Spiritual Dryness and the Dark Night of the Soul: A Catholic Guide

1. What Is Spiritual Dryness?

Spiritual dryness is a season in which prayer, Mass and Scripture bring no felt consolation, even though you still want God and keep reaching for him. The Catechism describes it exactly: "Dryness belongs to contemplative prayer when the heart is separated from God, with no taste for thoughts, memories, and feelings, even spiritual ones. This is the moment of sheer faith clinging faithfully to Jesus in his agony and in his tomb" (CCC 2731).

You may recognise it this way. The prayers that once moved you to tears now feel like reading a phone book. Adoration feels like sitting in an empty room. You wonder if you ever believed at all, or if it was only emotion. You still go, and you feel nothing.

Here is the hard word. Many Christians quit right here, because they built their faith on feelings, and when the feelings left they assumed God had left too. That is the biggest mistake you can make in a dry season. The psalmist prayed in the same desert: "my soul thirsts for thee; my flesh faints for thee, as in a dry and weary land where no water is" (Psalm 63:1). He was thirsty, and he kept praying.

And here is the mercy. Dryness is a stage nearly every saint passed through, and it is often a sign that God is drawing you deeper. Isaiah wrote for people exactly where you are: "Who among you fears the Lord... who walks in darkness and has no light, yet trusts in the name of the Lord and relies upon his God?" (Isaiah 50:10). Walking in darkness and trusting God at the same time is possible. It is called faith.

2. Why Does God Allow Spiritual Dryness?

God allows dryness for three main reasons, according to the Church's spiritual masters: sometimes to call us back from carelessness, sometimes to test and strengthen our love, and sometimes to purify it so that we love him for himself rather than for the good feelings he gives.

St Ignatius of Loyola listed these three causes in his rules for discerning spirits (Spiritual Exercises, 322). First, we may be "tepid, lazy or negligent" in our spiritual life, and the dryness is a natural consequence and a wake-up call. Second, God may be trying how far we will serve and praise him without the payment of consolation. Third, he may be teaching us that devotion and spiritual sweetness are his gifts, which we cannot produce or keep by our own effort, so we do not grow proud.

The Catechism points to the first cause too: "If dryness is due to the lack of roots, because the word has fallen on rocky soil, the battle requires conversion" (CCC 2731). So ask honestly: have I let prayer slide, cut corners, chased distraction, or tolerated a sin I know about? If so, fix that first. Go to confession this week.

If you have been faithful and the dryness came anyway, take heart. The same paragraph of the Catechism quotes Jesus: "Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit" (John 12:24; CCC 2731). Something in you is being buried so that something better can grow.

3. What Is the Dark Night of the Soul?

The dark night of the soul is St John of the Cross's name for the passive purifications God works in a soul to lead it from beginner's prayer toward deep union with him. John (1542 to 1591) was a Spanish Carmelite friar, a co-reformer of the Carmelite order with St Teresa of Avila, and a Doctor of the Church. He suffered months of imprisonment in a tiny cell at the hands of friars who opposed the reform, and out of that suffering came his great poetry, including the poem that begins "One dark night." He later explained it in two great prose works, The Ascent of Mount Carmel and The Dark Night.

John describes two nights:

• The night of the senses, which is common. God weans beginners off the sensible sweetness of prayer, so they stop depending on feelings and learn to rest in him by faith.
• The night of the spirit, which is rarer and deeper. God purifies the soul's very foundations, its intellect, memory and will, to prepare it for union with him in love.

A warning about the phrase itself. Today "dark night of the soul" is used loosely for any crisis, breakdown or bad year. John meant something specific: a purifying work of God in a person who is seriously seeking him. Many people in a hard season are going through suffering, grief or depression, which are real and need their own care. Some are going through a dark night. A wise spiritual director can help you tell the difference.

The point of the night, for John, is love. He famously wrote that in the evening of life we will be examined on love. The darkness exists for the dawn.

4. The Night of the Senses: Three Signs

St John of the Cross gives three signs that dryness is the night of the senses and comes from God, rather than from sin, lukewarmness or illness (Dark Night, Book I, chapter 9). All three must be present together.

1. No consolation in God, and none in creatures either. Prayer is dry, and the person does not run off to find pleasure elsewhere. If you have lost your taste for God but are delighting in sin or endless entertainment, that points to lukewarmness instead.
2. A painful concern that you are failing God. The memory keeps turning to God with anxious care, and the person fears they are going backwards. John says this worry is itself a sign: the lukewarm do not care. If you are reading this page because you are worried about your prayer, notice that.
3. You can no longer meditate as before. The old method of thinking through a Gospel scene step by step no longer works. The mind will not cooperate. John says God is moving the soul from active meditation toward a quieter, simpler, loving attention to him.

John also notes, with remarkable realism for the sixteenth century, that melancholy, his word for what we might call depression or a low mood with physical causes, can sometimes accompany or imitate this dryness. Four centuries before modern psychology, a mystic told his readers to look for physical causes as well as spiritual ones. Do the same.

What should you do in the night of the senses? John's counsel is to stop forcing it. Stay still before God, with a simple loving attention, without straining after feelings or images. Keep your prayer time. Let God work.

5. The Night of the Spirit

The night of the spirit is the deeper purification St John of the Cross describes in Book II of The Dark Night. It usually comes to people who have already walked with God for years. It can feel like being abandoned by God, unworthy of him, and stripped of every support. John compares it to a log placed in a fire: first the wood blackens, smokes and crackles as the moisture is driven out, and only then does it glow with the fire's own light.

You are unlikely to diagnose this one yourself, and you should not try to. People in the night of the spirit typically need a wise, experienced spiritual director, because the pain is intense and the risk of despair is real. If you think this describes you, find a director this month. Ask a priest, a Carmelite or Dominican community, or a retreat house to recommend one.

Jesus himself entered the deepest night on the Cross: "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" (Matthew 27:46). Every Christian darkness is a share in that one, and it ends where his did: in the resurrection.

6. What Was Mother Teresa's Darkness?

St Teresa of Calcutta lived through about fifty years of interior darkness, feeling no sense of God's presence for most of the time she was serving the poorest of the poor. The world learned this only after her death, when her letters to her spiritual directors were published in Come Be My Light (2007), edited by Fr Brian Kolodiejchuk, the postulator of her cause.

The darkness began soon after she started her work among the poor of Calcutta in the late 1940s and, apart from a brief respite, lasted until her death in 1997. She wrote of emptiness, of longing for a God who seemed absent, of smiling for her sisters while feeling nothing inside. She asked that the letters be destroyed. The Church kept them, and they have helped countless people.

Two things changed for her. A Jesuit theologian, Fr Joseph Neuner, helped her see the darkness as a share in Christ's own abandonment on the Cross and in the spiritual poverty of the people she served. Over time she accepted it, even wrote that she had come to love the darkness as a small part of Jesus' own darkness and pain. She also wrote that if she ever became a saint she would be a saint "of darkness," always absent from heaven to light the way for those in darkness on earth.

She was canonised in 2016. Her life answers the fear every dry believer has: "If I cannot feel God, maybe my faith is fake." Mother Teresa felt nothing for decades and became one of the most fruitful saints of the modern age. Faithfulness is the true measure of faith. See St Teresa of Calcutta.

St Thérèse of Lisieux walked a similar road in her last eighteen months, a "trial of faith" in which the thought of heaven brought only darkness. She kept making acts of faith and died saying, "My God, I love you." See St Thérèse.

7. What Did St Ignatius Teach About Desolation?

St Ignatius of Loyola taught that desolation is a spiritual state of darkness, restlessness and loss of hope and love that the enemy uses to discourage us, and he gave precise rules for handling it. His rules for the discernment of spirits, in the Spiritual Exercises (313 to 336), are still the Church's sharpest tools for a dry season.

Ignatius describes desolation as darkness of soul, turmoil, a pull toward low and earthly things, restlessness from temptations, and a movement toward lack of confidence, without hope and without love, where a person feels lazy, tepid, sad and as if separated from God (Exercises, 317). Consolation is the opposite: an increase of faith, hope and love and a quiet joy in God.

The rules that matter most

1. Never make a change in desolation. Do not quit your vocation, leave your marriage, abandon your prayer time, or drop a good resolution while you are in darkness. Stay firm in the decisions you made before the desolation came (Exercises, 318). This one rule has saved more vocations than any other.
2. Push back against it. Ignatius says to intensify prayer and meditation, examine yourself more, and take on some fitting penance (319). Desolation wants you to do less. Do a little more.
3. Remember you have enough grace. God has left you with sufficient grace to keep going, even when you cannot feel it (320).
4. Be patient. Consolation will come back. Think of the consolation you have had before and remind yourself that it will return (321).
5. When consolation returns, store it up. Remember it, write it down, and prepare for the next dry spell (323).

Fr Timothy Gallagher's book The Discernment of Spirits is an excellent modern guide to these rules for lay readers.

8. Is It Spiritual Dryness, Desolation or Depression?

Spiritual dryness and desolation are spiritual states; depression is a medical illness that can affect every part of life, including prayer. They can overlap, and one person can have more than one at once. Here are some differences that often help, though only a doctor can diagnose depression.

• Scope. Dryness mostly affects prayer and the sense of God. Depression usually affects everything: sleep, appetite, energy, concentration, work, relationships and pleasure in ordinary things.
• Duration and weight. Low mood most of the day, nearly every day, for two weeks or more, is a reason to see a doctor whatever your prayer life looks like.
• Body. Depression often shows up in the body: exhaustion, heaviness, changes in sleep and appetite.
• Thoughts of death. Thoughts that you would be better off dead, or that others would be better off without you, call for help today.
• Acedia is different again: a spiritual sloth that stops showing up and prefers distraction to God. Our guide to sloth and acedia explains how to tell it from dryness.

Depression is never a sign of weak faith, and it does not come from a lack of prayer. Saints and great pray-ers have suffered from it. Grace and good treatment work together: pray, and also talk to your doctor and, if you can, a Catholic therapist (the directory at CatholicTherapists.com is one place to look). Never stop medicine or treatment without your doctor. Our full guide to depression for Catholics walks through the signs and the help available.

9. How to Pray Through Spiritual Dryness: Practical Steps

You pray through dryness by keeping a fixed time of prayer, simplifying what you do in it, and offering the dryness itself to God as your gift. Here is a plan to start today.

1. Fix the time and keep it. Same time, same place, same length, every day. Fifteen minutes is enough. Set an alarm. Faithfulness in the dark counts for more than fervour in the light.
2. Check for sin and carelessness first. Make a good examination of conscience and go to confession. Remove the obvious obstacles (CCC 2731).
3. Simplify. If meditation no longer works, stop forcing it. Sit before the Lord and repeat a short prayer: "Jesus, I trust in you." "Here I am, Lord." Or simply look at a crucifix.
4. Lean on the Church's words. When your own words dry up, borrow hers. Pray the Psalms, the Rosary, the Liturgy of the Hours. The Rosary and the Our Father prayed slowly carry you when you cannot carry yourself.
5. Go to Mass, especially on weekdays. The Eucharist works whether you feel it or not.
6. Offer the dryness. Say: "Lord, I feel nothing. I give you this nothing as my prayer." That is an act of pure faith.
7. Look after your body. Sleep, food, exercise and sunlight. Elijah's cure in the desert began with food and sleep (1 Kings 19:5-8). Exhaustion often feels like spiritual darkness. If you are running on empty, read our guide to burnout.
8. Get a spiritual director. Do not walk a long night alone. Ask your parish for a priest or trained director.
9. Serve someone. Mother Teresa served through her darkness. Love in action keeps the heart from turning in on itself.

When you cannot find words, let the prayer carry you. Pro gives you audio-guided prayer sessions and audio devotionals with calming music to pray along with when your own words are gone, prayer frameworks from the full study library, and a circle of believers to pray with you. Get Pro for $49, once, lifetime access, 30-day money-back guarantee. Keep tomorrow's prayer time.

10. What Should I Avoid in a Dry Season?

The biggest mistakes in a dry season are quitting prayer, making big decisions, chasing emotional highs, and concluding that God has abandoned you. Each one turns a trial into a fall.

• Quitting. Dropping prayer because "it does nothing" is how dryness turns into acedia. St Teresa of Avila wrote in her autobiography that for years she often longed for her hour of prayer to end, and she kept praying anyway. She became a Doctor of the Church. See St Teresa of Avila.
• Big decisions. Ignatius' first rule: no changes in desolation. Wait for the light before you quit, move, break up or leave.
• Chasing highs. Running from conference to conference or church to church to find a feeling. Feelings are gifts. They are poor foundations.
• Numbing out. Filling the silence with scrolling, binge-watching or drinking. These deepen the emptiness. If your phone has become your hiding place, our guide to screen addiction will help.
• Drawing false conclusions. "God has left me." "I was never really a Christian." "I am being punished." Dryness proves none of these. God promised, "I will never fail you nor forsake you" (Hebrews 13:5).
• Comparing. Others seem on fire while you feel like ash. You do not see their nights. God leads each soul by its own road.

11. How Do Other Christians Describe Spiritual Dryness?

Christians of every tradition know the dry season, though they name it differently.

• Catholics draw on the Carmelite tradition of the dark night, Ignatian discernment of consolation and desolation, and the Catechism's teaching on dryness (CCC 2731).
• Eastern Orthodox Christians draw on the desert fathers and on St John Climacus' Ladder of Divine Ascent, which treats despondency as a serious spiritual battle, and they stress perseverance in the Jesus Prayer and the services of the Church when prayer feels empty.
• Reformed and Puritan writers spoke of "spiritual desertion," seasons when God withdraws the sense of his favour. The Puritan Thomas Goodwin wrote a whole treatise, A Child of Light Walking in Darkness, built on Isaiah 50:10.
• Evangelicals often speak of a "wilderness season" or "dry season," drawing on Israel's forty years in the desert and Jesus' forty days of fasting.
• Pentecostal and charismatic believers, whose worship values felt experience of the Spirit, can find dryness especially disorienting. The saints' teaching is a gift here: the Spirit is present even when he is not felt.

Across all these traditions, the counsel converges: keep praying, keep worshipping, keep obeying, and wait for the Lord. "Though the fig tree do not blossom... yet I will rejoice in the Lord" (Habakkuk 3:17-18).

12. Does Spiritual Dryness Ever End?

Spiritual dryness does end, though no one can tell you when, and the soul that persevered through it is rarely the same afterwards. Ignatius says consolation will return (Exercises, 321). John of the Cross says the night leads to a dawn of union with God. Scripture promises it: "Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes with the morning" (Psalm 30:5).

God even calls the desert a place of romance. Through Hosea he says of his people: "Behold, I will allure her, and bring her into the wilderness, and speak tenderly to her" (Hosea 2:14). Many believers look back on their driest years as the time God was closest, doing his deepest work out of sight.

What comes out of the night? A quieter, steadier faith that no longer needs constant feelings. Greater compassion for others who struggle. Humility. A love for God that is about him. And often, a simple peace in prayer that the beginner never knew.

No one knows the day or the hour (Mark 13:32). The soul that keeps vigil in the dark is the soul that is ready when the Bridegroom comes (Matthew 25:1-13). Keep your lamp lit. Keep your prayer time. Tomorrow, show up again.