When God Feels Gone: Watching St. Vincent: The Return After Silence (2016)

I didn’t expect to find myself revisiting Silence (2016) again this year. I’d written about it once already—digging deep into its theology of suffering and God’s seeming absence. But then I watched HBO’s St. Vincent: The Return, a 2024 documentary about a nun’s quiet mission to revive a dying parish in post-industrial Ohio—and suddenly, I was back in Japan with Father Rodrigues, not because the stories are the same, but because the silence is.

St. Vincent: The Return follows Sister Evelyn, a Catholic nun in her 70s, who returns to her hometown to care for a once-thriving church that now stands mostly empty. The documentary is spare, slow, and almost painfully intimate. There are no sweeping conversions or grand revelations. Just dust, broken pews, and people who drift in and out with half-forgotten prayers. The parishioners are tired. Some have lost children to fentanyl, others to poverty or prison. Sister Evelyn listens. She doesn’t preach much. And most of the time, she’s just cleaning, cooking, waiting.

At one point in the film, someone asks her if she feels God is still here. She pauses and says, “He’s never left. But sometimes He lets you feel like He has.” That line hit like a whisper from Silence. In Silence, Rodrigues begs for a sign, a sound—anything—from God. He sees believers mutilated and murdered, and hears nothing in return. His God is terrifyingly quiet. And yet, at the climax, in the smallest, most unexpected way, God speaks—not with power, but with shared suffering: “Trample. Trample. I was born into this world to be trampled on by men.” It’s a revelation of solidarity, not rescue.

In St. Vincent: The Return, the silence isn’t tragic—it’s ambient. The film doesn’t ask why God is silent. It assumes He is and watches what people do anyway. Sister Evelyn never says she hears God. But in every bowl of soup she ladles, every hymn she sings alone in the cold chapel, there’s something quietly sacred. 

The documentary doesn’t glorify her. It just shows her, persevering in love with no audience, no applause.
That’s where the connection deepens. In my earlier writing on Silence, I argued that Rodrigues’ final act—his apostasy to save others—is a kind of hidden martyrdom. Outwardly, he denies Christ. Inwardly, he becomes Christ: humiliated, silenced, crucified without glory. In a strange way, Sister Evelyn lives that same inward devotion. She isn’t martyred. But she sacrifices visibility. Her holiness is anonymous. Her suffering is ordinary.

What struck me most about St. Vincent was that no one converts. No one returns to church in droves. The miracle is that Sister Evelyn stays. The camera doesn’t flinch when she breaks down after a funeral for a teen overdose victim, or when she lights candles in an empty sanctuary. But through those quiet acts, the film suggests that sometimes faith is just fidelity—staying when you could leave, loving when it feels pointless, waiting in the silence.

This documentary doesn’t dramatize suffering like Silence does. It doesn’t need to. Its power lies in duration: the ache of quiet faithfulness across decades. Silence asked me if God was still present when it felt like He’d abandoned His people. St. Vincent: The Return shows me someone who acts as if He is—even when He doesn’t answer.

And maybe that’s the deeper message in both works. Faith isn’t always certainty or joy or martyrdom. Sometimes it’s cleaning the floor of a crumbling church. Sometimes it’s hiding a crucifix in your hand as they burn your body. In both, silence isn’t the absence of God—it’s the space where love continues anyway.

Footnote:
This blog post reflects on the 2024 HBO documentary St. Vincent: The Return through the lens of themes I previously explored in Martin Scorsese’s Silence (2016), particularly the intersection of faith, suffering, and divine silence. While Silence dramatizes martyrdom under persecution, St. Vincent explores quiet, everyday faith in a modern, disillusioned context. Drawing from my earlier essay’s insights on Rodrigues’ hidden fidelity, I connect Sister Evelyn’s quiet service to the idea of “concealed martyrdom”—a life of love and endurance in the absence of divine response. The blog adopts a personal and reflective tone to mirror the style of culture commentary.