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

Q: 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

Dryness in Prayer – Part II – Our Part in the Struggle

Q: 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?

Dryness in prayer is the contrary of consolation (the sense of satisfaction that God gives our emotions, imagination, intellect and will when we encounter his truth, goodness, and beauty).  Dryness is the absence or lessening of those consolations, either every once in awhile, or for long periods of time.  And the Catechism identifies dryness as one of the key obstacles in prayer.  But we won’t be able to understand how to deal with the obstacle unless we understand, at least a little bit, what causes it.

Dryness in prayer surfaces for one of two reasons: because of us, or because of God.  Let’s start with the first reason.

When the Going Gets Tough

When we aren’t making a reasonable effort to do our part in the quest of prayer, dryness happens because of us.  At times in the spiritual life, especially (but not only) at the beginning, God sends frequent and intense consolation to our souls.  It is like a courtship, and he is courting us.  He sends us flowers, gives us candy, takes us out on beautiful dates (in the spiritual sense).  He is trying to convince us of his goodness, wisdom, and power.  He is trying to win us over.  As our relationship deepens, we realize that following God involves not just getting good gifts from him, but giving him the gift of ourselves.  This we do through obeying his commandments and his will, through following his example, growing in virtue, building up the Church, loving our neighbor… All these things, since they are based on our desire to grow in our friendship with the One who is calling us, takes an effort on our part.  We have to freely choose to respond to God’s action in our lives; it’s not automatic (if it were automatic, it wouldn’t be a relationship of love, or friendship).

As this journey continues, we sometimes grow weary.  We begin to hanker after the “onions of Egypt,” as the Israelites did during their sojourn in the wilderness on their way to the Promised Land.  We long for an easier life, for the pleasures of self-indulgence, for the seductive comforts and passing gratifications that thirty pieces of silver can purchase for us.  Moments like these are crucial for spiritual growth. They give us a chance to mature our love for God, to grow up a little bit more.  But the tug of our fallen nature, egged on by the glitter of popular culture and the twittering of the devil on our interior homepage, is strong.

Getting Sloppy

One reaction that we can have in these times is to begin simply going through the motions in our prayer life.  On the surface, we are continuing with the same prayer commitments that we have always kept, commitments that have the blessing of our spiritual director.  And yet, we start fulfilling them in a routine way, not making a concerted effort to concentrate on our vocal prayers, for instance, or not carefully following the method of our mental prayer.  We get careless.  We don’t prepare the material for our meditation ahead of time.  We don’t guard our interior silence during the day.  We cut off a couple of minutes now and then from our meditation, or toy with involuntary distractions instead of putting forth the necessary effort to deflect them… Sometimes this diminishing effort is extremely subtle, even subconscious.  Sometimes it is glaringly obvious: we are avoiding looking into God’s eyes because of an un-repented and un-confessed sin (dishonesty, infidelity, impurity, disordered ambition, willful consent to self-righteous anger or envy…).  Whether subtle or flagrant, slacking off in our reasonable efforts to pay attention to God when we pray will often inhibit us from hearing his voice.  Not always, because God can make himself heard even when we’re not listening, but almost always.

Sidestepping Along

When our inbox is overly cluttered, we lose motivation to roll up our sleeves and get to work, so we procrastinate or look for busy-work to distract ourselves.  This inhibits us from experiencing the satisfaction that comes from a job well done, from meeting goals and following objective priorities.  Likewise in the spiritual life.  When we hit a steep section of the road as we’re following Christ, we can stray off to the side, take a rest, or even go looking for a shortcut, though we know very well that our Lord is standing on the upgrade beckoning us forward.  Until we get back on track, we won’t be able to experience the consolation God has for us, because we won’t be meeting God (the source of consolation) where he is waiting to meet us.

Think of a gymnast who reaches a plateau in her training.  Her coach knows that she needs to maintain the same effort that she was putting out while she was making visible, rapid progress.  But she starts getting discouraged, precisely because her progress isn’t so rapid and visible at the moment.  If she trusts her coach and perseveres, soon she will be beyond the plateau, achieving higher levels of excellence and experiencing the satisfaction that goes with it.  The coach can encourage her, but in the end she has to decide if she will keep putting forth the effort, doing her part.

The First Question

So this is the first question we need to ask ourselves if we are experiencing dryness in prayer:  Am I still doing my part?  Or has some un-confessed sin or subtle self-pity – or just plain laziness (be humble) – drained my efforts?  To find an objective answer to that question, it is often helpful to go over our prayer commitments with our spiritual director, to describe how we are praying the Rosary, the Mass, the meditation, the morning offering…  It can also be useful to go over the basic guidelines of prayer again, e.g. reading The Fundamentals of Christian Meditation from the first section of The Better Part. (For your convenience, I have included a checklist below that can help remind you of what doing your part in the daily meditation entails.)

If you discover that, indeed, you have been slacking off a bit.  Don’t be afraid!  Bring it up in confession, and then make some small adjustments to your commitments that will help motivate you to get back in the swing.  For example, change the book you are using to help you meditate, or the place of your morning prayer, or the time of day, or buy yourself a new Rosary…  A fresh start can be sparked without these kinds of external tricks, but they can sometimes help.

If, on the other hand, after a calm and objective self-evaluation, you are convinced that you are still making a reasonable effort to do your part, then the dryness you are experiencing probably isn’t because of you, it’s probably because of God.  Next time, we will talk about why God sometimes withholds his consolations.  (By the way, I keep saying “reasonable effort” because that’s all God asks of us.  Some people tend to think that if their effort isn’t perfect in every way, it isn’t reasonable. That’s not true.  God knows we are not angels.)

…[from "The Better Part: A Christ-Centered Resource for Personal Prayer"]… On any given day, then, measuring whether your meditation went well or badly is not so easy.  Your meditation may have been quite pleasing to God and full of grace for your soul even when it was unpleasant and difficult from a strictly emotional perspective.  An athlete may have a great practice session even though it was painful and frustrating – likewise with a daily meditation.

The best we can do is to give some indicators below.  The most important thing, though, is simply to keep striving to pray better.  Speak about your prayer life in spiritual direction and confession, and trust that if you are sincerely doing all your best, the Holy Spirit will do the rest.

My meditation went badly when I…

• Didn’t plan ahead regarding what material I would use, when and where I would meditate, turn off my cell phone, etc.
• Simply gave in to the many distractions that vied for my attention
• Let myself fall asleep
• Skipped over the first step, Concentrate, or did it sloppily – how can my prayer go well if I am not keenly aware of God’s presence?
• Didn’t humbly ask God to help me and to give me whatever graces I need to continue growing in my spiritual life
• Spent the whole time reading, thinking or daydreaming, and didn’t stop to ask what God was saying to me and to respond from my heart
• Tried to stir up fuzzy feelings and intense emotions instead of conversing heart-to-heart on the level of faith
• Didn’t renew my commitment to Christ and his Kingdom at the end of the meditation
• Shortened the time I had committed to without a really important reason

My meditation went well when I…

• Actually fulfilled the commitment I have made to spend a certain amount of time in meditation every day
• Faithfully followed the methodology in spite of tiredness, distractions, dryness, or any other difficulty, or if it was impossible to follow the four-step method, I did my best to give praise to God in whatever way I could throughout my meditation time
• Stayed with the points of consideration that struck me most as long as I found material there for reflection and conversation
• Was seeking only to know and love Christ better, so as to be able to follow him better
• Made sure to speak to Christ from my heart about whatever I was meditating on (or whatever was most on my heart), even when it was hard to find the words
• Was completely honest in my conversation – I didn’t say things to God just out of routine or because I wanted to impress him with my eloquence; I told him what was really in my heart
• Made a sincere effort to listen to what God was saying to me throughout the time of prayer, seeking applications for my own life, circumstances, needs, and challenges
• Finished the meditation more firmly convinced of God’s goodness and more firmly committed to doing my best to follow him faithfully

Yours in Christ, Father John Bartunek, LC

Dryness in Prayer – Part I – What is going on?

Q: 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 it the “dark night of the soul”?  If not, what’s going on, and what should I do?

A: The Catechism (#2371) mentions dryness as one of the most common obstacles to prayer.  But this is one of those terms that can be used in many different ways.  It will take more than one post to answer your question, so let’s begin at the beginning, with a definition.

When we say that we experience “dryness” in prayer, we usually mean that we don’t sense God’s presence, or we don’t sense it as much as we think we should, or as much as we would like.  We naturally expect that we will experience a certain level of consolation when we come into contact with God.  This usually takes the form of positive emotions: when we meditate on Christ’s mercy, we experience a feeling of relaxation in our soul, a release of tension, because we recognize once again that we don’t have to earn God’s love, and that we can’t lose it; when we meditate on God’s grandeur we are filled with the elation that flows from perceiving something beautiful – as if we were watching a dramatic sunset over the ocean; when we meditate on God’s omnipotence, we feel a certain awe and security, a confidence that fills the soul with a sense of peace; when we meditate on Christ’s tireless zeal for those in need, we feel a surge of vitality and a keen, sweet desire to do great things for the Church and lead others into friendship with Christ… These emotional responses to our encounter with God are intense and deep.  They give us a sense of satisfaction that we don’t find elsewhere, and in so doing, God hopes to draw us closer to him and increase our commitment to his Kingdom and his will.

But consolation can also come in other forms.  It can be found in the imagination.  At times, as we meditate on a scene from the Gospel, or as we gaze meditatively upon a crucifix or an icon, we can experience a kind of perfect harmony between the scene we are looking at and the attention of our mind.  It’s as if everything suddenly came into focus.  It’s as if our visual and imaginative capacities are suddenly in perfect synch with our understanding, which also just so happens to be in perfect synch with God’s truth.  This is similar to what athletes experience when they get “in the zone.”  We are free from distractions, our memory is perfectly in order, and during this consolation we ourselves and our whole personal world seem to be in high-definition harmony with the glance of God.

Consolation can also be experienced at the level of the intellect and will.  The emotions and the imagination are more directly connected to our sense faculties (sight, sound, touch, taste, smell) than the spiritual faculties of intellect and will.  The intellect is what enables us to know true things in the abstract (dogs know their masters’ commands, but they don’t reflect on and write poems about them, as we do). The will is what enables us to choose good things freely (in a sense, squirrels may choose one nut over another, but it’s only by instinct, whereas people can choose even to go against their instinct, as when the martyrs refuse to denounce Christ even under torture).  When in our prayer these two faculties come into contact with God, who is Truth itself and Goodness itself, we experience an even deeper sense of satisfaction and fulfillment than we do through emotional and imaginative consolation.

These experiences of consolation (of the emotions, the imagination, and the spiritual faculties) are like whiffs of heaven.  They draw us toward God and guide us along the steep and narrow path of Christ.  When they diminish or disappear, we experience “dryness in prayer.”

So much for definitions.  Next time we will examine two possible causes of this dryness, and that will lead us into the last part of the answer, “What should I do?”

Yours in Christ, Fr John Bartunek, LC