When prayer is silence
Psalm 63:1
Honesty about absence, held gently.
ContemplativeDryness
When prayer feels like silence
Dryness is the season nobody warns you about. Nothing has gone wrong. You have not lost your faith, exactly. Prayer has simply stopped feeling like anything, and the usual advice, to try harder or feel more, makes the silence louder.
The sessions here refuse the two easy exits. They will not tell you that the absence is your fault, and they will not tell you it is secretly presence in disguise. They stay with the plain fact that God can feel far away for a long time, which the psalms and most of the contemplative tradition treat as ordinary rather than alarming.
What they offer instead is a practice small enough to keep when the feeling has gone. Six to ten minutes. The same shape each day. Fidelity without performance.
What to expect
Honesty about absence
The sessions name the silence directly rather than talking around it. Pretending has a cost, and the psalms never pay it.
A practice you can keep
Shorter sessions than the other seasons, on purpose. When feeling is gone, what remains is showing up, and that should be easy to do.
No pressure to produce a feeling
Nothing asks you to work yourself into gratitude or peace. The prayer is offered for you to say or to leave unsaid.
Written for this season
Sample sessions
Every session is written by a person and reviewed by the advisory council. These are open to read in full, so you can judge the writing before you trust it with a morning.
The well is dry
Isaiah 43:2
Staying in the practice when the feeling has gone.
Reformed
Prolonged dryness sometimes has causes that a prayer app cannot address, including depression and exhaustion. It is worth telling someone you trust, and worth speaking to a doctor.
This is one of six seasons.
You choose which one you are in, and you can change it whenever it stops being true. Selah never infers it from your behaviour.