Spiritual dryness: why prayer feels empty and what to do

Spiritual dryness is when prayer feels empty: you show up, you say the words, and nothing seems to happen. It's a normal part of Catholic life, and almost every saint went through it. Dryness doesn't mean God has left or that you're doing it wrong. The answer is usually simple: keep praying, look honestly at whether something is getting in the way, and talk to someone wise.

Is spiritual dryness normal?

Yes. The Catechism treats it as one of the ordinary difficulties of prayer, especially "for those who sincerely want to pray" (CCC 2731). It describes dryness as a time when the heart has "no taste for thoughts, memories, and feelings, even spiritual ones," and calls it a moment of "sheer faith clinging faithfully to Jesus in his agony and in his tomb."

That's a hopeful way to see it. In dry seasons you pray without the reward of feeling anything, and that kind of prayer is pure faith. Jesus himself prayed from the cross, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (Mark 15:34). The Psalms are full of the same cry. You're in good company.

Many people, especially those who came back to the faith with a lot of early joy, panic when the warmth fades. They assume something has broken. Usually nothing has. The first sweetness of conversion is a gift, and God often withdraws it gently so that you learn to love him and not only the feeling of loving him.

Dryness, desolation and the dark night

These words get used loosely, so it helps to tell them apart.

Dryness (aridity)

Prayer feels flat. You don't get much out of it, but you're not in turmoil. You still want God, even if you can't feel him. This is the most common experience, and it can last days, months or longer.

Desolation

St Ignatius of Loyola used this word in his rules for the discernment of spirits, in the Spiritual Exercises. Desolation is more than a lack of feeling. It's an inner pull away from God: discouragement, restlessness, heaviness, a sense that faith, hope and love are draining away, and thoughts like "this is pointless, I should just stop." Dryness is quiet. Desolation pushes.

The dark night

St John of the Cross, the sixteenth-century Carmelite, wrote about the "dark night" in which God purifies a soul by taking away the consolations it used to rely on. He gives three signs for recognizing it (The Dark Night, book I, chapter 9): you find no comfort in the things of God or in anything else, you keep an anxious concern that you're failing God, and you can no longer meditate as you once did. It's a real and specific stage of the spiritual life, but it's easy to over-apply. Most dry seasons are not the dark night, and it isn't something to diagnose in yourself. A good spiritual director can tell the difference.

What causes spiritual dryness?

Ignatius named three reasons a person ends up in desolation, and they apply to dryness too. Sometimes it's our own doing. Sometimes God is testing and strengthening us. Sometimes he's teaching us that consolation is his gift, not something we earn. In practice, the causes look like this:

• Sin. A serious sin that hasn't been confessed, or a venial sin you've stopped fighting, can quietly dull your prayer. The Catechism says that if dryness comes from a lack of roots, "the battle requires conversion" (CCC 2731). This is the first thing to check, and also the easiest to fix: go to Confession.
• Tiredness and stress. You are a body as well as a soul. Poor sleep, overwork, illness, a new baby or grief can leave you with nothing to give. That isn't a spiritual failure. If the heaviness spreads into everything, including sleep, appetite and things you used to enjoy, talk to a doctor as well as a priest.
• Drift. Prayer slowly squeezed to the edges of the day, rushed and distracted. If you've stopped making room for God, that's closer to lukewarmness than to dryness, and small habits will help.
• God's purification. Sometimes there is no fault at all. God is drawing you past feelings into a steadier, deeper faith. This is often what's happening to people who are praying faithfully and still feel nothing.

What should I do when prayer feels dry?

1. Keep praying. This matters more than anything else. Keep your time and your place, even if you shorten it. Ten honest minutes of dry prayer is not wasted. It may be the most faithful prayer you'll ever offer.
2. Tell God it's dry. Prayer doesn't have to sound holy. "Lord, I feel nothing. I'm here anyway" is a real prayer, and it's true.
3. Simplify. When meditation won't come, lean on vocal prayer: the Our Father, a decade of the Rosary, a Psalm read slowly. Let the Church's words carry you when your own run out. For more on the forms of prayer, see how to pray as a Catholic.
4. Don't make big changes in desolation. Ignatius' advice is to hold firm to the decisions you made before the desolation came, and not to make new ones while you're in it. Don't quit prayer, leave a vocation or abandon a commitment because you feel empty. Decide those things in a calmer season.
5. Go to the sacraments. Confession clears away anything that might be blocking you. Mass and Communion feed you whether or not you feel fed. Grace works below the level of feeling.
6. Examine your day. A short evening examen helps you notice what drains you and what draws you toward God, and whether a particular sin keeps returning.
7. Talk to someone. A priest or spiritual director can help you tell dryness from desolation, from sin, from exhaustion. Even saying it out loud to someone wise is a relief.

Mother Teresa's long darkness

If you think dryness means you're far from God, consider St Teresa of Calcutta. After her letters were published in 2007 in the book Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light, the world learned that for about fifty years, from soon after she began her work among the poor until her death in 1997, she felt little or no sense of God's presence in prayer.

She kept praying anyway. She kept going to Mass, kept her hours of Adoration and kept serving the poorest people in Calcutta. Over time, with the help of a spiritual director, she came to see the darkness as a share in Christ's own suffering on the cross. The Church canonized her in 2016. Her life is a quiet answer to the fear that feeling nothing means you are nothing to God.

How long does spiritual dryness last?

There's no fixed answer. For many people it's a season of weeks or months that lifts as quietly as it came. For some, like Mother Teresa, it's much longer. Either way, measuring it day by day tends to make it heavier. Better to ask a simpler question each evening: did I show up today? If the answer is yes, that's enough.

When consolation does come back, enjoy it and thank God for it, and remember that it's a gift and not a grade. The next dry stretch will be easier to recognize.

A prayer for dry days

You don't need a special prayer. Something like this is enough: "Lord, I don't feel you, but I believe you're here. I'd rather sit with you in the dark than be anywhere else without you. Keep me faithful until the light comes back." Then sit quietly for a minute and leave the rest to him.