by Mother Linda Malia

I have nothing but respect for our newsletter’s editor, Beth Weeks.  I wouldn’t want her job!  I don’t know that I’d have the patience to deal with individuals like myself who wait until just before an assignment is due to begin work.  Inevitably, zero hour finds me hunched over my keyboard hoping for the best.  Sometimes, to my relief, a likely theme suggests itself; other times I just start writing and pray for inspiration.  Perhaps it’s simply the nature of the creative process. Who knows.  There are those wonderful exhilarating stretches when the ideas come fast and furious, and then there are those dreadful intervals when the well seems to have run dry, and you’re certain that you will never again have another good idea as long as you live.  

I mention this because these “dry spells” are not unlike the droughts we all experience in our spiritual life now 

and then.  Sometimes our spiritual life is richly rewarding.  We enter into it easily, like one friend eagerly seeking out the presence of another.  The words of scripture resonate within us, and prayer comes effortlessly.  Our hearts are stirred as we immerse ourselves within the embrace of the Holy, filling us with a sensation of peace which spills over into our daily life.  We’ve all experienced times like these, perhaps at home in the quiet of our private devotions, or perhaps as we gather at the Lord’s Table and feel ourselves drawn into the mystery of salvation by the Risen One himself. 

There are other times, however, when, for whatever reason, the joy and satisfaction that formerly marked our spiritual life seems to have vanished, dried up.  What remains is a kind of emptiness, a feeling of discouragement, a restlessness of spirit that disrupts our relationship with God.  We want to pray but somehow we cannot.  Our heart still yearns for God, hungers for the consolation of God’s presence, but for some reason God, who previously seemed as close as our own heartbeat now seems somehow distant – perhaps even absent.  This terrible sense of emptiness is sometimes referred to as being “in desolation” – to draw upon the writings of St. Ignatius of Loyola  - and what greater desolation can afflict the human soul than to feel that one has suddenly been set adrift in a world bereft of the divine?

At such times it may be comforting to know that God hasn’t gone anywhere, despite how we may feel.  This terrible barrenness which pervades our prayer life from time to time is simply part of being human.  Painful though they may be, these intervals of “desolation” are as natural to the process of spiritual growth as those wonderful fruitful periods.  The problem is, we’d much rather do without the former.  Of course we all wish that our prayer life could always be rewarding and enjoyable.  Like Lucy in the Peanuts comic strip, we don’t want ups and downs, we just want ups and ups!  But ironically, sometimes it’s those “downs” that God uses in order to draw our attention to aspects of our spiritual life that may need consideration.  Perhaps what we’re experiencing is growing pains: our spirituality needs to grow and develop in order to sustain us as we journey on.  The faith that sustained us when we were younger needs to make way for something more mature.  Or maybe we’ve been so busy lately that we’ve been neglecting our daily devotions.  Now suddenly, when God seems to have absented himself from our lives, we realize how much that relationship means to us. 

The thing to do at such times when prayer seems so unrewarding, and we’re tempted to give up altogether, is to persevere in prayer, however frustrated we may feel, and not allow desolation get the better of us.  God will see us through this desert time.  Consolation will return, but in the meanwhile we have serious soul work to do. Desolation is a humbling experience, but a necessary one.  It reminds us that the wonderful fruits of our prayers are not something we achieve by our own merits or purely by our own efforts.  They are God’s gift to us.  Sometimes desolation is God’s way of letting us know that when we were congratulating ourselves on the wonderful spiritual progress we had achieved, in fact, all that time God was carrying us on his shoulders, like a parent with a small child, and now he sets us down and invites us to learn to walk beside him.