious faith.  How does it feel in your hands?  What was happening at the time?  Were you with a large congregation, or were you alone, reading onionskin pages by a dim bedside lamp?

Now think about what you're experiencing as you hold this object right now.  It has the same weight, shape, feeling to it.  Does it have any of the same meaning, or the same associations?  When you hold it, do you still think of some of the people in that congregation, or the parents who bought it for you, or the lover you thought of as you took the object to the counter at the store?

And: if you can feel the same thing related to the object before and after a loss of faith, then doesn't that mean that you're still the same decent, emotional person?  Religion purports to be the answer to whether or not the world has a meaning, but whether you believe in that religion or not, isn't it important that the object--a part of life--retains some meaning of its own?

It's the part of you that's aware of the meaning within one simple object that will get you through a loss of faith.  Keep the object near you, and whenever you begin to get depressed about feeling adrift and unsure without the anchor of religion there, take it out and think: this much, at least, I'm sure of--this means something to me.  Let your own best self--the part of you that exists and thrives, with or without religion--be your guide to these questions, as it was very possibly the guide that led you away from religion in the first place. 

Maybe you'll return to that religion one day; maybe you won't.  But you can feel confident when you need to; you can know that you can at least grasp some small part of the truth, whether God exists or not.  You can Get Over It.

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