Navigating Spiritual Dryness in the Desert Seasons of Faith

Blog by the Unhurried Living Team

There is a season in the life of faith that nobody quite prepares you for. It is not crisis, and it is not flourishing. Prayer still happens, but something feels thin. God, who once seemed close, now feels strangely out of reach. If you have been quietly wondering whether something is wrong with you, Gem Fadling's conversation with Anglican priest and author Tish Harrison Warren offers something more valuable than an answer: it offers a name for what you are experiencing, and a reason to stay.

What Is Spiritual Dryness, and Why Does It Catch Us Off Guard?

The American church, Tish Harrison Warren observes, has tended to focus on two seasons of the spiritual life: the bright beginning, full of conversion excitement and youthful exuberance, and the final chapter, where figures like Eugene Peterson offer the wisdom of a life fully lived. What gets skipped, Tish suggests, is the long stretch in the middle. That middle stretch is where most of us actually live, and spiritual dryness is one of its most disorienting features.

Tish Harrison Warren describes the moment her own desert season began not as a dramatic fall, but as a quiet drop in signal. Prayer, which had always felt connected, started feeling like the line had gone dead. She had no category for it that did not involve guilt. Was she sinning? Had she drifted? Was she simply not trying hard enough? The word she eventually found for this experience was one the historic church has used for seventeen hundred years: aridity. Spiritual aridity, drawn from the desert fathers and mothers, names the experience of dryness not as evidence of failure, but as a recognized and even necessary season of formation.

That reframe matters more than it might first appear. When spiritual dryness is understood as a symptom of something broken, the instinct is to fix it fast. But when it is understood as a season with its own particular work to do, something shifts. Tish Harrison Warren wrote her book What Grows in Weary Lands not as a guide through the desert, but as field notes from inside it. She is not handing readers a map. She is sitting with them in the not-yet-knowing.

One small practice to begin: notice the language you are using about your current season. Are you calling it failure? Try calling it aridity instead. The word itself carries centuries of company.

If you are ready to explore resources that companion you through seasons like this, explore it here.

How Does Waiting on God's Timing Feel When You Are in the Messy Middle?

Waiting on God's timing is rarely the difficulty it sounds like in theory. In practice, it feels more like being stranded at a fork in the road with no signposts. Gem Fadling uses exactly that image in this conversation: standing at the fork, able to see the path behind you, unable to see what comes next, and not knowing how long you will remain in that in-between place.

Tish Harrison Warren draws on the spiritual director she worked with during her own desert season, a woman who kept gently refusing to give her the answers she wanted. When Tish said she felt lost, her spiritual director said: maybe just be lost for a while. When Tish said she did not know if anything was happening, her spiritual director said: maybe just not know for a while. This drove Tish, by her own admission, absolutely crazy. She wanted a solution. What she was being offered instead was permission to stay in the waiting.

The messy middle of life, as Tish frames it, is not a waiting room before the real life begins. It is the place where something essential is being formed. She points to Jesus himself: immediately after his baptism, the voice from heaven, the Spirit descending like a dove, all that unmistakable glory, he did not go straight into public ministry. He went into the desert. Forty days of apparently nothing. No healing. No preaching. Just the wilderness. And yet that time was not insignificant; it was necessary. Waiting on God's timing in the messy middle of life is not wasted time. It is formation time, even when it feels like absence.

The small practice here is simple and uncomfortable: resist the urge to narrate your way out of the season. Tish's spiritual director was pointing toward something the desert fathers and mothers knew well: the work cannot be rushed, and explaining it away is its own form of escape.

You do not have to figure this out alone; trained guides are available to sit with you in these seasons. Find it here.

What Does Spiritual Aridity Teach Us That Nothing Else Can?

Spiritual aridity, Tish Harrison Warren insists, is not a detour from the Christian life. It is part of it. And there are things that can only be learned inside it. This is not a comfortable claim, but it is an honest one, and it is the claim at the heart of What Grows in Weary Lands.

To illustrate it, Tish turns to desert plants. She describes how plants that survive in arid conditions adapt in ways that are almost counterintuitive. Some learn to wick moisture from the air itself, drawing in any small good thing and holding it. Others appear to die entirely, becoming what botanists call resurrection plants: dormant, seemingly lifeless, yet capable of bursting back to life the moment even a trickle of water arrives. Decades can pass in apparent dormancy, and then: life. And then there are trees whose roots press deeper and deeper the drier the soil becomes, some reaching down as far as a hundred feet in their search for a source.

Tish offers these not as illustrations of endurance but as portraits of what spiritual aridity actually grows in us, if we stay. The capacity to receive small goodnesses without demanding large ones. The willingness to appear dormant without concluding that we are dead. The slow deepening of roots in a soul that is learning to draw from something underground and invisible.

The key image Tish returns to from the desert fathers and mothers is the instruction to stay in your cell. A monk's cell was not just a room; it was the whole of a person's life: work, prayer, relationships, ordinary rhythms. To stay in your cell was to stay in your actual life, not the life you wished you had, not the life that seemed more spiritually productive elsewhere. The elder monk's word to a discouraged brother who wanted to leave: you are not made whole by your efforts, but by God's mercy. Go back. Stay.

Spiritual aridity, understood this way, is not a problem to be solved. It is an invitation to a stability of heart that can only be forged in the middle.

One practice: name one relationship or rhythm you have been tempted to abandon because it no longer feels spiritually alive. Consider staying in it this week, not straining, just remaining.

What Spiritual Dryness and Resilience Have in Common

The Quiet Fruit of Staying in Desert Seasons

Gem Fadling shares her own nursing mother story in this conversation, a quiet moment from the 1990s, before smartphones, in a rocking chair, holding her son and looking into his face. In that still moment, she sensed the Holy Spirit saying simply: this is how I feel about you. And then: this counts.

That moment reordered something in her understanding of what it means to meet God. It was not transactional. It was not earned. It was simply presence meeting presence.

Tish Harrison Warren tells a parallel story from her own book. She describes weaning her daughter, who came to her crying in the night. Tish held her, but did not nurse her. And after just a minute, her daughter quieted, curled into her, and rested. She did not want the milk anymore. She just wanted her mother. Tish connects this to Psalm 131, the image of a weaned child resting in a parent's presence, and to John of the Cross's language of God setting aside what once nourished us so that we might learn to come for presence rather than for what presence can give us.

Desert seasons of faith are, at their core, an invitation into exactly this kind of relationship. To come to God not for the experience, not for the insight, not for the answer, but simply because God is there. That shift, from instrumental faith to relational faith, is the slow fruit of spiritual aridity. It does not feel like growth while it is happening. It feels like loss. But Gem, Tish, and the long line of desert mothers and fathers who have come before them agree: something is being formed in the dry ground that could not have been formed any other way.

The practice here: the next time you sit down to pray and feel nothing, try staying anyway. Not straining. Not performing. Just being present to One who is already present to you.

When Desert Seasons Become the Place You Meet God

Desert seasons of spiritual dryness are not evidence that faith has failed. They are the place, as Tish Harrison Warren puts it, where we actually meet God. The desert fathers and mothers expected this. The psalmist named it. Jesus himself walked through it. What grows in weary lands is not nothing. It is a stability of heart, a depth of root, a capacity for presence that no flourishing season alone can produce.

If this conversation resonated with something you are carrying, the Weekly Email from Unhurried Living offers a gentle, ongoing companionship for the long middle. Sign up here. And if you are ready to go deeper into a sustainable rhythm of soul care, the Unhurried Daily Email is a 40-day devotional to help you find your footing. Get started here.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What does it mean to stay in your cell? A: In the tradition of the desert fathers and mothers, a cell was not just a physical room; it was the whole of a person's life, including prayer, work, relationships, and daily rhythms. To stay in your cell means to remain present to your actual life rather than fleeing into distraction, comparison, or the hope that a different circumstance would make faith easier. It is a practice of faithful staying, grounded in God's mercy rather than personal performance.

Q: How do I find God in the wilderness? A: The desert fathers and mothers, along with writers like Tish Harrison Warren, suggest that the wilderness is not a place God has abandoned. It is often the place where God is most quietly and deeply at work. Practices like spiritual direction, simple presence in prayer, and learning to receive small goodnesses can help. The invitation is not to find your way out of the wilderness, but to be present within it.

Q: Why does my prayer life feel empty? A: An empty prayer life is not automatically a sign that something has gone wrong. The historic church gave this experience a name: spiritual aridity. Seventeen hundred years of Christian tradition recognizes dryness in prayer as a season of formation, not failure. What is being formed in that season, according to Tish Harrison Warren, is the capacity to come to God for God's own presence rather than for particular experiences or answers.

Q: Is spiritual dryness the same as losing my faith? A: Spiritual dryness and losing faith are not the same thing. Dryness, or aridity, is a recognized season within a living faith. It is often characterized by continued practice alongside absent feeling. Many who have walked through deep aridity, including figures like St. Teresa of Avila, found their faith not weakened but quietly deepened by the experience.

Q: How long does spiritual aridity last? A: One of the hardest truths Tish Harrison Warren names in What Grows in Weary Lands is that aridity does not come with a timeline. The desert fathers and mothers prayed for decades before experiencing the fruit of their faithfulness. St. Teresa of Avila struggled with doubt for years and experienced a profound moment of consolation only near the end of her life. Trusting the season without knowing its length is itself part of the formation.