How do I know if God is talking to me in prayer?

Q: Dear Father John, I keep hearing (and reading) that Christian prayer is a conversation with God. But, to be totally honest, when I pray I don’t really hear God speaking to me. At least, how do I know it’s God and not just my own thoughts? Am I doing something wrong?

A: You are right: the phrase “conversation with God” describes Christian prayer beautifully. Christ has revealed that God is a real person, and that he is interested – passionately interested – in our lives, our friendship, our closeness. For Christians then, prayer, as Pope Benedict explained when he visited Yonkers, NY in 2007, is an expression of our “personal relationship with God.” And that relationship, the Holy Father went on to say, “is what matters most.”

Parameters of Faith

When we pray, God speaks to us in three ways. But to understand these three ways, we need a reminder. Our relationship with God is based on faith. Faith gives us access to knowledge that goes beyond what we can perceive by our senses. By faith, for example, we know that Christ is truly present in the Eucharist, even though our senses only perceive the appearances of bread and wine. Whenever a Christian prays, the prayer takes place within this atmosphere of faith. When I address God in vocal prayer, I know that he is listening to me, even if I don’t feel his presence with my senses or emotions. When I praise him, ask things of him, adore him, thank him, tell him I am sorry… In all these expressions of prayer, I know by faith (not necessarily by my senses or my feelings) that God is listening, interested, and that he cares. If we try to understand Christian prayer outside of this atmosphere of faith, we will get nowhere.

Keeping that in mind, we can look briefly at the three ways God speaks to us in prayer.

The Gift of Consolation

In the first place, God can speak to us by giving us what spiritual writers call consolation. Through consolation, he touches the soul and allows it to be comforted and strengthened by a felt awareness of his love, his presence, his goodness, his power, his beauty…

This consolation can flow directly from the meaning of the words of a vocal prayer. For instance, when I pray Blessed Cardinal Newman’s famous “Lead, Kindly Light..” prayer, God may boost my hope and my confidence, simply because the meaning of the words nourish and revitalize my awareness of God’s power and goodness.

The consolation can also flow from the reflection and pondering involved in mental prayer. As I read and reflect slowly, prayerfully on the parable of the Prodigal Son, for example, I can feel my soul being comforted by that picture of the Father embracing the repentant younger brother. That picture of God’s love comes to my mind, and gives me a renewed awareness of God’s mercy and his goodness: “God is so merciful!” I think to myself, and I feel the warmth of his mercy in my heart. That image and those ideas are mine, insofar as they arise in my mind, but they are from God, insofar as they arose in response to my consideration of God’s revelation, in an atmosphere of faith. Or, on another occasion, I could meditate on the same biblical passage and be moved to a deep experience of sorrow for my own sins: in the ungrateful rebellion of the Prodigal Son, I see an image of my own sins and rebellions, and I am repelled by them. Again, the idea of the ugliness of sin and the feeling of sorrow for my personal sins are my own ideas and feelings, but they are a response to God’s action in my mind as he guides my mind’s eye to perceive certain aspects of his truth while I listen to him speaking through his revealed Word in the Bible.

In any of these cases, my soul is touched anew, and thus nourished and consoled, by the truth of who God is for me, and who I am for him – a truth which God speaks to my soul. But the distinction between God’s speaking and my own ideas is not so clear as we would sometimes like. He actually speaks through the ideas that come as I turn my attention towards him in prayer. He speaks within my heart, within the words that form in my heart as I gaze at the Word.

Nourishing the Gifts of the Holy Spirit

In the second place, God can respond to us in prayer by increasing in our souls the gifts of the Holy Spirit: wisdom, knowledge, understanding, piety, fear of the Lord, fortitude, and counsel. Each of these gifts nourishes our spiritual muscles, so to speak; they build up our spiritual faculties. They make it easier for us to discover God’s will in our lives, to appreciate and want his will, and to carry out that will.  In short, they enhance our ability to believe, to hope, and to love God and neighbor. During a time of prayer, then, when I am addressing God in vocal prayer, or seeking to know him more deeply through mental prayer, or adoring him through liturgical prayer, God’s grace touches my soul, nourishing it through increasing the power of these gifts of the Holy Spirit.

Since these gifts are spiritual, and not material, and since God’s grace is spiritual, I will not always feel the nourishing take place. I may spend fifteen minutes reading and reflecting on the parable of the God Shepherd, and no consoling ideas or feelings are stirred up; my prayer feels dry. But that doesn’t mean that God’s grace is not nourishing my soul, that he is not strengthening within me the gifts of the Holy Spirit.

When I take vitamins (or eat broccoli), I don’t feel my muscles grow, but I know that those vitamins are indeed enabling that growth. Likewise, when we pray, we know we are entering into contact with God’s grace, with a God who loves us and is making us holy. When I don’t experience consolation, I can be certain that God is still working in my soul, strengthening it with his gifts by means of the spiritual vitamins that my soul takes in whenever I have faith-filled contact with God. But I only know this by faith, because God doesn’t always send sensible consolation with this spiritual nourishment. This is why spiritual growth depends so significantly on our perseverance in prayer, regardless of whether we feel consolation.

Direct Inspirations

Thirdly, God can speak to our souls through words, ideas, or inspirations that we recognize clearly as coming right from him. Personally, I have a vivid memory of the first time the thought of the priesthood came into my mind. I wasn’t even Catholic yet. No one had told me that I should become a priest. And yet, in the aftermath of a powerful spiritual experience, the thought simply appeared in my mind, fully formed, with compelling clarity. I knew without any doubt that the thought had come directly from God, that he had spoken to me directly, giving me an inspiration.

Most of us have had some, even if only a few, experiences like this, when we knew God was saying something specific to us, even though we heard the words only in our hearts, and not with our physical ears. God can speak in this way even when we are not at prayer. But a mature prayer life will make our souls more sensitive to these direct inspirations, and create more room for God to speak directly more often, if he wishes to do so.

Jesus assured us that any effort we make in prayer will bring grace into our souls, whether we feel it or not: “Seek, and you shall find; ask, and it shall be given to you; knock, and the door will be opened” (Matthew 7:7-8). But at the same time, we have to always remember that we must live our entire lives, including our prayer lives, in the light of our faith, not only in accordance with what we perceive and with what we feel. As St. Paul said so powerfully, “We walk by faith, not by sight” (2 Corinthians 5:7).

Consolation & Desolation: What are “spiritualized capital sins”?

Q: Dear Father John, You used the phrase “spiritualized capital sins” in your post on consolation and desolation. I have never heard this idea before. What are spiritualized capital sins and how do they “attempt” to re-conquer the soul as we mature?

A: We have to remember that here on earth we are members of the Church militant. We are in the midst of a battle. As we grow spiritually, the enemies of our souls (the devil and his demons) don’t sit idly by. Did you know that the Church’s most notable heresiarchs (people who start heresies) were almost all priests in their forties? Pelagius, Arius, Apollinaris, Nestorius… These were all men of God, passionately dedicated to the Church and to seeking deeper intimacy with Christ, advanced in theological knowledge and in the spiritual life. Who would have guessed that they would become instruments of ecclesial devastation and spiritual shipwreck? And yet, they did. We can  never forget this: as we grow spiritually, the battle doesn’t go away.

But our enemies are smart. They know that temptation has to be customized to the situation of the person being tempted. They can’t invent new sins (the seven capital sins are always the primary categories for sinful behavior), but they can disguise them in new ways. So, for someone who is well along the road towards spiritual maturity, the tempters will have to clothe the capital sins in spiritual garments.

“Spiritualized” Capital Sins

For example, the inclination to vanity can appear in a subtle desire to have one’s new and advanced piety noticed. You start trying to draw attention to the outward manifestation of your devotion. Or you find yourself seeking to impress your spiritual director – hiding real struggles from them, lest they think you are less holy than you want to appear. You may even switch spiritual directors, not for any objective reason, but simply because you don’t want to follow anyone’s advice except your own.

The inclination to pride can show up in a sort of complacency in your religious works. You think you are really doing well, and so you start planning all kinds of great spiritual projects, but you don’t actually follow through on any of them. Or, you start talking about spiritual things with other people just to give them lessons, instead of seeking ways to put the lessons into practice yourself.

In the area of sensuality, you can become attached to the consolations that God has given you in your prayer and sacramental life. So you find yourself trying to force certain emotional reactions during your meditation or after Communion. You start to seek spiritual feelings too much, forgetting that the goal of holiness is union with God in mind and will, not feelings of consolation. You can even begin to become attached to friendships or relationships that seem to be based on spiritual values, but in truth you invest in them because of the emotional payback you feel instead of the mutual spiritual support they are supposed to provide; this can become a kind of spiritual lust. Spiritual greed can take the form of an insatiable desire to read every spiritual book, to accumulate rosaries and holy cards and icons, to jump around from devotion to devotion trying to imbibe the entire spiritual patrimony of the Church all at once even to the neglect of life’s basic duties (like one’s responsibilities to family members), instead of seeking patiently to go deep in the essentials.

Keeping Our Eye on the Ball: “Thy Will Be Done – Not Mine!”

These are some examples. You can find a more systematic summary of this spiritual trap in Fr. Tanquerey’s treatise on the spiritual life, #’s 1262-1269. We need to know that these types of attachments and self-absorption are possible, and that they can hinder spiritual progress as much as the less subtle sins. But we need not become obsessed with them. As always in the spiritual life, the compass and anchor remain the same: I love God by accepting and fulfilling his will in each moment of my life. That’s the litmus test, and that’s the surest guide through the shadows and tangles of this earthly pilgrimage – as sure a guide for us as it was for Jesus: “My food is to do the will of Him who sent Me and to accomplish His work” (John 4:34).

Consolation and Desolation: What does it really mean?

Q: Dear Father John, I know you wrote before about consolation and desolation in the spiritual life.  But I have a follow-up question.  When we experience some kind of desolation, how do we know where it’s coming from?  I mean, how do we know whether it’s really from God or not?

A: This is a great question – and an important one, for Christians in today’s society.

Consolation and Desolation: Grasping the Terms

First, we have to have a quick review of what we mean by “consolation and desolation” in the spiritual life.  Usually, these terms refer to the felt presence of God in our soul (consolation), or the absence of that feeling (desolation).  By faith we know that God is always thinking of us, with us, interested in our lives, and loving us with a personal, determined love.  We know that by faith.  But we don’t always feel that in our emotional world.  In fact, sometimes we can feel an intense and painful emptiness inside.  Sometimes we can feel absolutely no excitement or pleasure at the thought of spiritual things.  Sometimes we can feel dry as a desert even when we are at prayer: emotionally, we don’t even want to keep praying.  We are like children with their homework: they know it is good for them to do it, and they know they should do it, but they just don’t feel like doing it.

This lack of the felt presence of God, a lack of emotional pleasure or resonance regarding God’s will for us, is usually referred to by spiritual writers as sensible desolation.  The contrary is sensible consolation.

Now we can get to your question.  If you are experiencing desolation, it can come from a variety of sources.  Simply knowing what those sources are can help us reflect on one’s personal situation and, usually, identify its source.

Our Own Fault

First, desolation can be caused by our own sin.  We may be inordinately attached to something: some habit, some relationship, some hope, some fear, even some hobby or pastime that may not be evil in itself… Or we may have committed some sin that we haven’t confessed or repented of yet.  Sooner or later, disordered attachments will interfere with our relationship with God.  God loves us too much to let us idolize anything for long.  If we are following him, when the time is right he will speak to our conscience about putting that disordered room in our soul back into order.  During the struggle to decide whether or not to obey what he is asking of us, we can experience desolation, because as we dilly-dally, our hearts are divided.  In this case, we are actually pushing God away, and the desolation is our own fault.  This happens frequently in the early stages of the spiritual life, but can return with a vengeance even after much growth, when the spiritualized capital sins attempt to re-conquer the soul.

At times, it is hard to identify disordered attachments.  If you are praying regularly (including at least an annual spiritual retreat), doing a regular examination of conscience, going to confession on a regular basis, and receiving some kind of spiritual direction (or at least you have a friend or small group of friends to whom you make yourself spiritually accountable), and following the commandments of God and the Church, you should be able to recognize these disordered attachments when the Holy Spirit points them out to you.  If you are not following those basic spiritual practices, your desolation may have this cause, and I would recommend renewing your commitment to these means for spiritual growth that all spiritual writers recommend.

Our Fallen Nature’s Fault

Second, desolation can flow from advancing self-knowledge.  As we grow in the spiritual life, God allows us to know ourselves better and better.  We begin to see just how deep our self-centered tendencies really go.  We begin to see just how vulnerable we are to temptations of vanity, pride, and sensuality.  We begin to see just how helpless we really are, when it comes to growth in holiness, without the constant aid of God’s grace.  This can create a disturbance in our relationship with God, because we no longer feel worthy of the great love he has for us.  We truly love God.  We truly want to follow him.  But when we resist approaching him because we have discovered that we actually don’t “deserve” to be loved so unconditionally we begin to stumble. It’s like the spouse who has been unfaithful and has difficulty accepting their spouse’s forgiveness, or the mother who has aborted her child and simply can’t seem to accept God’s mercy.  But in this stage of the spiritual life, the specific cause of the interior resistance is often less clear.  Here again, we end up separating ourselves from God.

This hurdle has to be faced and overcome, in order to become spiritually mature.  You have probably already detected the real source of the spiritual reluctance that comes from this situation.  It is a subtle form of pride.  And the enemy of our souls will often seize on this, stir it up, and try to exaggerate it.  The truly humble soul responds to its own unworthiness with peace and joy, throwing itself into God’s arms with total abandon, totally conscious of its absolute need for God’s grace, and contentedly aware of God’s delight in showing mercy to his needy children.

The deep interior resistance so many people experience when it comes to activating that kind of abandonment shows just how difficult developing the virtue of humility really is.  It is the bedrock of the spiritual life, and digging foundations is never fun.  But you can do it.  Read the lives of the saints (especially St. Therese of Lisieux’s Story of a Soul and St. Faustina’s Diary).  Read the Psalms.  And get on your knees in front of the Eucharist, simply learning to trust more deeply in God’s goodness by exercising whatever level of trust you can as you gaze at Our Lord, who has chosen to be there for you, no matter what.

The Doctor at Work

Finally, desolation can flow from God’s direct action on the soul.  God can take away the consolation of his presence, without actually taking away his presence.  This is a method he uses to purify the soul and to increase the soul’s capacity for love.  If we can keep following God’s will in our lives even when we are passing through “a valley as dark as death” (Psalm 23:4), we will emerge with a much more mature faith, a more vibrant hope, and a deeper love.  These are the theological virtues that unite the soul to God – and union with God is what we were created for, and what God yearns us to achieve and deepen.

So when he takes away interior consolation in this way, we can rest assured that his wisdom and goodness will permit us, when emerged from the darkness, to undergo greater consolations than we ever imagined, because our soul’s capacity to experience God will have been increased by God directly.  These periods of purification initiated by God are often called the “dark night.”  We can have dark nights of the senses, of the spirit, of the intellect… It is when God, the doctor of our soul, lays us on the spiritual operating table and takes direct action.  Our job in this case is to trust and endure by continuing to seek and embrace God’s will in our lives (the commandments, the duties of our state in life, etc…).  The recent book on Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta, Come Be My Light: The Private Writings of the Saint of Calcutta, chronicles a truly amazing journey through this kind of darkness.

I hope these reflections have helped you identify both where your current desolation is coming from, and how to react to it.  If not, I recommend taking up the prayer Jesus taught us through St. Faustina, and making it the constant refrain of your heart and mind throughout this season of your spiritual journey: “Jesus, I trust in you.”

Sayings of Light and Love #19

The soul that in aridity and trial submits to the dictates of reason is more pleasing to God than one that does everything with consolation, yet fails in this submission.

Saint John of the Cross

More ”Sayings of Light and Love”

Dryness in Prayer – Part III – God’s Part in the Struggle

Q: Dear Father John, I have been praying (mental prayer) for a long time.  But lately I seem to be experiencing dryness in my prayer – I just don’t seem to get as much out of it as I used to.  Is this the “dark night of the soul”?  If not, what’s going on, and what should I do?

Lack of consolation in prayer (also known as dryness) may be a result of un-confessed and un-repented sin, or it may come from sloppiness or laziness in our effort to pray.  But if we are making a reasonable effort to do our part, and yet we still don’t experience (or stop experiencing) consolation, it’s probably God’s fault, not ours.

God is not a vending machine; he doesn’t have to reveal himself to us in a tangible way every time we try to press his buttons.  This is one of the big differences between Christianity and many other religions.  In pagan religions, for example, the gods were obliged to respond to worshippers in a certain way, if the worshipper performed a specific ritual, likewise in Satan worship.  But Christ isn’t like that.  We can’t control him.  He can hold us back from feeling his presence in our souls, even when we are sincerely and conscientiously doing our part.

Why?  Why would he allow us to experience dryness in prayer?  Because he wants our love for him to mature.  At times, we can become subtly attached to our experience of God in prayer – to the consolations that we feel as we gaze upon his beauty or taste his goodness.  Subconsciously, we can begin to seek those consolations even more than their source.  We begin to value the gifts of God more than the God who gives them, like the little child who enjoys Uncle Ernie’s company because Uncle Ernie always gives out candy.  Candy is a good sign of Uncle Ernie’s goodness and love for a child, but getting to know Uncle Ernie better and developing a more mature relationship with him means learning to go beyond the gum-drops.

When God withholds consolations, he is purifying us of this subtle attachment to our feelings, so that our faith can grow and mature.  To become mature Christians, we must learn more and more to “walk by faith, not by sight” (2 Corinthians 5:7).  In this context of spiritual growth, dryness in prayer is an opportunity to truly adore God himself, regardless of personal preferences and satisfactions.  The mature love is the love that “lays down its life for the beloved” (John 15:13), not the love that “has no root deep down and does not last, should some trial come…” (Mark 4:17).  Dryness is an invitation to give ourselves to God, putting aside our desire to get things from him.

Doing Our Part Amid Dryness

When God sends us this kind of purification, our reaction should be like a patient on an operating table.  We must not try to avoid the often painful dryness, nor panic in the midst of it.  Rather, we should persevere in our good efforts, trusting that the wise doctor of our souls is hard at work in ways that we cannot see or feel, healing us of spiritual cancers that we may not even know we have.  (St. Ignatius of Loyola used to advise keeping to the exact minute of the time reserved to meditation whether we experience immense consolation or immense desolation.)  This is what spiritual writers call “passive purification.”  Active purification is when we consciously deny our natural inclinations in order to follow Christ more closely (see our blog posts on mortification).  Passive purification is when God puts us into the fire in order to burn away impurities that are beyond our reach.  The result is marvelous: purified silver is more fully itself after being put through the fire; we become more fully what God made us to be after he purifies us.  But the process is often painful.

When this dryness occurs for long periods of time on the level of emotions or imagination, it is sometimes referred as the “dark night of the senses.”  The “dark night” is an image that St. John of the Cross used to sum up the whole phenomenon of dryness and passive purification.  When this dryness occurs for long periods of time on the level of intellect and will (see part I of these posts on dryness in prayer for an explanation of these different faculties), it is sometimes referred to as the “dark night of the soul,” since these two faculties are the superior, spiritual faculties of the human soul.

St. John of the Cross went into great detail about the signs by which authentic dark nights can be distinguished from dryness that comes from other sources.  In summary, they are as follows: 1) we find no consolation in the things of God, but neither do we find any in the things of the world; 2) we find ourselves still attending very carefully to our prayer commitments, and our anxiety comes because we fear we are not serving him well; 3) we find ourselves unable (at least for unusually long periods of time) to make reflections and considerations when we go to mental prayer, as if our minds were somehow paralyzed.  In these three areas, however, it is difficult for us to diagnose ourselves; it’s like trying to look at our backs in a mirror.

Two Tangents

Two more observations are needed before leaving this topic. First, those who are taking their spiritual lives seriously and striving to grow in prayer can sometimes be distracted by trying to figure out exactly where they are in the various stages of spiritual growth.  It’s as if they think that having the perfect label will make their efforts more fruitful and helpful.  This can be a pitfall.  Because we are all individuals, and God leads us through unique paths of spiritual growth, it is not always easy to fit our real experience perfectly into the abstract categories that theology has to use to reflect systematically on these issues.  We can become obsessed with finding the right label, instead of staying focused on loving God through prayer and action in obedience to his will.  It is helpful to understand more and more the principles in the spiritual life, because then we can understand ourselves better as we begin to identify how those principles are at work in our experience.  Yet, spiritual naval-gazing is unhelpful.  This is one reason why spiritual direction is such a useful tool.  It helps keeps us objective and balanced in our efforts to discern how God is acting in our lives.

Second, those Christians who are living out their vocation to holiness as lay men and women often receive their purification in ways other than the “dark nights” of the senses and the soul.  The suffering and the struggles for fidelity to Christ that come with the vocation to marriage can be acute.  The suffering and struggles that come in one’s effort to build Christ’s Kingdom through work, community, and professional activities can also be acute.  God can use those struggles and that suffering to perform his purification-operations.  He is not limited to using dryness in prayer.  This is one more reason why we should be wary of spiritual naval-gazing.  The key to spiritual growth is accepting, embracing, and fulfilling God’s will moment by moment, not anticipating how God will work in us and then forcing him to follow our expectations.  We must let the Doctor do his work, without demanding that he first teach us the whole science of medicine.

Yours in Christ, Father John Bartunek, LC