You've lost your faith and don't know who you are without it

I was a professor of religious law until a wandering dervish broke everything I knew, and I can tell you the losing was not the end I feared. What broke may have been a form, not the thing itself — a set of certainties rather than the deeper longing they pointed toward, and the reed torn from the reed bed still cries for the reed bed, so the longing underneath your faith did not die when the beliefs cracked; often what collapses is the scaffolding while the living thing it was built around remains, asking to be met in a new way. The one who misses the faith is still here — you have not vanished with your beliefs, for the self that grieves the loss and asks this very question endures beneath every belief that comes and goes; who is it that misses the faith? That one is you, still standing. And let the empty place stay open rather than rushing to fill it — the wound is where the light enters, so do not slam the emptiness shut with the first cynicism or new certainty, but let it stay open, tender, long enough for what wants to come to arrive. What fell away, and what remains?