The Prayer Thread is a collection of teachings and practical prompts to help as we learn to pray in community. This text was originally delivered on July 20, 2022 as a short teaching at our online weekly prayer sit.
Unfortunately, there are periods when prayer feels as though it has stopped working. These periods are normal, natural, even necessary. However, when we first experience a dry period, it tends to feel anything but normal, and often not welcome.
Especially if we have enjoyed the sweet tastes of prayer early on in our journey, when everything seems to be coming alive, and if the flavors of fullness have been nourishing us for a while, then the first barren period may strike us as surprising, even startling. What used to work now stops working. The flow we felt seems to fritter away. The words become silent. The emotions dry up. The ideas dissolve. All seems lost.
Those who have gone before us call these normal periods by many names. The desert. The Dark Night. A never-ending abyss. While these periods typically do not feel good, they are actually “good for us.” The distaste of dryness, the discomfort of stretching, the tedium of boredom, the sense of dying that comes with surrender and self-emptying—all of these markers of the barren desert help to thrust us into a deepening and widening of our sacred soul space. Like the pangs of labor, these natural aspects of our prayer life may not feel so great, but they do prompt us toward birth and new life.
The arrival of the desert is a sign inviting us into “more.” Saying yes to the barrenness of the desert is a risk that comes with stepping toward the darkness of the unknown.
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