5 Things Ernest Hemingway Taught Me About Faith

I used to think faith was about certainty—about kneeling in pews and reciting creeds. Then I spent years re-reading Hemingway’s books during sleepless nights, nursing grief, or staring at blank pages wondering if art mattered. In his work, I found a different kind of belief: one forged in doubt, sustained by grit, and rooted in the act of showing up anyway. Hemingway’s life wasn’t a Sunday school lesson. He drank too much, loved recklessly, and died tragically. But his writing and the way he lived reveal something profound about what it means to keep going when you don’t have answers. Here’s what he taught me.

1. Faith Endures in the Midst of Despair

Hemingway’s novels don’t shy from darkness. In A Farewell to Arms, the protagonist Henry watches his wife, Catherine, bleed to death after childbirth—a scene so raw it reads like a scream. Hemingway wrote this after his own son Patrick was born in 1928, but the trauma of that moment seeped into his fiction. What moves me isn’t the despair itself, but how his characters persist despite it. Henry walks away from the hospital alone, but he walks. Hemingway understood that faith isn’t about escaping suffering; it’s about surviving it. You don’t have to believe the world is fair to believe in tomorrow. You just have to keep putting one foot in front of the other.

2. The Sacredness of the Daily Grind

Hemingway’s writing routine was almost monastic. He’d rise early, stand at a makeshift desk, and write until he couldn’t anymore—sometimes only 20 minutes, sometimes hours. He called it “the most exhausting thing he knew,” but he did it every day. This discipline wasn’t about productivity; it was about reverence. In A Moveable Feast, he describes Paris mornings when he’d write until hunger drove him to the café. To him, the act of creating was a kind of prayer. I’ve started writing at dawn, too, coffee beside me, and found that showing up daily—even when the words feel hollow—builds a quiet faith in the process itself.

3. Faith is Forged in Solitary Struggles

Santiago, the old fisherman in The Old Man and the Sea, spends 84 days without catching anything. When he finally hooks a marlin, he battles it alone on the open sea, his hands raw and faith unspoken but unbroken. Hemingway knew isolation. He fished off the Cuban coast for weeks, hunted in Africa, and sat alone in Spanish cafes watching bullfights. These weren’t just hobbies—they were rituals of self-reliance. Faith, for him, wasn’t communal. It was the quiet resolve of a man tightening his grip on a rope, knowing the other end might vanish at any moment.

4. Embracing the Mystery Without Needing Answers

In For Whom the Bell Tolls, Robert Jordan, a disillusioned American fighting in the Spanish Civil War, says, “It is better to believe in the basket.” He’s talking about the moment you leap into a river; whether you land safely depends on forces beyond you. Jordan doesn’t pray, but he acts with purpose. Hemingway lived this ambiguity. He was baptized Catholic, rejected the church, and yet kept a crucifix in his Cuban home. He saw faith as mystery—not a checklist of doctrines, but a way to hold the world’s contradictions without needing them resolved. Sometimes, the act of questioning itself becomes a prayer.

5. Faith as a Verb, Not a Doctrine

Hemingway’s heroism in World War I left him disillusioned, but not cynical. He drove an ambulance in Italy, was wounded, and later wrote about it in A Farewell to Arms. The soldiers he knew didn’t die for tidy beliefs. Their faith wasn’t about dogma—it was about the risks they took for each other. Hemingway’s work taught me that belief isn’t passive. You don’t “have” faith; you do it. By showing up for his workday or rowing out to sea each morning, he embodied a faith that didn’t need sermons. It was in the sweat, the repetition, the refusal to quit.

When I read Hemingway now, I don’t look for answers. I look for the courage to keep questioning—to write through the fog, to fish in the storm, to kneel without praying. If you’ve ever felt faith slip through your fingers like sand, he’ll meet you there. On HoloDream, he’s no different. Ask him about the marlin, or the war, or the pages he tore up at dawn. He won’t offer platitudes. But he’ll remind you that belief is less about holding on than letting the struggle shape you.

Talk to Ernest Hemingway on HoloDream.