After I posted a little bit about my struggle with dryness in prayer and learning to be lonely, a few people asked me what the remedy was to such dryness. The truth is, that is a tough question to answer in general terms, because it is entirely dependent on circumstances, temperament, and the action of a Sovereign Lord. That's a lot of variables to try to explain. But I have spent a lot of time thinking about my spiritual journey as I sought to learn to walk again after the devastating blows of the last year.
I think when you are experiencing what people call spiritual dryness, where suddenly prayer is unproductive, you see no forward progress in your spiritual life, and you feel distant from God, you have to dig deep to the root causes of what is happening spiritually. Periods of dryness in prayer are often quite normal and just the Holy Spirit disciplining our Spirits and asking us to persevere. But sometimes, when a period of dryness seems to grow longer, go deeper, and feel heavier than a simple test of perseverance, we sense that something is wrong. We feel suddenly awkward in a relationship with a Savior we've known and loved many times over. We fumble through prayer frustrated with the lack of intimacy because we are hungry and desperate and we need Him and He seems far away.
That is where I found myself as I journeyed through my grief process and the weeks wore to months and we added suffering to suffering in our lives. Suddenly the God I had known and loved deeply since my early teen years seemed a stranger to me, and prayer, the language of our romance, was awkward and stilted and frustrating.
The solution to that special brand of dryness alluded me for a long while until I dug deep enough to hit the nerve center of what was going on. I knew that grief had changed me in ways both expected and unexpected. I knew that it had changed my relationship with God. While my faith had brought grace upon grace, tender mercy upon tender mercy as I grieved, it had also been dealt a blow, a challenge that knocked the wind out of me and left me gasping for breath. And there were many times I felt I was a spiritual feather weight placed in the ring with the heavy weight champion of the world.
When I began to try to recover from the near depression that stalked me for much of the early summer, I began to try to trace this dryness, this lack of intimacy, back to its roots. I read the prayer journal that I began in the weeks after Bryce's death from its beginning to the present. I could see the progression, the slow changes in my conversation with my Savior, but I couldn't really pin point what had happened.
I said in this post that Eucharistic adoration was the short answer to the question of how I recovered. In June, as uncertainty swooped in and added another death-defying plunge to our life's roller coaster, Greg and I made a commitment that one or the other of us or all of us as a family would be in front of the Eucharist daily, either in Adoration or in attendance at Holy Mass. I confess, this was a new level of commitment to me. Getting to holy hour on a regular basis was a habitual spiritual failure on my part. I know well it is because the very dominant Martha in me is scared to death to have to play Mary for a whole hour, sitting and listening. And yet I also know well, it is the better part.
And so I began a regular routine of sitting silently in the presence of my God. Outwardly silent, anyway. It is a struggle for me to quiet myself inwardly, and often takes me half of the hour just to settle in, but as I practice more, it comes more easily.
In that continual practice of stillness before the True Presence of my Living Savior, a flashlight shone into my soul. The deepest, quietest spaces that I had missed in all my searching were lit in His presence. And what I began to see in those corners of my heart were stones. Far back, way deep down, the heart that had once loved a Savior so joyfully, so zealously, was atrophied and cold. It was normal in all the visible places that others could see. It was normal enough that I could function spiritually on one level. But its symptoms were plaguing me, and I knew that if I left this condition undiagnosed much longer it was going to progress rapidly.
There in the safety of the presence of Christ the King, I was able to own the lack of trust I had developed, the anger and the blame I had placed on His shoulders, and the unwillingness I had developed to let Him go certain places in my heart. I found the places where I was digging in my heals and saying "no" to questions He had not yet asked. I found my fear. These were not the early, obvious wounds of grief, which had already been recognized and treated with healing balms. These were deeper, hidden wounds that even I had not really been able to articulate.
But it was in digging very deep and feeling out the cold stony places in the darkened recesses of my soul that I was able to come face to face with God again. And realize that His gaze frightened me.
That was the beginning. And it happened in His Eucharistic presence, where stillness and grace and tangible Divinity became the expert medical team that found what I had been unable to find on my own.
