Is Spiritual Dryness a Sign of Weak Faith? Usually Not
The people who ask this question are almost never the ones with weak faith — and there's a reason the old writers said so first.
By Oleh · Maker of Sacred Hour
No, usually the opposite. Spiritual dryness — praying and feeling nothing — is a normal season that Christian writers have described for centuries, not evidence your faith is failing. The tell is simple: someone with weak faith doesn't lose sleep over feeling distant from God. The ache itself is the faith still working.
You sit down to pray and it's like talking into a wall. The verses read flat. You keep showing up anyway, and the showing up feels like a performance. Then the question arrives: is something wrong with my faith?
Probably not. And the reason matters, because the guilt does more damage than the dryness.
Weak faith doesn't ask this question
John of the Cross, writing in the 16th century, made a distinction that still holds up. Dryness that comes from lukewarmness looks different, he argued, because lukewarm people simply don't care much about God — they aren't anxious about the distance. The soul in a genuine dry season, by contrast, keeps turning back to God "with painful care," convinced it's falling behind.
Read that again. The worry is the diagnostic. If your faith had gone cold, the silence wouldn't bother you.
Ignatius of Loyola got there from another angle. In his rules for discernment he named desolation — that flat, disconnected state — and listed why God permits it. One reason is our own negligence. The others aren't punishment at all: to test whether we'll serve without the reward of good feelings, and to show that consolation was always a gift rather than something we produced.
Scripture doesn't hide this either:
O God, you are my God; earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you, my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water.
— Psalm 63:1
That's a man seeking God and finding a desert. Both at once. The Psalms are full of it.
One honest test
There is a version of this that is drift. The difference isn't how you feel — it's what you're doing.
- Dryness: you keep praying, keep reading, and it costs you something. Nothing comes back.
- Drift: you stopped weeks ago and mostly haven't noticed.
If it's the second one, the fix is unglamorous and immediate — start again, small, today. If it's the first, there's nothing to fix. You're already doing the thing.
What to do while it lasts
- Shrink the session, don't skip it. Two honest minutes beats a heroic hour you'll dread and abandon.
- Stop grading it. Judging each prayer by how it felt turns devotion into a mood report. The feeling was never the point.
- Pray borrowed words. Psalm 42, Psalm 88, the Lord's Prayer. When your own words are gone, use someone else's.
- Tell one real person. Dryness thrives in private, where it convinces you you're the only one.
- Check the ordinary stuff. Exhaustion, grief, burnout and depression all dull spiritual feeling. If the flatness is spreading into the rest of your life, talk to a doctor or pastor — not just to yourself.
Common questions
How long does spiritual dryness last?
There's no set length — accounts range from weeks to years. Mother Teresa's letters, published in Come Be My Light (2007), revealed decades of it while she kept working and praying. Length is not a measure of your standing.
Should I keep praying if I feel nothing?
Yes, and shorter than you think. Faithfulness in a dry season is the test Ignatius described. Showing up without the payoff counts more than showing up when it's easy.
What to do now
Pick one two-minute window tomorrow and keep it — not to fix the dryness, but to stop asking it whether you're allowed to keep going. That was never the right question.
