Dark night or depression?

Q: Dear Sister Carmen, I am struggling with prayer – it is very dry and I feel very alone but I have not given up. I believe I am in the dark night but I am also melancholy by temperament. How can I discern what I am experiencing? I don’t have access to a spiritual director because of my remote location. Am I depressed or in the dark night or both? I know you can’t know everything about my situation via this simple question – can you point me in the right direction?

A: Dear Friend, You are right in saying that I can’t know everything about your situation. Each of us is an unrepeatable individual unique among all persons living today, those who have lived before us and those yet to come. God has created us and in so doing has a plan for each of us. We want to live our lives in accordance with that plan and thus seek to discern how the Holy Spirit is leading us. A good spiritual director, if available, can be of invaluable help in this.

I can only give you the signposts that are general standards for growth in the spiritual life and there are many variations in these in the way that God chooses to work in the individual soul.

Before discussing dryness in prayer let us back up a little and summarize some of what has already been said. We have been dealing with the beginning mansions of the Interior Castle of which the first three Mansions form a special grouping. These three are a preparation for entrance into the Fourth Mansion in which one experiences the Prayer of Quiet. Teresa provides us with visual images to describe the work to be done either actively or passively as one journeys toward union with God. She applies a universal image in trying to express her thoughts, that of “water”. What she terms the First Water is applied to the first three Mansions. She compares the work done here to one who obtains water from the well by means of lowering and pulling up the bucket – hard work – but in Teresa’s day necessary if that was the only means at hand to obtain the precious water. How important was the water to the individual? Certainly a matter of life and death!

Thus in the spiritual life how important is our union with God to exercise the labor needed to reach our goal? The grace of God is there for us just as the water is in the depth of the well. Are we willing to use the means at hand to draw it up? Such means are: overcoming patterns of sin, practice of prayer, strengthening our sacramental life, practicing the Presence of God, cultivation of the virtues, bringing our wills into conformity with the will of Christ, detachment from worldly desires, practice of charity, etc. All of these are within the aid of ordinary grace. Much of the work here is “active work”, work we must do, with the help of God’s grace. And it is often slow work for growth takes time.

While all of us at one time or another may have experienced some form of consolation in prayer, however fleeting, the spiritual life is of too great a value to be an easy road. There is much hard work to be done especially in the first three mansions. It is here where we test the honesty and validity of our desire for a deeper relationship with God. Any relationship that is worthwhile takes profound commitment and arduous work on our part.

Now to get to the crux of your question! Why does wanting a deeper prayer life mean that often my prayer will be dry? And how do I determine whether this dryness is a result of spiritual growth or an effect of my melancholic temperament?

Can someone be going through the Dark Night and be experiencing melancholy at the same time? After all, many saints had a melancholic temperament. Regardless of our temperament each type has both strengths and weaknesses and of itself temperament does not stand in the way of spiritual growth. It is a part of what makes us the person we are. What we are referring to here is not our temperament but a form of melancholia or depression which can affect someone regardless of their temperament type. Yes, it is possible for someone to be going through both at the same time but it is not the usual case. Difficulties may be a source of suffering for us but not every suffering is the Dark Night.

If dryness is the result of one’s spiritual growth in prayer, the person will still have that strong desire to give him/her self totally to God through perseverance in prayer even when the senses feel no delight. Joy can also be experienced in suffering. On the other hand, melancholy closes the person in on self so that rather than seeking solitude to be alone with God in a loving relationship the person develops an unhealthy separation from others.

Generosity becomes a key word here. The one growing in prayer may not have a sense perception of the graces being received because the body is not perfectly conformed to the spirit and these graces are often very gentle and subtle, but the person is moved outwardly toward God and in service to others. Even if the person feels no delight in prayer the habitual attitude is to “give” rather than to “receive”, a characteristic quality of love. On the other hand,  dryness which results from melancholy turns the person inward on self suffocating the spiritual life.

Consolations may seem more pleasurable and are sometimes given by God because of our weakness. We give a small reward to a child to help them persevere in reaching their goal. It takes humility to walk in dryness recognizing our human frailty. But the strength we gain in the practice of fortitude draws us into closer conformity with Christ. If our path were to be strewn with consolations, what might be the deceptions that would assail us? The example of St. Bernadette is helpful here. Although the apparent rejection of her Novice Mistress was painful to her, she recognized that had she been treated as a favored one, it might have stunted her spiritual growth. The lack of human consolation enabled her to identify more closely with Christ Crucified.  If God leads us by the road of dryness it is because He knows what is best for us. We must have confidence that He seeks our happiness even more than we do ourselves.

In union of prayer,

Sister Carmen Laudis, O.C.D.

PS: To learn more about the Carmelite Sisters visit our web site: www.carmelitesistersocd.com and for more information please contact the sisters at contact@carmelitesistersocd.com, or 626-289-1353 Ext. 246, 920 East Alhambra Road, Alhambra, California 91801.

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