Navigating Spiritual Dryness in Prayer (S10,EP10)

Do you ever feel like your prayer is pointless? You show up, but you feel nothing, "know" nothing, and it seems like you're just talking to the void. This experience of spiritual dryness is one of the most common and difficult challenges in the spiritual life, and it's the number one reason many people stop praying altogether.

In this episode, we explore the practical and profound antidote to this dryness: faith and hope. We dive into John Henry Newman's powerful distinction between "notional assent" (simply knowing and explaining facts about God) and "real assent" (letting those truths radically change how you live). This shift is the key to understanding what to do when your prayer feels empty.

We discuss how this concept, combined with St. Teresa of Avila's "determined determination," responds to dryness. It's not a sign of failure or God's absence; it's a critical training ground to build a faith that isn't dependent on feelings.

In this episode, you will learn:

• The crucial difference between "notional assent" and "real assent" and how it impacts your prayer.
• Why looking for God in your feelings or natural understanding is like trying to "force God into something that would make him not God."
• How to understand dryness as the training ground St.John of the Cross calls "naked faith."
• Practical ways to apply "determined determination" and use hope as the fuel to persevere, even when prayer feels pointless.

TRANSCRIPT

The Problem of Dryness in Prayer

Hey everyone, welcome to this episode of Midnight Carmelite. This episode, we're going to be talking about and kind of answering the question: "How am I supposed to keep praying when I feel nothing, know nothing, and it seems pointless?" This is obviously pointing to the answers that faith and hope are the antidote to the dryness, which is feeling nothing, knowing nothing, and this kind of pointless feeling.

Notional vs. Real Assent

I'm just going to start with a broad overview of something that John Henry Newman talked about. He talks about notional assent versus real assent. Basically, you can assent to something conceptually. In other words, you see the reality that these concepts are pointing at. Because remember, concepts are a means towards something; they're not something in themselves. But there's also real assent, where you change your life because of what you've assented to. In other words, you're sitting there saying, "God is real and I'm going to live according to what Jesus Christ, who is God, has said and modeled my life on his."

That change is very crucial because you're now going through your life seeing with, as the fathers would say, "the eyes of the soul" and hearing with "the ears of the heart." And so what's happened now is that assent is allowing you to really act based on the reality of God and pointing yourself towards him.

Applying Assent to Prayer

How does this relate to prayer? Well, if you're feeling nothing, but you have real assent, then you know that you're not simply understanding in a notional way that God is there with you despite you not feeling it. You still act as if God is there despite not feeling it. In other words, you overcome the natural tendency to say, "Well, there's nothing here. I feel nothing." Then, through faith, you say, "No, I know God's there and I know he's real and I've oriented my life towards him." This then points you to hope, which is, "I'm certain that based on what I trust he said, he's going to help me." In other words, hope is saying, "I'm positive that he can't change what he said, and he says what he says and he means what he says." Therefore, if I trust in that—in this, as St. John of the Cross said, "this naked faith"—then he will bring me to him no matter my limitations as a finite human person.

Determined Determination and the Nature of God

I think that this is really important for us to understand because, again, let's say you attend Mass. How you feel doesn't change the reality that God's disclosing himself to you at that point. It doesn't change the fact of God's disclosure; what it does change is how you receive it and how you deal with it. And so, I'd say Teresa of Avila says the life of prayer requires "determined determination." This is what I think she's talking about. I think she's trying to say, look, you're going to come to things where naturally it seems there's nothing. But you have to remember that God is beyond things. So he is no thing. He's beyond things.

By expecting to experience God in how you feel and what you know (meaning knowing in a natural sense in this case), then you're kind of forcing God into something that would make him not God, in other words. You're not doing justice to God by virtue of him being God. If God is infinite and beyond being and the cause of all things, and so you're looking at him as creator, as source of existence, providentially... obviously, He's beauty itself, goodness itself, mercy itself, justice itself. You start going through all these things. You can't look at God in a way that confines him within boundaries because he's beyond boundaries, but he can bring himself into the boundaries of our reality and reveal himself. That's the key thing to understand here: he brings himself into the reality and reveals himself.

The Antidote: Hope and Perseverance

So how do we deal with that? How do we overcome it? I've already said you have "determined determination," but what does that really mean? How do you address that? Well, it's hope. It's back to what we were talking about in the last podcast. You have to put your hope in God. You have to say, "I'm going to sit down and pray even though it seems pointless, I feel nothing, and I know nothing. And I know he's going to act in some way if I do that in good faith."

Because my hope is in him; my faith, my trust is in him. And I think if we do that, we can become more aware of God and see this dryness as the training ground to build this virtue of faith and hope. So we persevere trusting in God, even when we don't see the immediate results.

Conclusion: Moving from Knowledge to Real Assent

I really think this is an important podcast because I feel like this kind of point is where people get tripped up. They think, "Well, I've memorized, let's say, the catechism. And I know all these things about the faith." Well, to go back to Newman, is it real assent? Because is your life matching what you notionally assent to? And I think that's where this kind of... what John of the Cross is talking about when he talks about "naked faith" and being in the dark night. That's where you want to get to. You want to mortify your appetite slowly so you're volitionally free, free in the will. And then now what you're saying is ultimately my hope is in God, my faith is in God. I need to just keep praying because that's what he said to do, even when I feel nothing, know nothing, and it seems pointless. Anyway, I will stop for now and see you next time.