"I'm not sure what I'm doing," he said.

I'd never met him before, but the air of fragile confidence was familiar, this sense of being lost in the house you grew up in.

"I've been a pastor for 15 years, and most days I have no idea what I'm doing. It makes me nauseous," he continued.

He seemed like a man struck with malaise, a chronic illness in which the source is hard to pinpoint.

He's not alone. I find myself talking with more and more pastors stricken with uneasy nausea and fatigue that they can't name. It's as though their calling has been stripped of meaning.

This man could do a good job with the regular activities of being a pastor, he went on to say, but he wasn't sure whether they meant anything to his people.

Of course, there have always been pastoral struggles, and they've shifted as time has unfolded. But throughout time, from Augustine to Thomas Becket to Jonathan Edwards, pastors and priests have at least served against a cultural backdrop with the shared understanding that the transcendent is real and our lives must interact with something beyond what we can see and touch.

Today, things are different.

We now live in a time where the very idea that God is real and present in our lives is no longer accepted. Indeed, it's widely contested. Belief has been made fragile -- for the pastor as much as for those in the pews.