Do not give up prayer on any account, no matter how dry or rotten you feel; every moment, especially before Him in the Tabernacle, is a certain, positive gain; the effect will be there though you may not feel it.

COMMENT: We live in a very sentimental world. So much of the modern psyche is driven by feelings and by emotion. It is so pervasive that we can end up using feelings as the yardstick of our actions, and this can be a hard habit to break. This is especially true in prayer.

God often provides consolations to beginners in the spiritual life precisely in order to reward and attract them to the life of the spirit. But sooner or later they will be taken away, either because of our own unfaithfulness and lack of attention, or because God wants to see if we really love Him, or if we are mere mercenaries who desire feelings in their own right.

There can always be a temptation to abandon acts of piety in the face of this dryness and lack of feeling. This, of course, is precisely the wrong thing to do. Often it is precisely when we are dry and when we find prayer distasteful that we can gain most from it.

Fr Doyle himself struggled with this temptation, and he occasionally tied himself to his pre dieu in order to overcome the temptation to abandon prayer when he experienced aridity.

We perhaps can learn today from St Francis de Sales, Doctor of the Church:

But if, after all this, you are still unrelieved, do not be disturbed at your dryness, however great it be, but continue striving after a devout attitude in God’s Sight. What numbers of courtiers appear a hundred times at court without any hope of a word from their king, but merely to pay their homage and be seen of him. Just so, my daughter, we ought to enter upon mental prayer purely to fulfil our duty and testify our loyalty. If it pleases God’s Divine Majesty to speak to us, and discourse in our hearts by His Holy Inspirations and inward consolations, it is doubtless a great honour, and very sweet to our soul; but if He does not vouchsafe such favours, but makes as though He saw us not,–as though we were not in His Presence,–nevertheless we must not quit it, but on the contrary we must remain calmly and devoutly before Him, and He is certain to accept our patient waiting, and give heed to our assiduity and perseverance; so that another time He will impart to us His consolations, and let us taste all the sweetness of holy meditation. But even were it not so, let us, my child, be satisfied with the privilege of being in His Presence and seen of Him.

St Francis de Sales