Spiritual Dryness

I’ve been hunting through miscellaneous journals, workbooks, and clippings for blog inspiration. I found some good advice for dealing with adult children, prep work for RCIA classes, and notes on my trip to Lourdes. All good stuff! Today I also found some notes I’d made about spiritual dryness. I have a terrible habit of writing down quotes from others but not noting the author’s name. What follows is probably from another writer, maybe two, and I can also hear my own voice take over at times.

When we are dry, we are no longer giving to others out of our fullness. We feel empty or weary. We feel an inner reluctance or resistance to serve because we have no choice. Our motivation is that others are relying on us and we want to honor that commitment but we feel we really have nothing to offer spiritually. We distance ourselves from God.

I don’t need constant consolation to believe in him but there is a silence that isn’t normal. He hasn’t withdrawn – as a baptized Christian I know he is always in my soul. But there’s a blankness. It’s such a physical feeling of weariness that if Sunday wasn’t a holy day of obligation I wouldn’t bother to go.

It has nothing to do with trauma or any particular event – you just wake up one morning depleted. It’s like someone took a drawer out of a dresser. The frame is still there and the space that is left can still accommodate the drawer. You could pile up more stuff underneath but there’s still that void. You can’t 'fix' it. Doing the usual things like going to Mass and praying the rosary are just joyless items on the to-do list like dusting or dishes. They’re there, you do them, but you do it mindlessly.

The first time I had a dry spell I felt shocked. Why would God leave me? I did everything I was supposed to do – Mass, confession, bible reading, my ministries, I even had a good Lent. But faith isn’t about doing. I think he was showing me that for a time I just had to be a place for him.       

Eventually, the feelings of lethargy and nothingness lifted. I don’t want to go back to that place but sometimes I do let myself think about that time so I can balance my Martha tendencies with the necessity to also be a Mary.