I have been praying for forty years. Some of those years, prayer felt like breathing - natural, sustaining, essential. Other years, prayer felt like shouting into a canyon and hearing only my own echo come back.
If your prayer life feels dead right now, I want to tell you something that might seem counterintuitive: that might be exactly where you need to be.
The Myth of the Prayer Life
We talk about prayer as if it should be consistently rewarding - as if a "good" prayer life means feeling God's presence every time we kneel. The great pray-ers of the Christian tradition tell a different story. Teresa of Avila compared prayer to watering a garden - sometimes the water flows freely, sometimes you are hauling it bucket by bucket from a deep well. Both are watering. Both are prayer.
The Ignatian tradition, which shapes my own practice, distinguishes between consolation and desolation. Consolation is the felt sense of God's nearness - peace, warmth, clarity. Desolation is the absence of that feeling - dryness, confusion, distance. Ignatius taught that both states carry spiritual information. Consolation tells you where God is drawing you. Desolation tells you where God is stretching you.
The mistake is to treat consolation as the goal and desolation as the failure. Both are prayer. Both are relationship.
Why Empty Prayer Matters
Here is what I have learned in two decades of hospital chaplaincy, sitting with people in the worst moments of their lives: prayer that feels empty is often the most honest prayer you will ever pray.
When prayer feels full, there is always the danger that you are praying to the feeling rather than to God. You come to the experience seeking consolation, and if you get it, you leave satisfied - but you may not have actually encountered the living God. You encountered a feeling about God, which is not the same thing.
When prayer feels empty, pretense is stripped away. You are not praying for the reward. You are praying because you choose to show up. That, I would argue, is closer to love than anything that feels good.
A Practice for Dry Seasons
If prayer feels like talking to a wall, try this: stop talking.
The contemplative tradition calls this centering prayer. You choose a sacred word - a single word that represents your intention to be present to God. "Jesus." "Peace." "Here." Then you sit in silence. When thoughts come - and they will - you gently return to the word. Not as a mantra, not as a technique, but as a gesture of consent. You are saying: "I am here. I am willing. I am not going anywhere."
You may feel nothing. That is fine. You are not praying for a feeling. You are praying for a relationship. Relationships are built on showing up, especially when it costs you something.
Twenty minutes. No expectations. No performance metrics. Just you, in silence, with whatever God chooses to do with it.
Some days, the silence will feel like absence. Other days - and you will not be able to predict which ones - the silence will feel like the fullest room you have ever been in. Both are prayer. Both are real. Both are held by a God who is closer than your next breath, even when you cannot feel Him there.
