Why does prayer feel dry even when I'm faithful?
Last but not least, there are two types of prayer. There is the prayer that we offer God, and then there is the type of prayer that the saints experienced, where God prayed with them and they experienced intensely the presence of God. Most of us will experience little moments of this throughout our life, maybe during the liturgy, maybe during our prayers. That is when prayer is really prayer, really alive.
But the saints tell us something so interesting: what is best for us is when prayer is hard work. Even the saints who experienced tremendous moments of the presence of God often described times afterward that were devoid of it. St Silouan the Athonite says that he felt like Adam rejected from the Garden of Eden when he lost that grace of the Holy Spirit, and he struggled to recapture it.
His soul was in turmoil. In fact, the saints say this is one of the reasons most people do not have very illustrious spiritual experiences: they could not handle the heartbreak, the pain, the agony, and the disappointment of not being that close with God afterwards. So God measures out what they are able to experience of him, in order to keep them in a healthy spiritual framework without falling into despair.
So we have our prayers, and sometimes God prays with us. We thank God for those moments. They are the highlight of our life, but they are fleeting. They are not all the time, and they are not what we are looking for. We are just looking to humble ourselves and be connected with Christ. There is such a faith that goes into praying even when we know it is just simple prayer.
It takes real faith to cultivate that daily. It takes real work and real energy. This is why we often describe the saints as athletes: they are fighting against the disposition of wanting everything to be good and happy and joyous and spiritually illustrious. They are fighting against that spiritual Xanax people are looking for, where they want all their problems to go away because they said some prayers, as if they were magical incantations.
All they are looking for is to be united to Christ in simple prayer every single day, to walk with Christ. If we mitigate our expectations, if we have a right view of what we should expect from prayer, we let prayer be whatever it is going to be, because we are on the path of cultivating our souls into spiritual health by being focused on Christ daily. God bless.
