There is a lie that quietly empties churches and abandons prayer ropes in drawers: the idea that if prayer does not feel like anything, it is not working. Wait for that feeling to return on its own, and you may wait a very long time.
Dryness is not failure — it is the path
The Catechism is blunt about this. It calls prayer a battle, and it names spiritual dryness directly: the times when the heart is parched, when meaning seems to have drained out of the words. This is not a sign that something has gone wrong. It is, for almost everyone who has prayed seriously, a stretch of the ordinary road.
St. Teresa of Ávila, one of the Church’s great teachers of prayer, spent years in dryness. St. Thérèse of Lisieux often fell asleep during prayer — and decided that God loves His children as much asleep as awake. Even St. Teresa of Calcutta lived for decades in a darkness where she felt nothing of God’s presence, and kept praying through all of it.
Prayer is an act of the will, not a weather report
Feelings come and go like weather. Love — real love — is what you do when the feeling is gone. To show up before God when you feel nothing is not lesser prayer. In some ways it is purer, because it is no longer about what you get out of it. It is simply fidelity.
What to actually do
- Show up at a set time. Do not leave prayer to when you feel like it; you rarely will. Anchor it to a moment in your day.
- Pray small. On the hard days, one slow Our Father, prayed with attention, is worth more than an hour you dread. Lower the bar enough to clear it.
- Borrow words when yours are gone. This is what the Church’s written prayers and the Psalms are for. When you cannot generate feeling, you can still speak truth.
- Offer the dryness itself. Tell God plainly: “I feel nothing, and I am here anyway.” That sentence is already a prayer, and a strong one.
Name the noonday devil
The desert monks had a word for the heavy listlessness that makes prayer feel pointless: acedia, the noonday devil. Naming it helps. What feels like proof that prayer is empty is often just a mood dressed up as a verdict. Recognize it, and you take away half its power.
Keep going. The feeling is not the prayer. The showing up is.
Sources: Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2725, 2729, 2731; St. Teresa of Ávila, The Interior Castle; St. Thérèse of Lisieux, Story of a Soul.