Sometimes we can only break the bonds of disordered attachments when God leads us to the desert.
It happens in everyone’s spiritual life. Your prayer is dry, and you can’t feel God’s presence. Maybe you have to force yourself to pray, and it’s a very distraction-filled experience to even get out one Our Father. St. Ignatius of Loyola actually has a name for this state of spiritual dryness, “desolation.” He describes it as “darkness of soul, disturbance in it, movement to low and earthly things, disquiet from various agitations and temptations, moving to a lack of confidence, without hope, without love, finding oneself totally slothful, tepid, sad, as if separated from one’s Creator and Lord.”
Any Christian with a daily prayer life surely has experienced desolation to varying degrees. It’s just a part of the experience of being a disciple of Christ. Although we may not always know the exact cause of our spiritual desolation, we can have confidence that “all things work for good for those who love God” (Rom 8:28).
One consolation during times of spiritual dryness is that even the apostles didn’t always understand why Christ would seemingly remove his presence from them. In John’s Gospel, Jesus tells his apostles that he will depart from them but that “it is better for you that I go” (Jn 16:7). Although it had yet to occur, Christ was referring to his ascension into heaven. You can almost imagine the confusion that the apostles felt as they watched Jesus ascending. How could the act of Jesus, the second person of the Blessed Trinity, leaving the Twelve Apostles possibly be to their advantage? The experience is all too familiar as we encounter periods of desolation: “What good is there in hiding yourself, Lord?”
God Never Abandons His People—Including You!
The key to understanding why Jesus would seemingly withdraw himself from the apostles’ presence and your own spiritual life is found in the book of Exodus—as St. Augustine wrote, “The New [Testament] is hidden in the Old.” Similar to the apostles experiencing the resurrection followed by the departure of Christ at the ascension, Israel went from witnessing consecutive, large-scale miracles in Egypt to wandering through a dry, barren desert and feeling abandoned by God. When we look to the Exodus, the desert wanderings of Israel, we will find that the “desert” of desolation truly is for our spiritual growth.
The connections between your own desolation and the desert wanderings of Israel are obvious. Both are seemingly endless, both are difficult, and both lack many signs of “life” along the way; however, God never ceases to accompany his people in the midst of their fears, struggles, and frustrations.
That applies to the Exodus, and it applies to you now. God will provide your daily bread as he did with the manna in the desert (Ex 16:4). Israelites would still complain during this time in the desert, but their stomachs were filled every day exclusively by God’s providence of manna. Their subjective feelings of resentment toward God did not negate his continual care.
Later, the apostles, even with Christ’s promise of never abandoning the Church (Mt 28:20), would still feel fear from persecution. Despite all of these subjective experiences, God was fully present in both circumstances, and the same is true in your own desolation.
One consolation during the “desert wanderings” of your prayer life is that we have something infinitely greater than the manna—Christ told us as much (Jn 6:49–51). The Eucharist is truly the body, blood, soul, and divinity of Jesus. His presence hasn’t been stripped from us. This is exactly the experience of the apostles post-Ascension. Jesus was truly present to them in the Eucharist, but it still perhaps felt as if he had abandoned them because Jesus wasn’t present in the way that he was during his ministry. Every time that we receive Christ at Mass or visit him in adoration, we can rest in the knowledge that Jesus hasn’t removed his presence, regardless of our subjective feelings.
There’s a Reason You’re in the Desert
Another consolation in the midst of desolation is that God only ever leads us into the desert to accomplish a purpose. For the Israelites, God wanted to free them from Egypt’s tyranny and purify their idolatrous tendencies. For the apostles, it was to prepare them for Pentecost. In both cases, the desolation also was meant to sanctify.
The desert wanderings end with the death of Moses and God’s raising of Israel’s new leader, Joshua (Jos 1:1–2). This is all a precursor to God’s next step in his plan for salvation—the conquering of the Promised Land. This is the reward for Israel’s willingness to follow God in the desert for 40 years.
The conquest of the Promised Land is more perilous than merely the physical dangers of war. Israel is entering a pagan, idolatrous nation. The Israelites are going to be confronted with temptations similar to what they encountered during their time in the desert. Their leader needs to be molded and formed by the consequences of Israel’s idolatry in the golden calf incident (Ex 32) so that he can resist any temptations to fall back into pagan worship.
The 40 years added to the Exodus weren’t only punishment; they were preparation. Joshua proves himself to be faithful to God (Jos 24:15) and intolerant of any idolatry (Jos 7:24–26) because he humbled himself in the desert. God is asking the same of us in the desert of desolation. We have to humbly accept that his providence alone will sustain us and continue in our spiritual practices until he has deemed it time to exit this period of desolation.
Those times may be difficult and frightening, but the apostles encountered the same problems in the upper room on Pentecost before the descent of the Holy Spirit. Ultimately, God led them into that room with a purpose in mind, the outpouring of the Holy Spirit and birthday of the Church, and he led us into the desert so that we could enter into his true Promised Land of heaven.
Israel needed a saintly leader to guide the nation into the Promised Land, and the Catholic Church needed the pope and bishops to be infused with the gifts of the Holy Spirit. God clearly uses desolation to accomplish his ends in the Bible, and, again, the same applies to you too.
God’s Ultimate Plan
Sin and temptation form disordered attachments in our lives on earth. Sometimes, these bonds can only be broken when God leads us into the desert. By stripping us of everything, we come to rely on him alone, just as Israel had to rely on him for their food every day. The desert of desolation makes us stronger in our pursuit of holiness. We are actually purified in our desolation, making us more prepared to enter heaven. After all, God always provides for all of our needs, both temporal and spiritual.
Just as God’s providence during the Exodus wasn’t limited to the manna, his providence in our lives isn’t exclusively the Eucharist (although the Blessed Sacrament is perfectly sufficient). God loves to include humankind in his plans. It’s quite possible that God is always looking to raise up more saints to become powerful, heavenly intercessors for the Church. It’s as if God delights in having his children lead the way for the generations of Christians after them.
It wasn’t until God’s people utilized the lesson from the desert that they made Jericho’s walls fall to the ground and began the storming of the Promised Land. It wasn’t until the apostles entered the upper room that the Holy Spirit fell upon them and began the storming of the gates of hell by the Church. And it could be that your period of desolation will ultimately strengthen you spiritually. Your prayers will fall to earth with a force more resounding than the crumbling of Jericho’s walls, beginning the storming of the gates of heaven by a multitude greater than the population of Israel or the first converts on Pentecost.
All this is to say: God could be using desolation in your spiritual life to prepare you for something great on earth, but we know for sure that his ultimate plan is to use it as a means to bring us to heaven—something beyond our wildest imaginations, “What eye has not seen, and ear has not heard, and what has not entered the human heart, what God has prepared for those who love him” (1 Cor 2:9).
