Researched by the Ignaria Editorial Team · Published 2026-05-05
Every serious Christian encounters seasons when prayer feels flat, Scripture reads dull, and God seems remote or absent. The Christian tradition does not dismiss this experience — it names it, analyzes it, and prescribes a response. The biblical foundation is Psalm 22: "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" — the prayer of desolation that Christ himself prayed from the cross, which means no degree of spiritual dryness places a believer outside the company of the faithful. The medieval tradition analyzed the causes with precision: Thomas à Kempis taught that grace sometimes partially withdraws to humble the soul and detach it from self-reliance; Albertus Magnus described the resulting "spiritual darkness" as a purifying silence that exposes God's incomprehensibility. John Owen (1665) identified a pattern he called "frowardness in our walking" — when believers drift from attentiveness to God's providence, prayer dries up as a consequence. The prescription across the tradition is consistent: patient perseverance, honest self-examination, continued prayer even without feeling, and the refusal to interpret God's silence as abandonment. Spurgeon's pastoral summary captures the mainstream: "God often delays in answering prayer... it is to prepare us for greater blessing."
What the primary sources show
"You must seek earnestly the grace of devotion, ask for it fervently, await it patiently and hopefully, receive it gratefully, guard it humbly, cooperate with it carefully and leave to God, when it comes, the length and manner of the heavenly visitation" — à Kempis frames spiritual dryness as the soul's call to humble pursuit of grace rather than anxious demand for feeling.
"When in such a state and condition God seems to shut out our prayers, and we have not returns of them, we may be sure it is a time wherein God hideth his face" — Owen links seasons of unanswered prayer to the soul's drift from close walking with God, naming divine silence as a call to self-examination rather than despair.