When prayer feels empty
You sit down, you do what you have always done, and nothing comes. The tradition has been writing about this for sixteen centuries, and it does not think you are doing it wrong.
The first thing to know.
Almost everyone who prays seriously for more than a few months arrives here. The consolation that made prayer feel worthwhile disappears. Scripture goes flat. The practice that carried you last year now feels like sitting in an empty room talking to the furniture.
The instinct at that point is to conclude one of two things: that you have done something wrong, or that there was never anything there. The tradition rejects both, and it does so from long experience rather than sentiment. Aridity is such a standard feature of the contemplative life that the major writers organise whole books around it.
What follows is what they say — and one important distinction about when this is not a spiritual problem at all.
Read this section before the others.
Dryness, or something else?
Spiritual dryness and clinical depression can look similar from inside, and confusing them causes real harm. People have spent years treating an illness as a spiritual failure, and that is a cruelty the tradition never intended.
A rough distinction that spiritual directors use, and it is only rough:
Dryness is usually specific. It affects prayer. You still take pleasure in your children, your work, a meal with friends. You still want God, even while finding nothing — the desire is often sharper than before.
Depression is usually global. It flattens everything, not only prayer. Sleep, appetite, energy, and the capacity for pleasure go with it. The wanting itself is gone rather than unmet.
If what you are experiencing extends past prayer into the whole of life — if you cannot sleep or cannot stop sleeping, if nothing is enjoyable, if this has lasted weeks — please talk to a doctor. That is not a failure of faith or a lesser response; it is the correct one, and the two are not mutually exclusive. Many people are in a genuine dark night and also need treatment.
If you are having thoughts of harming yourself, please reach out now rather than waiting. In the US you can call or text 988, any hour. You do not have to be in crisis to call.
The oldest name for it.
Acedia — the noonday devil
The desert monks had a precise word for one form of this. Evagrius Ponticus, writing in fourth-century Egypt, describes acedia as the most oppressive of the thoughts that assail a monk — and he places it at midday, taking the phrase from Psalm 91: the business that walketh about in the dark, the invasion, or the noonday devil.
His description is uncomfortably recognisable. The monk becomes convinced that the day is dragging. He looks out the window. He calculates how long until the next meal. He becomes certain that this place, this work, this life is not producing anything, and that he would be more genuinely holy somewhere else — a different community, a different practice, a different rule.
Acedia is not laziness. It is a restlessness that dresses itself as spiritual discernment. Its signature is the conviction that the answer is elsewhere.
The remedy Evagrius and his successors give is uniform and unglamorous: do not leave. Stay in the cell, keep the hours you agreed to keep, change nothing while the thought is on you.
John of the Cross.
The dark night of the senses
The phrase dark night of the soul has escaped into ordinary English to mean any bad period. In John of the Cross it means something specific, and worth knowing accurately.
John describes a passage in which God withdraws the consolations that accompanied early prayer — the felt sweetness, the vivid images, the sense of progress. He argues this is not punishment but promotion: the beginner was, quite naturally, attached to the consolations rather than to God, and the only way past that attachment is for the consolations to stop.
He gives three signs for discerning whether a dry period is this night rather than tepidity or illness:
- No satisfaction in the things of God — and none in created things either. If prayer has gone dry but the appetite for distraction has increased, that points elsewhere.
- A painful concern that you are failing God. The person in the night is anxious about serving God badly. Someone who has simply cooled does not lose sleep over it.
- An inability to meditate as before, despite genuine effort. The old methods stop working — not from lack of trying but because the faculty they used is no longer where the action is.
All three together, John says, and sustained over time. Not one on a bad week.
His counsel to someone in this state is deliberately minimal: stop straining to produce what you used to produce, and remain in loving attention without a method. What feels like doing nothing is, he claims, the work.
The soul must remain in peace and quietness, even though it seems to it that it is doing nothing. St. John of the Cross
What to do.
Practically
Keep the time
Same hour, same length, same place. This is the whole of the advice and everything else is commentary. Fidelity in a dry season is worth more than fervour in a good one, precisely because there is nothing in it for you.
Do not extend it
The instinct is to sit longer to force something. Do not. End when you planned to end. Extending turns prayer into a negotiation.
Do not change methods
This is the one that matters most and the one nobody follows. Almost everyone who abandons contemplative practice does so during a dry stretch, in search of a technique that works better. There is no such technique. Changing methods in aridity is acedia wearing a reasonable face.
Shorten before you stop
If twenty minutes has become unbearable, pray ten. Ten minutes daily through a dry year is a serious achievement. Zero is how the practice ends.
Move to simpler forms
When Lectio goes flat, the short repeated prayer often still works, because it asks almost nothing of the faculties that have shut down. The Jesus Prayer exists partly for this. So does the rosary. So does simply sitting.
Tell someone
A confessor, a spiritual director, a priest, a friend who prays. Dryness endured entirely in private turns into a private theory about yourself, and the theory is usually wrong.
How long.
The uncomfortable answer
Longer than you want. Teresa of Ávila records something close to two decades of difficult prayer. Mother Teresa's letters, published after her death, describe a darkness that lasted the better part of fifty years — during which she did the work anyway, which is either the most discouraging fact in modern spirituality or the most useful one, depending on the day.
What the tradition offers is not a timeline. It is the claim that the absence of consolation is not the absence of God, and that the person sitting faithfully in an empty room is doing something real — arguably more real than the person for whom prayer is currently pleasant.
Do not be surprised if you fall every day; do not give up, but stand your ground courageously. St. John Climacus
Stay. Keep the hour. Change nothing while it is dark.
This page discusses a sensitive subject. If any of it is describing your life right now rather than your prayer, please speak to a doctor or a counsellor — and if you are in danger, call or text 988 in the US, at any hour.