Lesson 6

Spiritual Consolations & Dealing with Dryness

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Introduction to Real Prayer is based on Prayer Works: Getting a Grip on Catholic Spirituality by Matthew Leonard.

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Lesson Six

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1. What are spiritual consolations?

Answer: These are little tastes of heaven even as we temper our taste for the things of the world. They typically happen early on as a person is making a real effort to grow in the spiritual life (e.g. praying regularly, fighting bad habits, making sacrifices) and generally occur while praying.

Examples of these consolations would be an extremely deep sense of peace, a powerful sense of gratitude and joy welling up in your heart, or even something like a pleasant kind of burning sensation as a fire of love inflames your soul. These are sensible gifts (i.e. you feel them) given by God as a kind of reward for our faithfulness and encouragement to keep going.

2. What is the danger of spiritual consolations?

Answer: The danger is confusing the feelings of spiritual consolations with spiritual growth. Spiritual growth isn’t about how you feel. It’s about how you live. It’s about manifesting the fruits of the Spirit from Galatians 5: “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control” (v. 22). When we focus on spiritual consolations instead of upon God himself and becoming like him, we’ll get off track.

3. Why does God allow dryness in prayer?

Answer: It’s part of our maturation process in the spiritual life. God is preparing us to grow into the next stage of the spiritual life. The point of the dryness is to teach us to seek him for who he is instead of how he makes us feel or what he does for us. 

4. What does St. John of the Cross call the period of dryness leading up to the second stage of the spiritual life—the illuminative Way? Why?

Answer: He calls it the “passive purification of the senses” or the “night of sense”. He calls it a “night” because our relationship with God has become a bit more obscure, so to speak. But even though the presence of God is more “obscure” and we don’t sense him as much, he’s actually gotten closer to us. We just haven’t yet developed the spiritual senses to recognize his nearness.

St. John of the Cross uses the analogy of the sun to explain this. He asks what happens to us if we look directly at the sun? We’re blinded. Why? Because it’s so bright that we don’t have the senses to look right into its incredible luminosity. That’s like what’s happening in this “night of sense”. Even though he’s actually gotten closer to us and is working on us in a new and deeper way, we don’t feel God because we haven’t yet developed the spiritual senses to experience him on that deeper level.

5. What should you do when you start experiencing dryness in prayer or the “night of sense”?

Answer: Keep showing up to your daily prayer because it’s a normal part of the path of spiritual growth. Also, the saints say that when you feel this kind of dryness and still seek the Lord in prayer, it’s actually more meritorious than when you’re sailing right along in the spiritual life. The reason is because by seeking him when you don’t feel like it, you’re showing him that you love him no matter what you feel or don’t feel.