Spirit dryness

Spiritual dryness is the painful experience of longing for God while finding God nowhere to be sensed. The book treats it as a recurring condition of the spiritual life, not as evidence that faith has ended: periods of felt presence and periods of absence alternate, and the work of faith includes learning not to give up when experience turns dry.

The Cycle of Presence and Absence

The pattern is introduced through Plotinus and Origen as a rhythm of rising and falling. At times religious experience reaches great heights; at others, a person seems to be in a desert, longing for God without finding God. That absence can threaten faith precisely because the longing remains. The account therefore does not equate dryness with indifference: desire for God may persist even when the assurance of divine presence does not.

This alternation also gives mystical experience its particular temporal shape. William James’s account identifies such experiences as transient: they may be brief, and the mystic may lose all sense of time while they last. When the experience ends, the return of God's absence can be frustrating, yet the memory of a moment in which presence felt undeniable can remain a source of gratitude. The contrast between a fleeting encounter and the longer interval that follows helps explain why dryness belongs within, rather than outside, the book’s account of mystical life.

Brief Encounters and Their Aftermath

Thomas Merton’s return from Germany offers a concrete instance of dryness following intense experience. When he arrived in America in September 1938, he was the last person off the ship and seemed dazed. The spiritual experiences he had known earlier with God had been brief, passing moments; back in the comfortable surroundings of Haverford, he found the return difficult and his spiritual life dry. His experience makes the gap between an encounter and ordinary life visible: the surroundings had not become hostile, but they could not restore the intensity of what had passed.

The dryness was not the end of Merton’s religious development. He recognized that he needed to change his life. He renewed his relationship with his family, showed more love, and came home from teaching to play with his children. He also invited students into his home to read and discuss spiritual classics. During this generally happy period at Haverford, he began work on the manuscript that would be published after his death as A Testament of Devotion. These details do not make dryness disappear; they show a life continuing through it, with family affection and shared study taking their place alongside earlier intense experiences.

Practices During Dry Periods

The book distinguishes the inability to command a mystical experience from the possibility of shaping a receptive inner life. Douglas Steere says that the weight is on the side of experience being given. In the same account, mystical experience is described as passive: it cannot be produced by will, and the mystic may feel that the will is not functioning at all. Spiritual practices therefore are not presented as a technique for compelling God to appear.

Prayer, meditation, study, and silence instead form a cumulative discipline. Regular prayer may feel useless and dry on some days and rich on others; the point is not to secure one extraordinary moment but to let repeated practice shape a life over time. The guidance is deliberately modest: begin with a Psalm and the Lord’s Prayer, add a few minutes of silence, and perhaps include a reading from one of the four Gospels. Meditation or attentive participation in a church service may follow. The advice is to find a workable way, experiment, and set aside what is not useful. Such practices are intended to make a person more open and receptive, not to manufacture a divine encounter.

Meaning Within a Life of Faith

The book places dryness within a larger account of mysticism centered on a direct consciousness of God's presence. Bernard McGinn identifies presence as the unifying note of Christian mysticism, while the surrounding discussion stresses that the experience is difficult or impossible to express fully. The contrast matters: a person can have sought and briefly known an encounter without being able to keep it, explain it, or bring it back at will. Dryness marks that limit without cancelling the significance of what was experienced.

The resulting counsel is endurance without the expectation of constant intensity. Rich and dry periods may alternate, and the alternation should be anticipated rather than treated as a reason to abandon spiritual practice. The mystics described in the book are presented not as seekers of ecstatic experiences for their own sake, but as people longing for God and hoping for communion. In that framework, dryness is both a hardship and a test of what sustains the search when immediate feeling does not: continuing attention, habitual prayer, and a desire that persists through the apparent absence of its object.