HUNGER AND SPIRITUAL DRYNESS
If God wants to draw me higher spiritually, He has to create a situation in which I can get there. He creates a hunger within you, and you yearn for spiritual food. The only way to feed your soul, to mold it and change it, is to give you this hunger. You must absolutely have a hunger before God can grow in your soul. It is necessary for you to have dryness in prayer.
Don’t judge your interior life or your prayer life by dryness. Dryness is a necessary pain. We need to love God for Himself, not for the feelings we experience because of Him. Our Dear Lord loved His Father more on the cross than at any time in His human life. Dryness is the sign of God’s pleasure. It means that He wants to push you higher and higher to the realms of serenity. Without consolations, He wants you to be convinced that He is your all.
DRYNESS IN PRAYER
Spiritual dryness is a gift from God, because it removes the soul from the emotional level and puts prayer on the level of the will, where I am a child of God who does things of God because I decide to do so, not because I am depending on emotions outside of me.
I’ve had spiritual dryness for thirty-three years. But I praise God for it, because I have learned something. When I go into that chapel feeling miserable and dry with no desire to pray, I say, ‘Jesus, I love you and I am here just to praise You, to console You, to be in Your Presence.” If I’m there looking at Jesus, that is a greater gift to God than if I were present all joyful and bubbly. Everyone responds to consolation. It’s responding to God when you don’t feel like it that will get you to Heaven. There terrible feelings should not make you experience guilt; in fact, they purify and perfect your offering of love.
So often I read the words of others who have been going through dry times with me, and they use words to describe their relationship with Him now that I can not. Vibrant. Happy. Exciting. Wondrous! Meanwhile I sit here, I kneel on my knees eagerly awaiting the Mass each week because I’m holding on to it as a lifeline to my spirituality.
I read the Bible daily, I pray daily. Do my actions however show me to be a Christian? I’ve been told that they do by many, and by one I’ve been told essentially that I’m going to Hell for my actions. It would hurt a lot less if that did not come from a person whom I hold deep affection and respect for, and if anything, it has contributed greatly to my spiritual dryness.
Yet I opened this book to this topic, and I find I am told to not treat this dryness as a curse, but rather as a blessing. Much like Mother Teresa for much of her life, Mother Angelica too knows the pain of spiritual dryness; much like I do. Every day I plead with Him to feel a desire for Him like I used to, to feel like I’m a good human being once again. I cry out to Him and I rail at Him about how I want some direction, how I want to know things will one day be better. How I want Him to guide me in my ways and show me the path to righteousness. How I want to become the man that He would want me to be.
I’ve prayed out of a sense of obligation partially, but also something more. For as dry as my spiritual life has been in these last few painful months, I can not forsake it. I know that God exists as a simple fact, as much as the fact that I know that I breathe in air and it is vital to my continued existence as a human being. I know that He is there, and whether I care to pray to Him or not, I know I will, because I have no other choice.
Yet that is not the truth is it? We all have a choice. It has become a struggle to continue my daily prayers when I feel like I am alone in the desert, without fellowship and friendship. Yet I do anyhow, I place prayer on the level of the will, and I continue to pray even when I don’t see a single difference that it has made on my behalf recently.
I cry out daily to be consoled over the gaping hole in my heart. I pray desperately to be given the same peace that she has…and every time I ask, I seem to be given the same response, “No.” Ten months of sorrows, ten months of pain. “no”. I just want to be me again, a better me even. “no”.
That is all I have come to expect of Him, and I have yet to be surprised. Yet that willful choice to continue to worship Him, to continue to praise Him even in these storms…I will. I must. Because as much as I may hate the answer “no”, I can not and will not allow myself to cease praising Him, because in the end, He is all I have left.
Please Lord, pull me out of this muck…I just want to be vibrant again, and I don’t want it to be based off another person’s feelings for me. That’s a part of what has reduced me to what I am now. The other part is my own failings as a human being, and if it is not too much to ask Lord, can You pull me up from those as well? I know You will say "no", but it never, ever, hurts to beg.
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