One winter a number of years ago, I was filled with a deep discontent and longing whose aim I could not identify. After several weeks of being close to despair, it slowly came to me that I was fed up with prayer as I knew it. I didn’t want to pray anymore to my concept of God—I wanted to experience God himself.

As we have seen with the “Arab Spring,” social and political revolutions come about because of discontent. This is no less true of spiritual revolutions within the human heart. We sometimes experience a “desert time” or a “divine discontent”—a longing for change or deepening prompted by the Spirit of God. We seek a truer, freer, and more personal dialogue with God.

There are many forms that desert times take, but the yearning for God prompted by spiritual discontent is a common one, though often misunderstood. Sometimes we do not even know what or who we are yearning for in this “parched land” (Psalm 143:6). But a new path for the soul that has been described by saints and sages down through the centuries relates to God’s call to contemplative prayer.

Theologian Martin Laird writes that Saint John of the Cross spoke of the spiritual dryness that comes during “discursive” prayer, by which he means “any form of prayer that involves a good deal of mental activity, reflection, devotion, imagining Bible scenes, saying set prayers—all the work of the thinking mind.”[1]

John of the Cross says the first sign that our prayer life is beginning to mature into contemplation is that “one cannot make discursive meditation or receive satisfaction from it as before. Dryness is now the outcome of fixing the senses on subjects that formerly provided satisfaction.”[2]

The second sign in the sequence described by John of the Cross is that we are “disinclined to pray the way we once did.”[3] This is not laziness but a disenchantment with prayer for or about particular subjects. This was the place I found myself in that winter a number of years ago.

The third sign “is that the person likes to remain alone in loving awareness of God, instead of practicing the devotions and praying with words that previously characterized prayer.”[4]

 

Join the Conversation

Where are you in your prayer life? Martin Laird says the natural maturing of our prayer is into the simplicity of contemplative prayer, perhaps best described as a loving awareness of God. Does the scheme that John of the Cross outlines above describe any aspect of your own spiritual hunger?

Don Simpson: Don Simpson is a certified spiritual director in Colorado Springs and is senior editor at NavPress. He is coauthor with Dallas Willard of Revolution of Character (NavPress, 2005). He also participated in launching Discipleship Journal and The Small Group Letter, and was cofounder of Helmers & Howard, Publishers.

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