There is a particular kind of discomfort that comes with being recognized for something you are no longer sure you believe.
Recently, my poem Litany for What I No Longer Believe In was shortlisted for The Fiddlehead’s 2025 Poetry Contest. It is, by any measure, good news. The kind of news that should arrive cleanly: with gratitude, with celebration, with a sense of arrival.
And I am grateful. I am.
But the poem itself is about the dismantling of faith—the slow unlearning of belief, the quiet decision to stop holding on to ideas that no longer feel true. It was written from a place of clarity, even conviction. At the time, I believed I had reached something like an ending.
Now I’m not so sure.
Lately, I’ve found myself in a season of life that resists neat conclusions.
The kind of season that reopens questions you thought were already settled. The kind that exposes how provisional certainty can be. How quickly it shifts under pressure.
In moments like this, disbelief doesn’t feel as stable as it once did. It doesn’t hold its shape as firmly. It softens. It hesitates. It reaches—despite itself—for something like meaning, or hope, or presence.
Not necessarily God. Not the version I grew up with.
But something.
When I wrote the poem, I thought I was documenting an absence. A letting go. A refusal.
But returning to it now, I see something else embedded within it—something I didn’t fully recognize at the time.
Even in the act of rejecting belief, there was still a kind of attention. A kind of listening. A quiet insistence that something remained, even if I couldn’t name it.
I didn’t notice that then.
I notice it now.
I don’t suddenly believe again. That would be too simple, too convenient a narrative.
But I am beginning to understand that losing faith does not mean becoming empty.
It means carrying something more uncertain. More fragile.
A form of faith that does not rely on answers, but on persistence: on continuing to care, to hope, to remain present even when certainty has fallen away.
It lives in small, repetitive acts. In waiting. In noticing. In the refusal to turn away.
Being shortlisted for this prize is an honour. It means the poem has found readers, that it has resonated beyond me.
But what it means to me now has changed.
The poem is no longer just about what I no longer believe.
It is about what remains when belief is stripped away.
And perhaps that is the more difficult thing to face: not the loss of faith, but the quiet realization that something in you continues to reach for it anyway.
I wrote a poem about losing faith. I didn’t realize I was also writing about what would survive it.
Renato Gandia 