The Challenge of Patience: When Prayer Doesn't Seem to Work
Embrace spiritual dryness to develop inner strength and peace.
John of the Cross calls it the dark night of the soul (noche oscura). The Society of Friends calls it spiritual dryness. Mystics might call it purification.
Even for people who aren’t necessarily on a spiritual path, perhaps a season of boredom or stagnation might be uncomfortable enough for them to change something. Whatever you call it, it’s pretty uncomfortable. If it is comfortable, it allows complacency (or sloth) to set in.
Sometimes you do move or change something in your outer life—whether it’s a job, relationship, or location—because the discomfort made you aware of your lack of growth.
Other times, the discomfort points out the places within you that have become attached. Some of the places have made you spiritually, mentally, or physically sick, and the fact that you feel discomfort—or at least have that inner awareness of “not good”—is a gift of the Spirit.
Years ago, my Christian evangelical friends told me never to pray for patience because then God will put you in a situation that requires it. I’ve always thought that was pretty mean—to ask for something to help you get through a current situation and instead, you get more stretching of the circumstance. I think it’s a polite way of saying, “If you’re praying for patience, God is really saying, ‘no.’”
I mean, really, how often do we say, “God wants to answer your prayer in a different way than what you expected?” Then, somehow, we twist our original prayer to match what is given and say, “Oh, the Lord has blessed me with favor.” (Insert eye-roll here)
I can’t say I’ve been praying for patience these past several years, but I know I’ve definitely needed it. And my patience has been stretched beyond measure.
But also, this time of dryness has called for me to reorient my prayer. Yes, I’ve been praying the Prayer for Employment and the Surrender Novena countless times. I’ve even done the worldly practice of putting a sign on my bathroom mirror giving me a daily reminder of hope—or actually a rigid deadline—that I will find a job by a certain date. Yet those dates have passed.
So it is really irritating when you hear others’ accounts of how God has answered their prayers. They tell you they to talk to God. They tell you how much prayer works. Let’s face it--sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes prayer really doesn’t work. Prayer can make you more frustrated with your current situation, and you feel a tinge of bitterness wanting to set in. You want to abandon prayer altogether because over time, over many years, you just don’t see things moving. You feel like Sisyphus rolling the rock up the hill each day, only for it to fall back down again.
That’s why I love the readings about the dark night. They’re somewhat pacifying because they’ve gone through the same thing. John of the Cross was imprisoned for many years despite his faith, so I would imagine his prayers for his release would have gone bitter pretty quickly. And there wasn’t a Joel Osteen or other televangelist to tell him, “Just pray! Prayer works!” No, he had to endure the aridity, the slowness, the unanswered prayer.
I turn to a book, Guide to True Peace, from the Society of Friends, which has a full chapter on spiritual dryness. As nurtured as you might be in the silence, even they said you experience this path of desertion:
The Lord makes use of this veil of dryness for various ends, one of which is that we may not know what He is working in us, and so may be kept humble. For if we felt and knew distinctly what He was working in our souls, satisfaction and presumption would doubtless get in. We would imagine we were doing some good thing, and reckon ourselves very near to God, and this self-complacency would prevent real spiritual advancement.
I know I’ve written about this before—how pride can sometimes delude us into thinking God chose us to follow the path WE chose rather than the one God has chosen for us. In other words, we might pray for a particular direction—or outcome—but God has something radically different in mind. For us to cling to that particular prayer might keep us anchored into something that’s never intended to be. That’s how we’re disappointed. That challenges our faith. That’s when we can become bitter.
Even if we still yearn for certain prayers to be answered, the dark night requires for us to loosen our grip on them.
To address this noise—to follow its beckoning—is how the world begins to win another follower.
During this time, rather than ask God for something you desire or need, anchor yourself in silence. The Cloud of Unknowing maintains this simplicity, and rather than pray for something—even a desired feeling—use a single word like “God.”
It can be noisy inside our heads as the expectations from the materialistic world bear down upon our time in silence. This noise often rouses us off our seat so we can heed or serve the expectations of the world. To address this noise—to follow its beckoning—is how the world begins to win another follower. That one step towards the world is one step further from God.
When these voices tempt you, sit a little longer. Just one more minute. Or maybe just one more breath. Let God know that you serve Him, not the world. Here are some words of assurance from the Society of Friends:
God, in His own due time, will help you to overcome all your difficulties; and, when least you expect it, He will give you holy inclinations and more effectual desires after serving Him…His comforts are sometimes withdrawn, but His mercy endures forever. He only deprives you of what is sweet and sensible of His grace because you have need of being humbled.