Spiritual Dry Spells, Part 1

Here we go. I’m going to write about three words that seem harmless... but when you put them together, oh boy, watch out! I’m talking about...

Spiritual Dry Spells.

It seems like you can easily slip into a dry spell without even realizing it, so the big question is: How do you get out of one?

I'll let you know when I figure it out.

Kidding.

This would be a really boring short post if I waited to share all of my wisdom with you all until I got out of this seven-months-long-and-counting dry spell. Lucky for you, I'm too verbose to do short posts when I set out to really write, and my posts are never boring... (right?)

So, I sat down to write this post on another one of those hard-to-fall-asleep nights. You know, the ones where you can’t fall asleep because you have such great thoughts running through your mind that you just have to write them all down so you don't forget them in the morning. As I was thinking about what to include on my oh-so-helpful list of how to get out of a spiritual dry spell, I realized that maybe one of the reasons why my current spiritual dryness seems to be never-ending could be partly due to the fact that I haven’t been taking the advice I am about to give you right now.

Internal dilemma ensues. Should I still write this post? What if I can’t remember all this great stuff in the morning? What if I do write this and people think I’m a *shudder* "holier-than-thou" hypocrite?

The battle waged for 3.7 seconds before I decided that I really needed to go to sleep. So I quickly wrote down what I needed to purge from my head, and went to bed. And there those thoughts sat, out in cyberspace, unpublished to the world.

Until now. Most of the time, we, as bloggers, write about our experiences and things we have learned to share with our readers, with the hope that they will gain something from our experiences. Sometimes, we learn even more about ourselves in the process of preparing a post. This particular post, I admit, has some selfish motivations, because while I hope you all enjoy reading it and maybe even learn a thing or two, I'm hoping even more that writing this post will help me to become better at doing each of these things in order to grow closer in my relationship with God.

Without further ado, and in no particular order, my top ten list of things to help you in a spiritual dry spell. The first five are posted here, and the next five will be posted later this week.


1. Go to Mass more than you normally would

Vision of St. John the Evangelist

I used to go to Mass almost every day. It's not something I felt obligated to do, but something I looked forward to each day. I would sometimes come early and stay afterwards just to sit in quiet reflection or prayer, because it was something I wanted to do. When the dryness set in, I started praying even more fervently at Mass. I wasn't able to attend daily Mass as frequently due to my schedule, but when I did go to Mass, I would show up even earlier to spend more time in prayer, and I kept bringing the same petitions to the Lord. After a couple of months of that, with no "visible" results, I gave up.

I explained to one of my friends that I felt like I wasn't getting anything out of going to daily Mass anymore, and I found it difficult to focus on the readings and prayers like I had before. She not only reminded me that we don't go to Mass to feel something - but to worship and praise God - but she also explained that we receive amazing graces just by attending Mass. Just being in the presence of such a sacred mystery, abounding with grace, has got to scare the Devil, which means he will try whatever he can to keep us away! That's why it's so important to continue going to Mass. If you normally only go on Sundays, try to attend Mass a couple of times during the week. If you regularly attend daily Mass already, step it up a notch by arriving early or staying late to spend some extra time in prayer. I can say from experience that when the spiritual darkness sets in, you may lose the desire to go to Mass, which means you come up with every excuse in the book to not to get there that day... but if you do, God will grace you with His presence, even if you can't feel it.

2. Go say "Hi!" to a priest... in the confessional

Wussup, Father! I'm a sinner!

Spiritual dryness can be a heavy weight to carry, which can lead to us letting down our guard, opening up the floodgates to temptation and sin. Even if we don't realize it, being spiritually weary can be physically and emotionally stressful as well. A friend advised me that sometimes we can't do much to get out of a dry spell, but it's important to continue to remain in a state of grace so that we can continue to receive the Eucharist and be fully open to being a channel for God's grace. Even more, frequenting confession helps to protect us from spiritual attack... or at least better recognize particular vices that the sly one can use against us. 

From my own experience, my spiritual dryness has just been the icing on the cake, shall we say, with the other hardships in my life right now, which has caused a lot of stress and anxiety. I start to take this out on those around me, but especially God. I spend days building up anger and frustration with others and with God inside (yes, I even yell at God sometimes... in my head), and my patience was quickly diminishing much more rapidly than usual. It was when I was releasing all of this vented frustration to a friend that I realized I needed to take my soul to the car wash! The second I received absolution, I felt a huge weight lifted from me. The anger and impatience I had been feeling for days was gone. While I still had to come home and deal with the same frustrating situations, I was able to handle them more charitably and with loving patience. There have been a few times where I have walked away from Confession and physically felt a weight being lifted. Experiencing this feeling of God's love is always important, but especially when you are suffering from a dry spell, because it can be a much needed consolation that God's grace is still present in your life.

3. Try to do a Holy (Half) Hour each day

This makes me giggle. 'Sup, Jesus?!

The purpose of this is to make a point to set aside a little bit of time each day to focus on God. Can't do a holy hour? Try a half hour. Try five minutes, even! It can be spent praying in a chapel (or my latest alternative, sit quietly and try really hard not to go over my to-do list in my head), going to Eucharistic Adoration, reading some verses from Scripture, reflecting on the daily Mass readings, checking out some spiritual readings by the saints and other great Catholics... even just lying on your bed and thinking, "Are you there God? It's me, [insert name here]" is better than the alternative - ignoring God. When we (I) fail to do this, we start to use noise and toys and the shiny things of the world to distract us from what is really important, which is working on growing in our relationship with God. Would you not take the time to talk to or hang out with your best friend for long periods of time? Nope! Pretend that God is your best friend by spending some time with Him, because, well, He is your best friend. As with all relationships, a relationship with God has to be a two-way street. God is most likely holding up His end of the friendship, so we have to be willing to put in some effort as well.

4. Go on a retreat

Kairos - Live the Fourth!

I've heard that it's recommended for Catholics to go on at least one retreat a year to work on deepening their relationships with God. If you're in a dry spell, now is the best time to set everything aside and devote all your time to God. It makes a profound statement that you are willing to sacrifice time, technology, work, and other things of the world for a brief period in order to be only with God. While it may not end up being the mind-blowing experience you expect, you will most definitely receive certain graces by reflecting on your faith life and living on God's time instead of your own time. The biggest challenge for me - and many others - is taking what you learn from your retreat and putting these things into practice in your daily life, but it can be an important first step.

5. Serve others

I'm going to guess that she sees Christ in that sweet baby face.

Blessed Mother Teresa felt silence in her prayer life from the moment she answered God's call to open the Missionaries of Charity. Yet, she persevered and didn't give up on her relationship with God. She didn't stop going to Mass, and she received the Eucharist daily. She didn't counter God's silence with the cold shoulder, but instead persisted in her prayer. Most importantly, she continued to follow God's will for her life through serving the sick and poor each and every day. Through this service, it cannot be denied that she found Christ in each face that she saw, even if she couldn't find God in her prayer life. She may have suffered decades of silence, but by serving others, she remained close to God. I'm just going to take a guess and say that's probably one of the many reasons why she is now Blessed Mother Teresa. It's definitely worth years of silence in prayer to spend eternity in His presence.

We discover (or re-discover) our spiritual gifts through serving others. Furthermore, we grow closer to Christ by becoming more like him through service. To become more like Christ, whether it is through serving or suffering, preaching or silently evangelizing, is to grow a little bit further away from the darkness and closer to God's all-encompassing light.

I know that for me personally, I feel closer to God when I am able to use the gifts He has given me to help others. Whether it is cooking a home-made meal for college students away from home, baking a treat for Bible Study, offering free tutoring to friends who are struggling in their chemistry courses, or trying to be a positive, Christian witness to my pre-teen Girl Scouts, I feel more at peace even amidst the dryness in my spiritual life. I know that one of the more difficult struggles for me these past few months has been figuring out how I can continue to serve as my life is in a constant flux. When I felt like I had lost my outlets for utilizing my gifts to serve others, I began to feel a bit worthless. This is exactly what the Devil wants - the more worthless we feel, the less we realize how unique and special we are in God's eyes. This is why answering Christ's call to serve others - in whatever way we can - is so crucial, because it not only helps us shy away from the darkness of the Devil, but it makes us more like Christ which ultimately brings us closer to God.

Have you ever been in what seems like a never-ending dry spell in your spiritual life? How did you eventually pull through?

For other great blog posts about spiritual dryness, check out these great series by Julie at The Corner with a View and Jen at Conversion Diary.

Check back later for my next five tips, which will be posted later this week!

My Ultimate Spiritual Workout

As mentioned in my last post, I spent five days on a silent retreat out at Loyola on the Potomac in southern Maryland.

Oh, yea, feel the burn.

Well, ladies and gentlemen... was I in for my own personal spiritual workout. It was way above yoga and Tae Bo level... it was like the P90X of spiritual workouts - at least for me.

It was obvious to me on the first day that I had absolutely no idea what I had gotten myself into. While I was expecting to receive insightful answers going into this retreat, many of my prayers were not answered in the way I expected. However, I did manage to "tone" my spiritual life in this ultimate spiritual workout.

Silence

Silence teems with sound if we take the time to listen.
One hears the cries of fears that need calming;
One recognizes love that is smoldering;
One learns to bridge the gap between lack of trust and a vibrant faith.
Silence is not void; it is pregnant with life.
Lord, I will meet You there,
in the silence of my heart. Amen

Most of my memories growing up are surrounded by noise. I have three younger sisters, so you can imagine what daily life was like in my household. When I went off to college on my own, it only seemed to get louder. I always seemed to live in the dorm room right by the stairwell, so even my sleep was disrupted by noise, especially late at night on the weekends. Due to a scholarship, I ended up with a single room my junior year, and I found myself constantly turning on the TV or listening to music or keeping the door open to the hallway or all three at once, because the silence was deafening to me.

So to force myself to be silent for five days, and to be surrounded by twenty other people who were also being silent... well, you can imagine how disconcerting it was to be in a place where you only hear the scraping of forks on plates and the wind through the trees.

Make sure you play the rests properly.

Oh, how I longed for my iPod! To be able to click on the TV for background noise! To pick up the phone and call a friend just to hear a voice! Even to say a simple, "Hello," to people when we play the awkward "which side of the stairs are you going to walk on" dance. I realized how much I have come to depend on using noise to drown out the silence in my life, because there was something about silence that has always scared me. I found myself playing my own soundtrack in my head on my retreat to fill the silence, usually songs related to Scripture passages I was reading, but I noticed that I have needed noise even in my prayer life.

But in the silence, there is a lot to be discovered, and it's not always easy to find. Sometimes, it is only in the silence that we can truly let our guards down and acknowledge what we've really been longing for and missing in life. That isn't to say that God doesn't speak through noise - because He has many times in Scripture (for example, when He speaks to Moses in thunder and lightning, trumpet blasts, and fire on Mount Sinai in Exodus 19), and I have also felt God speak to me through the noise which I constantly surround myself. On the other hand, sometimes He can reveal so much more when it is just you and Him and nothing else. Elijah went up on the mountain in search for God, and he expected to hear Him as Moses did - in tumultuous noise. Yet even though he encountered wind, earthquakes, and fire, he didn't hear God in any of those events. It was in the "sound of sheer silence" where Elijah heard God speaking to him (1 Kings 19:11-12). I can only imagine Elijah's surprise and how thrown off he must have been!

But sometimes God teaches us something about ourselves when we have only silence surrounding us. I mentioned that I had an internal playlist playing in my head throughout my retreat. One of the many songs that kept coming into my head was Matt Nathanson's Come on Get Higher. He starts off the song by saying:

I miss the sound of your voice...I miss the still of the silence as you breathe out and I breathe in...

and continues in the second verse:

I miss the sound of your voice, the loudest thing in my head, and I ache to remember, all the violent, sweet, perfect words that you said.

While this song is not Christian, and we assume that he is singing about a lover, I've always been attracted to this song as more than just talking about a human relationship. To think of God as a lover, to miss the sound of His voice, to miss feeling His breath in the stillness - to feel all of this and only wish to "get higher" and be close to God once again. I think for me to begin to realize how much I missed the "sound" of His voice, I had to come to grips with the silence, tune out all the noise, and just be.

Filling My Time

Similar to constantly surrounding myself with noise, I have always tried to keep busy. Growing up, I was lucky enough to be able to be involved in Girl Scouts, work on the yearbook at school, take music lessons, and play softball. Into high school and college, I added on band rehearsal, football and hockey games, fraternity meetings and events, volunteer activities... oh, and I studied a lot. I sometimes look back and wonder how I slept the first 22 years of my life. When I did manage to get some free time to relax, I usually just ended up on the couch. My parents can most definitely affirm this, as I spent the three months between undergrad and graduate school laying on the couch... I did have four years worth of relaxing I needed to catch up on!

When I moved to DC, I had a hard time adjusting because I lacked things to do... so I slowly started to fill my schedule with activities. Band rehearsal and concerts, being a Girl Scout leader, attending a Bible study, and tutoring a lot. Slowly, I started to make friends, and began to fill up my time with spending time building strong Christian friendships. As I became more comfortable, I kept adding things onto my plate with coordinating and cooking for our weekly Newman Center dinners and planning fellowship events for graduate students. It got to the point where, again, I had something pretty much every night. When I would have a night off, you could find me on my couch, but still keeping busy with catching up on my TV shows, reading blogs, or making some sort of craft. 

So, you can see that I like to fill my time with noise and something to do. Now imagine this girl, who loves to always be doing something on a five day retreat.

The first day of my retreat, I went to bed at 10 PM... the earliest I've gone to bed in years. Oh, did I mention that I also took a two hour nap that day? I don't ever take naps. Why did I spend so much time sleeping? I was bored. I couldn't watch TV. I couldn't listen to music. I couldn't hang out with my friends. I couldn't even pretend to do work. Sleeping seemed the only cure for filling my time. This, for the most part, continued to be my pattern for the first few days.

What I failed to realize in the first few days was the lack of things to do was the point. To put away all distractions - forcefully, I might add - to focus on what often gets pushed to the side - time with God.

I've found, especially recently, that when I get some time off after a busy or stressful time, I take a vacation from life. Unfortunately, this means I also take a vacation from God. I don't go to Mass as often, I hardly take time to pray, I listen to less "good" music and jam out to more "bad" music, and I spend my time watching TV, shopping, sleeping, etc. Even though I have ample time (especially now while I search for a job), I often find that I put off spending time with God for later.

My view of the sunset each night.

What I came to realize on my retreat was that finding some time to relax doesn't mean taking a vacation from everything. God is not work, in the sense that it's hard work to cultivate a relationship with Him, but it is work that we should enjoy. Working on my relationship with God needs to be a 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year kind of job. I don't get two weeks paid vacation from God time. I don't even get sick days. If I take a leave of absence, it is unpaid and when I do come back to "work", I have to spend a lot of time catching up from being away.

In trying to discover how to fill my time on this retreat, I saw that God needs to become my vacation from the hustle and bustle of life. He needs to be my sunset on the beach. He needs to be my time relaxing on the couch. He needs to be the kind of feeling I get when I can sleep in without having to set my alarm (trust me, it's a good feeling!).

When I began to realize this and started to treat God as my vacation, I suddenly found a lot of things to do on my retreat. I spent hours sitting in the chapel. I sat outside each night and watched the sun set over the Potomac. I read more Scripture than I have all year, and found a number of books to also enjoy, including C.S. Lewis, lives of the saints, and The Jeweler's Shop by Pope John Paul II. I walked around the grounds while meditating on things I had read. I started off each morning with a prayer in the chapel and finished each night with the same thing. Most importantly, in finding all these things to do, I tried to always unite my time with God. I started to find God in the stillness of daily life. I started to feel rejuvenated, alive again, which is exactly what vacations are for. Now my daily spiritual workout is to remember to take a vacation with God each and every day.

Nothing is more practical than finding God, that is, than falling in love in a quite absolute, final way. What you are in love with, what seizes your imagination, will affect everything. It will decide what will you out of bed in the morning, what you do with your evenings, how you spend your weekends, what you read, who you know, what breaks your heart, and what amazes you with joy and gratitude. Fall in love, stay in love, and it will decide everything. (Pedro Arrupe, SJ)

Letting Go

Imagine that someone has a firm grip on your arm. You try to pry off their fingers one by one, but as soon as you get a couple to release their grasp and move on to the next one, the ones you already pried off clinch right back down again.

Now imagine that the person with the firm grip on your arm is yourself.

Now imagine that it's not your arm on which you have a firm grasp, but your own heart.

I like to know what is planned, so a lot of times, I like to be in control. Unfortunately, this means that I often end up with a firm grasp on my own heart, instead of letting go and allowing God to cradle my heart instead (Psalm 131). Especially at this point in my life - where all the things I thought I would have by now haven't necessarily happened, and all the things I feel I should have figured out by now haven't been figured out - I am holding onto my heart more strongly than ever, trying to figure out what to do next.

This is where I have started to realize that I really need God and His grace. Matt Maher sings in Your Grace is Enough that God "wrestles with the sinner's restless heart." Well, God... bring it on. Let's do this. I'm ready. And even though I may wrestle back, I really do want You to win.