St. Frances Cabrini on Spiritual Dry Spells

Shamelessly stolen from the NYC Cabrini Shrine website:

In 1892, one of the Missionary Sisters wrote to Mother Cabrini, concerned about how dry her prayer life had become. She received what was probably a surprising reply.

I rejoice with you for the eminent degree of holiness to which God calls you with the gift of great aridity,” wrote Mother Cabrini, “Courage, my daughter, it is in the battle that the valor of a soldier is proved and so it must be with a true missionary. Would that God willed that I could suffer like you, but instead He always treats me like a child.”

What Mother Cabrini suggests to the worried Sister is that dryness and difficulty are merely paths some of us are asked to walk as we draw near to Christ. From her perspective, the issue isn’t how rocky or smooth the path is, but where it leads.

In other letters to other Sisters, Mother Cabrini offered wisdom on strategies for navigating the path:

1. Ask God for Help

“Cast yourselves into the arms of God, enclose yourselves in the Sacred Heart of Jesus, ask Him to work freely in your soul and promise Him never to complain or say “no” to anything He asks of you. Do not exaggerate by making things seem big when they are really small, for all earthly things are small in comparison with God’s love.”

2. Tell Jesus You Love Him

“Tell Jesus often that you love Him ever so much and repeat it often whenever you feel tepid or like a rock. An act of love for Jesus is the only means of enkindling the fire in your heart.”

3. Invoke the Holy Spirit

“If you languish with tepidity and it seems you can do no good but you still wish to be fervent, try to be devout to the Holy Spirit, invoking him often and with your whole heart.”

Mother Cabrini would urge us, of course, to whole-hearted persistence in all of this because “the spirit of prayer knows no obstacles, admits no delay, despises dangers. Its end is the glory of God, the prosperity of Christ’s interests, the extension of His kingdom, our personal sanctification and that of our neighbor.”

One step toward maturity in the Christian life for me has been the understanding the dry spells are not failure of faith but part of faith. If the Son of God could experience desolation, then our experiences of desolation mean, paradoxically, that he is with us even then. This Screwtape Letter has always been a deep consolation for me:

My dear Wormwood,

So you “have great hopes that the patient’s religious phase is dying away”, have you? I always thought the Training College had gone to pieces since they put old Slubgob at the head of it, and now I am sure. Has no one ever told you about the law of Undulation?

Humans are amphibians—half spirit and half animal. (The Enemy’s determination to produce such a revolting hybrid was one of the things that determined Our Father to withdraw his support from Him.) As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time. This means that while their spirit can be directed to an eternal object, their bodies, passions, and imaginations are in continual change, for to be in time means to change. Their nearest approach to constancy, therefore, is undulation—the repeated return to a level from which they repeatedly fall back, a series of troughs and peaks. If you had watched your patient carefully you would have seen this undulation in every department of his life—his interest in his work, his affection for his friends, his physical appetites, all go up and down. As long as he lives on earth periods of emotional and bodily richness and liveliness will alternate with periods of numbness and poverty. The dryness and dulness through which your patient is now going are not, as you fondly suppose, your workmanship; they are merely a natural phenomenon which will do us no good unless you make a good use of it.

To decide what the best use of it is, you must ask what use the Enemy wants to make of it, and then do the opposite. Now it may surprise you to learn that in His efforts to get permanent possession of a soul, He relies on the troughs even more than on the peaks; some of His special favourites have gone through longer and deeper troughs than anyone else. The reason is this. To us a human is primarily food; our aim is the absorption of its will into ours, the increase of our own area of selfhood at its expense. But the obedience which the Enemy demands of men is quite a different thing. One must face the fact that all the talk about His love for men, and His service being perfect freedom, is not (as one would gladly believe) mere propaganda, but an appalling truth. He really does want to fill the universe with a lot of loathsome little replicas of Himself—creatures whose life, on its miniature scale, will be qualitatively like His own, not because He has absorbed them but because their wills freely conform to His. We want cattle who can finally become food; He wants servants who can finally become sons. We want to suck in, He wants to give out. We are empty and would be filled; He is full and flows over. Our war aim is a world in which Our Father Below has drawn all other beings into himself: the Enemy wants a world full of beings united to Him but still distinct.

And that is where the troughs come in. You must have often wondered why the Enemy does not make more use of His power to be sensibly present to human souls in any degree He chooses and at any moment. But you now see that the Irresistible and the Indisputable are the two weapons which the very nature of His scheme forbids Him to use. Merely to over-ride a human will (as His felt presence in any but the faintest and most mitigated degree would certainly do) would be for Him useless. He cannot ravish. He can only woo. For His ignoble idea is to eat the cake and have it; the creatures are to be one with Him, but yet themselves; merely to cancel them, or assimilate them, will not serve. He is prepared to do a little over-riding at the beginning. He will set them off with communications of His presence which, though faint, seem great to them, with emotional sweetness, and easy conquest over temptation. But He never allows this state of affairs to last long. Sooner or later He withdraws, if not in fact, at least from their conscious experience, all those supports and incentives. He leaves the creature to stand up on its own legs—to carry out from the will alone duties which have lost all relish. It is during such trough periods, much more than during the peak periods, that it is growing into the sort of creature He wants it to be. Hence the prayers offered in the state of dryness are those which please Him best. We can drag our patients along by continual tempting, because we design them only for the table, and the more their will is interfered with the better. He cannot “tempt” to virtue as we do to vice. He wants them to learn to walk and must therefore take away His hand; and if only the will to walk is really there He is pleased even with their stumbles. Do not be deceived, Wormwood. Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy’s will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.

But of course the troughs afford opportunities to our side also. Next week I will give you some hints on how to exploit them,

Your affectionate uncle

Screwtape

PS. The saint spent time out here in Seattle too. She founded a hospital here and used to pray at St. James Cathedral downtown (they have a statue of here there now. Yay Home Team!) I know a guy who had lunch once with a priest who was the recipient of a miraculous healing through her intercession. His name, if memory serves, was Peter Smith. When he was an infant, one of nurses at her hospital accidently administered full strength silver nitrate drops to his eyes, destroying them. The nuns, in a panic, asked her intercession and his eyes were completely restored, leaving only two little scars on the bridge of his nose. The documentation was used in her canonization. Years later, as an adult, he was present at her canonization.

Such things do happen.