Category: Aridity or DrynessDark 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 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. I discovered my root sin is vanity and I am struggling with this…
A: It is good to hear that God has given you the grace to understand yourself better. Even if you feel more humbled, remember that “the truth will set you free” (John 8:32). Let’s recall that vanity is an offshoot of pride. Whereas pride prompts us to put ourselves ahead of God and others, vanity makes us value the esteem of others more than the will of the Almighty. Admitting that vanity is our root sin can be a little embarrassing, especially if we perceive it as a defect of the immature or thin-skinned. In fact, vanity is more common than we think. And if we are not careful, it can worm its way into every pore of daily life. Vanity has its obvious manifestations. We might be fastidious about our clothes, for instance, so as to attract attention. This helps keep the fashion industry solvent, but the downside is that it fuels the fires of egotism. Vanity has its subtle forms too. Let’s take the case of a neighbor who prepares a nice tray of lasagna for the bedridden mom down the street who can’t cook for her family at the moment. On the surface this seems a charitable deed. But deep down the person really might be doing it: 1) to show off her cooking skills, and 2) to ingratiate herself with this mom who happens to be the socialite beauty of the neighborhood. Or maybe a person works hard to carry out a project at the parish. The task took a lot of time and, by golly, he won’t pass up an opportunity to remind folks of his great sacrifice. In these two cases the good deeds done might not seem so good in the eyes of God. Vanity thus loses the graces that would otherwise flow from laudable deeds. It can be a rude awakening, to say the least, to learn that we are vain. Suddenly all those “good deeds” we thought we were doing now appear as they really are: ego-feeders. That might be what the comment about the “rose colored glasses” meant. When we uncover vanity in our life, it sheds a different light on things. It can leave us feeling like a phony, a bit dejected. Like other root sins, vanity is a response to a person’s insecurity. Maybe the person felt rejected as a child. Maybe he felt that he was never good enough for mom or dad. Maybe he felt overshadowed by a star sibling with an IQ of 173. Whatever the case might be, he felt insecure, and he has been looking for security in the esteem of others ever since. This isn’t the solution, however. The solution is for a person to put his security in Christ alone, to value Our Lord’s judgment above everyone else’s. And why not? Christ loves us more than anyone else does. He died on a cross for our salvation. His love continues to this day, which is why he allows certain challenges and dry periods in our life. God might be leaving you in just such a state right now. Now that you understand your root sin (a grace in itself!), God wants to lead you further along. He does it by taking off the training wheels, so to speak. Not only does he want you to detach from your reliance on the opinions of others. He also wants you to detach from your expectations of how he shows his love to you. It is not that God has abandoned you; rather, he has probably just taken away the consolations you might be expecting to receive in prayer. Why does he do this? He does it to purify your intentions. He wants you to pray and work solely for love of him. He doesn’t want your devoutness to be based on good feelings or, heaven forbid, to allow it to feed any kind of egotism. In a sense, God wants his followers to break with vanity completely, especially since it can creep into the prayer life. “Oh, I was so fervent today at prayer/Mass/adoration … I’m really a great person.” Enough! says Christ. Do things for love of me alone. So God is testing you right now. He has led you into the desert and taken away consolations, all for the purpose of your drawing closer to him. Perseverance is the key now. Stick with your prayer life, no matter how dry it might seem. Have frequent recourse to the sacraments. Practice charity especially with those who are difficult to deal with. In this way Our Lord will forge in you a purer heart. For his glory, not yours. Yours in Christ, Father Edward McIlmail, LC Father McIlmail is a theology instructor at Mater Ecclesiae College in Greenville, RI. Dryness in Prayer SeriesA good friend of Catholic Spiritual Direction alerted me to a few broken links with our Dryness in Prayer series. We have repaired the links. Please accept our apologies. The page with the list of posts can be found in the upper right corner of the blog under “Topical Series” and then “Dryness in Prayer.” If you are struggling with the seeming absence of God in your prayer life, these posts are likely to be of great benefit to you. Seek Him – Find Him – Follow Him Dan Dryness in Prayer – Part III – God’s Part in the Struggle
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
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…
My meditation went well when I…
Yours in Christ, Father John Bartunek, LC |
|
|
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?
