What Is Spiritual Dryness? — John of the Cross on the Long Night
⏱ 12 min read
You did not search for this term lightly. The phrase what is spiritual dryness is not the search of the curious or the academic. It is the search of a woman who has been walking through a stretch — a month, six months, two years — in which the inward weather has gone quiet and dry, the prayers have stopped feeling like anything, the scripture has flattened on the page, and the question she is too tired to keep avoiding is finally written into the search bar at the end of a long evening. Is there a name for this. Am I the only one. Does anyone know what this is.
There is a name. The Christian tradition has known the stretch for nearly two thousand years. The desert mothers and fathers called it aridity. The medieval mystics called it the dark night. John of the Cross — a small, gentle, fierce Spanish Carmelite who walked through one of the most documented stretches of it in the 16th century — wrote the book the church still reaches for when a woman puts this phrase into a search bar. The slow practice this essay walks has its 140-day form in the Dry Season Devotional, but the essay itself will simply walk three of John’s passages, slowly, and let the small Spanish saint say what he came to say.
If you have been searching for feeling spiritually dry — a letter for the long silence, you are in adjacent terrain. The letter is for the woman inside it. This essay is for the woman trying to understand what it is. Both serve. Read the one your soul is ready for tonight.
The first thing John of the Cross will tell you — the dryness is not the absence of God
The most-misread part of John’s pastoral counsel, four centuries on, is that the dryness gets read as God’s absence. The modern devotional shelf, by and large, treats spiritual dryness as a problem to be solved — a sign of distance, a measurement of weak faith, a stretch to get through on the way back to felt-presence. John will not let that reading stand. He says, with a directness that has not aged, that the dryness is, in many cases, the most intimate work God is doing. Listen to him:
“This, as we have said, is an infused and loving knowledge of God, which enlightens the soul and at the same time enkindles it with love, until it is raised up step by step, even unto God its Creator.”
— John of the Cross, Dark Night of the Soul
Read this twice. It is not a sentence about a felt experience. It is a sentence about a kind of knowledge. John calls it infused and loving knowledge of God. The word infused is doing the heavy lifting. He is saying that there is a way of knowing God that is poured into the soul rather than reached up to by the soul — and that this kind of knowing does not come through the channels the felt-presence year used to come through. It is not sentimental knowledge. It is not the kind of knowing that lights up the chest in the morning chair. It is a deeper, slower, quieter knowing that the soul receives in a kind of darkness.
John’s claim, which the modern reader will want to slow down and absorb, is that the dryness is the medium of this infused knowledge. The felt-presence year was real. But it was not the deepest thing God had to give. The deeper gift — the loving knowledge John is naming — can only be received when the lower lights of felt-presence are turned down, so that the inward eye learns to see in a different register. The dryness is not the absence of God. The dryness is the changing of the channel — and the channel God is moving the soul onto is the deeper one, even though, while it is happening, the soul mostly feels the loss of the old channel and not yet the arrival of the new.
This is the reframe most modern devotionals will not give you. Your dryness is not the failure of your faith. Your dryness is, in John’s reading, possibly the most loving thing God has done for you in years — the slow apprenticeship into a deeper kind of knowing that the felt-presence years could not have produced because they were too noisy with feeling to make room for it.
A small thing for the body before the next passage
Notice the chest. The dry season sits in the chest more heavily than anywhere else — a flatness, a slight band, the sense of a space that used to be alive and has gone quiet. Press both feet flat to the floor. Let the shoulders drop by an inch. Let one slow inhale come into the flatness, and one slow exhale leave. The body has been carrying the flatness alongside the soul. Let it set the weight down for sixty seconds.
The dryness is not in the chest. But the carrying of the dryness has been. Let the chest open by a small amount. The next passage is here when you are ready.
The second thing John names — the only prayer that lands in the desert hour
The woman in spiritual dryness will, sooner or later, find that the prayers she used to pray have stopped working. The intercession lists have gone thin. The free-flowing morning prayer has dried up. The verses are read but do not echo. What John names, and what the long Christian tradition behind him names, is that there is a particular prayer that does land in the dry stretch — and it is not a prayer of asking. It is a prayer of surrender. The Belgian Benedictine Louis de Blois, writing in the same century as John and walking the same theology, framed it like this:
“You may truly say unto God: As a beast am I become with Thee. Believe me, Brother, if being replete with internal sweetness, and lifted up above yourself, you fly up to the third heaven, and there converse with Angels, you shall not do so great a deed as if for God’s sake you shall effectually endure grief and banishment of heart and be conformable to our Saviour; when, in extreme sorrow, anguish, fear, and adversity, crying unto His Father — ‘Let Thy will be done;’ … Therefore, in holy longanimity, contain yourself, and expect in silence until it shall please the Most High to dispose otherwise.”
— Louis de Blois, Mirror for Monks (in the tradition John of the Cross walked)
Sit with this. The line that does the work is at the centre — if for God’s sake you shall effectually endure grief and banishment of heart and be conformable to our Saviour … crying unto His Father — ‘Let Thy will be done.’ Blois, walking in the same theological water as John, is saying that the prayer of the dry stretch is the Gethsemane prayer. Let Thy will be done. Not please end the dryness. Not please give me back the felt-presence. Not please tell me when this will lift. Let Thy will be done — the simple, settled, costly prayer that conforms the soul to the Saviour’s own posture in His own dark hour.
This is the only prayer that lands in the desert. The other prayers — the asking, the bargaining, the questioning — keep the soul oriented toward changing the weather. The let Thy will be done prayer reorients the soul toward being in the weather with Him. And in being in the weather with Him, the soul discovers — slowly — that He is in the weather too, and that the dryness was not the absence of Him; it was the room He had asked her to come and meet Him in.
The closing line of Blois’s passage is the practical companion. In holy longanimity, contain yourself, and expect in silence until it shall please the Most High to dispose otherwise. Longanimity is the long word for long-suffering patience. The instruction is — wait. Quietly. Without insistence on a timeline. Without despair. Until He decides otherwise. The waiting is itself the practice. The waiting is the prayer.
The slow home for this kind of waiting
The Dry Season Devotional is built day by day for exactly this stretch. Not a journal that demands you produce a sense of nearness you do not have. A page that gives you scripture pre-printed — including the passages John of the Cross and the desert tradition used to walk women through dry years — and a small structure for the let Thy will be done, I am here, I am waiting prayer that is the only prayer that holds in the long night. The format is what this essay describes, made daily, for a hundred and forty days.
(If the dryness is wearing through the standard practice, the companion essay is a devotional for spiritual dryness (for the Christian man who won’t talk about it) — written for the household member who is walking the same stretch in silence next to you. And if the dryness has braided itself with a deeper grief you have not yet named, a journal for healing women — 30 pages that hold the hardest things is the slower-paced page for the grief underneath the dryness, while a women’s healing journal — for the slow years after is the longer-arc version for the slow years after the hardest thing.)
The third passage — the slow secret work
There is one more passage worth slowing for. John insists, throughout Dark Night of the Soul, that the dryness is doing real work that the soul mostly cannot feel as it happens. The work is below the threshold of sensation. The woman in it feels nothing — but the soul, underneath the felt-nothing, is being rebuilt. John uses an image close to Andrew Murray’s, writing from the same broad tradition centuries later:
“Abiding in Jesus is nothing but the giving up of oneself to be ruled and taught and led, and so resting in the arms of Everlasting Love. Blessed rest! the fruit and the foretaste and the fellowship of God’s own rest! found of them who thus come to Jesus to abide in Him. It is the peace of God, the great calm of the eternal world, that passeth all understanding, and that keeps the heart and mind. With this grace secured, we have strength for every duty, courage for every struggle, a blessing in every cross, and the joy of life eternal in death itself.”
— Andrew Murray, Abide in Christ (in the broader tradition John of the Cross walked)
Read it slowly. Murray, walking in the same theology, is naming what John called the deeper infused knowledge — the great calm of the eternal world, that passeth all understanding, and that keeps the heart and mind. The calm is not the felt-presence year’s calm. It is a deeper, slower, more durable calm — the kind that keeps the heart and mind even when the felt-presence is gone. It is the calm the dry night is forging.
This is the slow secret work John insisted on. The dryness is not nothing happening. The dryness is the forging of the kept-by-grace heart — the heart that holds in every duty, the courage that does not collapse in struggle, the cross that has a blessing inside it, the joy that does not need favourable felt-conditions in order to remain. The woman who comes out the other side of a long dry season comes out kept in a way she could not have been kept before. The felt-presence year could not produce her. Only the long night could.
This is John’s whole project — not to glorify suffering, but to insist that the dryness is being used. The dryness, faithfully walked, is the slow forging of a kept heart that the felt-presence shortcut could not have built.
A second small thing for the body, before the close
Notice the jaw. Spiritual dryness sets a small, chronic clench into the jaw over months — the muscular form of I am still keeping the practice, even though it does not feel like anything. Let the jaw soften by a small amount. Not to perform peace. Just to give the face one minute of not being the carrier of the long-walking by itself. One slow inhale. One slow exhale. The close of the essay is here when you are ready.
What John is not saying
Before the close — John is not saying every dry stretch is the dark night in the technical sense. He himself was careful to distinguish the deep contemplative dark night from ordinary spiritual fatigue, from depression, from grief, from medical conditions. The instinct in modern Christian writing to label every hard stretch as the dark night of the soul would have made him uncomfortable. The dryness has many faces. Some of them are medical. Some are grief. Some are exhaustion. Some are, indeed, the deep contemplative work he was naming.
What he is saying — and what holds across all of these — is that the dryness is not, in itself, evidence of distance from God. The dryness is, often, the room He is asking you to come and meet Him in. The asking. The waiting. The let Thy will be done. The slow apprenticeship into a deeper knowing. That work is the same across the various kinds of dryness. The work holds. You are not the first. The saints walked it. You are walking it. You are not alone.
The sentence to keep near the page
Take this one with you, if you take one. The dryness is the medium of the deeper knowing. Not as a slogan to manufacture peace. As a small companion in the long evening. The flatness is not the failure. The flatness is the channel He is asking you to learn to see in. The slow seeing comes. The kept heart comes. The deeper knowing comes. You are not wasted in this stretch. You are being slowly rebuilt.
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A companion for the long night
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Dry Season Devotional. A page each day, with scripture pre-printed and space for the let Thy will be done, I am here, I am waiting prayer the dry stretch eventually settles into — built for the woman who is keeping the practice in a year that has gone quiet, and who is ready to let the long night do the slow secret work it came to do.
(The cluster siblings, if you are walking more than one of these — why doesn’t God answer some prayers? — Edwards on the affections and what to pray when you don’t know what to pray — Spurgeon’s counsel are the prayer-question companions to this dryness essay.)
