What the Saints Say About Spiritual Dryness
One of the great gifts of the Christian tradition is that we are not the first people to have walked this road. For two thousand years, believers in every century and culture have navigated seasons of spiritual dryness — and some of them have left us extraordinarily honest, precise, and pastorally generous accounts of what they experienced and what they learned.
This article is a tour through some of those accounts — a gathering of voices from across the Christian tradition who have written about spiritual dryness with uncommon honesty and depth. Catholic mystics, Protestant reformers, Puritan pastors, 20th-century contemplatives — the testimony is remarkably consistent across its many forms. You are not walking an unprecedented path. You are walking a very well-worn one.
These are not academic accounts. They are pastoral ones — written by men and women who lived through what you may be living through and found, on the other side of it, a faith and a relationship with God that was richer for having survived the desert.
John of the Cross: The Doctor of the Dark Night
We have already introduced John of the Cross in our article on the Dark Night of the Soul, but no survey of what the saints say about spiritual dryness can omit him. His 16th-century poem "The Dark Night" and the extended prose commentaries on it — "The Ascent of Mount Carmel" and "The Dark Night" — constitute the most rigorous and systematic analysis of spiritual desolation in the Christian tradition.
John's key insight is that what we experience as spiritual dryness or the withdrawal of God's felt presence is often not abandonment but purification — God stripping the soul of its attachments to spiritual consolations so that it can love God more purely. He writes: "The soul that is attached to spiritual consolations cannot love God purely, because its love is for the consolation rather than for God." The dryness, he argues, is the context in which a purer, more God-centered love is forged.
John also offers specific guidance for those in the night. Do not try to force the old forms of prayer when they have become dry; they belong to an earlier stage. Learn to rest in loving, receptive attentiveness before God, without demanding or producing spiritual intensity. Trust that the apparent inactivity of the soul in the dark night is actually the setting of intense divine activity that the soul cannot perceive.
Teresa of Avila: Years of Aridity and the Life of Prayer
Teresa of Avila, John's collaborator in the Carmelite reform and one of the great mystical theologians of the church, offers one of the most honest personal accounts of spiritual dryness in her autobiography. She describes eighteen years — nearly two decades — in which she could barely pray and received little consolation from her prayer life. She writes about feeling like a hypocrite, going through the motions of religious life without any inner vitality.
What is remarkable about Teresa's account is that she did not give up. She kept showing up, kept trying to pray, kept maintaining the structures of the religious life — even when they offered nothing. And she writes about this perseverance not as heroism but as simple, dogged fidelity. Her eventual breakthrough into the deeper forms of contemplative prayer that she describes in her masterwork "The Interior Castle" came after and through those eighteen years, not in spite of them.
Teresa's counsel to those in dry seasons: be patient with yourself. Do not demand more of your prayer life than it can currently offer. Keep the practices, keep showing up, and trust that God is present and working even when the evidence for this is nowhere to be found. The dryness is not the end of the story.
Thomas Merton: The Contemplative Darkness
Thomas Merton, the 20th-century Trappist monk whose autobiography "The Seven Storey Mountain" introduced millions of mid-century readers to Catholic contemplative spirituality, was deeply formed by the tradition of John of the Cross and wrote extensively about the experience of spiritual desolation.
In "New Seeds of Contemplation," Merton writes about the necessity of what he calls "spiritual poverty" — the condition of the soul that has been stripped of all the props and consolations on which it habitually relied and finds itself with nothing but naked dependence on God. This state, he argues, is not a failure but a kind of spiritual readiness — the soul in a condition to receive what it could not receive when it was full of itself and its own spiritual resources.
Merton also writes about the danger of what he calls "spiritual gluttony" — the excessive pursuit of spiritual experiences and consolations that can paradoxically become an obstacle to genuine encounter with God. The dryness that strips this gluttony away is not pleasant, but it is, he argues, deeply necessary for the soul that genuinely wants union with God rather than merely the pleasant feelings associated with seeking Him.
Charles Spurgeon: The Great Preacher's Black Dog
Charles Spurgeon — the 19th-century Baptist preacher sometimes called the "Prince of Preachers" — struggled with severe depression throughout his ministry, which he called "the black dog." His experience of profound spiritual desolation, often in the midst of his most fruitful ministry, is documented in his sermons and letters.
Spurgeon wrote with remarkable pastoral generosity about these seasons, partly because he wanted other believers to know they were not alone. He described lying on his study floor unable to pray, the darkness of spirit that accompanied his worst depression, the sense that God was far away. And he wrote, from the inside of those experiences, about the sustaining power of the objective truth of God's Word when inner experience offered nothing.
"When your faith is small and your hope is little," Spurgeon wrote, "go back to the fact of what God has said and done. Preach the gospel to yourself. Remind yourself of what is true even when it does not feel true." This counsel — holding to the objective truth of Scripture when subjective experience fails — is one of the most practically useful pieces of guidance the tradition offers for seasons of spiritual dryness.
Mother Teresa: Fifty Years of Interior Darkness
Perhaps the most striking testimony to spiritual dryness from the 20th century is the letters of Mother Teresa, published after her death under the title "Come Be My Light." They revealed that the woman who had become an icon of selfless service and radiant faith had lived for approximately fifty years in a state of profound interior darkness — unable to feel God's presence, deeply troubled by His silence, experiencing what she described as "the darkness, the loneliness, the torment" of felt divine absence.
Mother Teresa's letters reveal a profound paradox: the apparent cost of her extraordinary fruitfulness was interior desolation. She gave, in her service to the poorest of the poor, from a place of radical spiritual poverty. Her darkness did not undermine her service — it may have been its deepest fuel, driving her toward the suffering Christ she met in the faces of the poor precisely because she could not find Him anywhere else.
Her testimony is both a comfort and a challenge. A comfort because it normalizes the experience of interior darkness even for the most heroically faithful. A challenge because it calls us to continue serving and loving even when God feels absent — which is perhaps the most demanding, and most profound, form of faith.
The Protestant Puritans: Afflictions of the Soul
The English Puritan tradition of the 17th century produced a remarkably honest literature on what they called "spiritual desertion" — the experience of God's felt absence. Writers like Richard Sibbes, Thomas Goodwin, and William Perkins wrote extensively on this subject, offering both theological analysis and pastoral guidance.
Richard Sibbes, in his beautiful work "The Bruised Reed," writes with extraordinary pastoral tenderness about God's care for those who are spiritually broken and despairing. Drawing on Isaiah 42:3 ("A bruised reed he will not break, and a smoldering wick he will not snuff out"), Sibbes argues that God's response to spiritual fragility and dryness is not judgment but gentle sustaining — the smoldering wick is not extinguished but carefully, quietly kept alive.
This image — the smoldering wick — is a beautiful pastoral anchor for those in seasons of spiritual dryness. You may feel that you are barely burning. But barely burning is not extinguished. And the God who tends the smoldering wick does not put it out; He carefully, gently sustains it until the flame can burn bright again.
Related Reading
→ Why Does God Feel Silent? (Hub Article)
→ The Dark Night of the Soul Explained
→ How Long Does Spiritual Dryness Last?
Frequently Asked Questions
Are the saints' experiences of dryness applicable to ordinary believers?
Yes — and this is one of the most important things to say about the testimony of the saints. While their experiences were often more intense than those of ordinary believers, the patterns they describe are recognizable across the full range of the Christian life. Their accounts give ordinary believers theological language and pastoral encouragement for their own, more modest experiences of dryness and silence. Their experiences are not so alien as to be irrelevant; they are amplified versions of what many believers know in smaller doses.
Why did God allow Mother Teresa to suffer such prolonged interior darkness?
This is a deeply mysterious question, and humility is required in answering it. From a theological perspective, the tradition would suggest that her interior darkness was a participation in the poverty and suffering of those she served — a profound solidarity with the poor and abandoned that she embodied not just externally but interiorly. Whether this is fully adequate as an answer to the mystery of her suffering, no one can say. What her life demonstrates is that heroic fruitfulness and profound interior darkness can coexist — and that the darkness does not ultimately define the story.
Should I read the writings of the saints to help with my spiritual dryness?
Yes, strongly recommended. The great spiritual classics of the Christian tradition — John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila, Thomas Merton, Richard Sibbes, and many others — were written precisely for people navigating the terrain you are navigating. Reading them in a season of dryness is not merely academic; it is a form of sitting with wiser, more experienced companions who know the road you are on and who can speak to it with hard-won authority.
Is spiritual dryness unique to Catholic mysticism?
No. While the most systematic theological analysis of spiritual dryness comes from the Catholic contemplative tradition, the experience is documented across virtually every Christian tradition. The Puritans wrote extensively about it under the name "spiritual desertion." Reformed theologians have addressed it. Evangelical pastors like Spurgeon have written about it from their own experience. It is a universal feature of the Christian life, not a peculiarity of any one tradition.
What is the most practically useful thing the saints teach about getting through dryness?
Across the tradition, the most consistent practical counsel is: stay. Keep showing up in prayer, in Scripture, in worship, in community — even when nothing is felt, even when it all seems hollow. The consistent testimony of the saints is that those who endure through the dryness emerge with a faith that is deeper and more genuine than the faith that preceded it. Leaving, withdrawing, or abandoning the practices of faith during the dryness is the one response that consistently fails to bear fruit.
At The Wandering Home, we believe that the communion of saints — across centuries, cultures, and traditions — is one of the great gifts of the Christian life. Their testimony sustains us in our own difficult seasons, and we hope this gathering of their wisdom has been helpful to you.
What do you do when God goes quiet?
Many believers experience seasons where prayers feel unanswered and heaven feels silent. In the Silence: When God Doesn’t Speak explores those moments honestly—through Scripture, story, and the journey of faith after failure.
If you’ve ever wondered where God is in the quiet, this book is for you.
