St. Teresa of Ávila on Prayer: How to Pray When Prayer Feels Dry

For nearly twenty years, one of the greatest teachers of prayer in the history of the Church found prayer hard. St. Teresa of Ávila, whose feast we keep on October 15, tells us plainly in her autobiography that she often waited for the hour of prayer to end, that she watched the sand run through the hourglass, and that she would have preferred almost any penance to the effort of recollecting herself before God.

That honesty is a gift. If you have ever sat down to pray and found nothing there but your own distraction, you are in very good company. Teresa did not become a Doctor of the Church because prayer came easily to her. She became one because she kept showing up, and because she discovered something simple enough for anyone to practice: prayer is friendship.

Who was St. Teresa of Ávila?

Teresa de Ahumada was born in Ávila, Spain, in 1515. She entered the Carmelite convent of the Incarnation as a young woman and spent the next two decades, by her own account, divided between God and the world. The convent was comfortable and social, and Teresa was charming and well liked. Her prayer life drifted.

The turning point came in midlife, during Lent, when she stopped before an image of Christ covered in wounds. She was overwhelmed by how little she had returned to Him for all He had suffered, and she threw herself down before Him and begged for the strength to stop offending Him. Around the same time she read St. Augustine's Confessions and recognized her own restlessness in his.

From that point her life changed. She went on to reform the Carmelite order, founding her first convent of the Discalced Carmelites, St. Joseph's in Ávila, in 1562, and many more after it, often in poverty and against fierce opposition. She worked alongside St. John of the Cross. She wrote The Book of Her Life, The Way of Perfection and The Interior Castle, which remain some of the most read works on prayer ever written. She died in 1582, was canonized in 1622, and in 1970 Pope St. Paul VI named her the first woman Doctor of the Church.

Prayer as friendship

Teresa's best known teaching is her description of mental prayer, which the Catechism of the Catholic Church quotes in paragraph 2709. In her own words, it is nothing other than a close sharing between friends: taking time, frequently and alone, to be with the One who we know loves us.

Notice what that definition leaves out. It says nothing about feeling holy, achieving silence, or having profound thoughts. It asks only for time, for regularity, for a little solitude, and for faith that God loves you. Our Lord said the same thing to the apostles:

I will not now call you servants: for the servant knoweth not what his lord doth. But I have called you friends.John 15:15

Friends do not need a script. They need time together. That is why Teresa insisted that the most important thing is not to give up the hour of prayer, even when it feels empty. A friendship kept only when it is pleasant is not much of a friendship.

How to pray the way St. Teresa taught

Teresa wrote The Way of Perfection for her sisters, many of whom struggled with distraction just as she had. Her advice there is concrete and practical. Here it is, gathered into five steps you can begin today.

1. Set a time and keep it

Teresa called the resolve to persevere in prayer a determined determination. Choose a time, even ten minutes, and keep it the way you would keep an appointment with someone you love. Early morning works well for many people because the day has not yet filled your head with noise.

2. Recollect yourself and remember who is with you

Before you say anything, pause and remember that you are in the presence of God. Our Lord told us where to begin:

But thou when thou shalt pray, enter into thy chamber, and having shut the door, pray to thy Father in secret, and thy father who seeth in secret will repay thee.Matthew 6:6

Teresa liked to picture Christ beside her, especially in a scene from His Passion, and simply look at Him and let Him look at her. You do not need a vivid imagination. Knowing that He is there is enough.

3. Pray vocal prayers slowly

Teresa had a great love for the Our Father, and much of The Way of Perfection is a meditation on it. Her advice is to say it slowly and to pay attention to whom you are speaking. If one phrase holds your attention, stay there. Vocal prayer prayed with attention becomes mental prayer almost without your noticing.

4. Use a book when your mind wanders

For years Teresa could not pray without a book in her hands. She was not ashamed of this, and you should not be either. Read a few lines of the Gospel for the day, then close the book and speak to Christ about what you read. When your mind wanders, go back to the page.

5. Do not measure prayer by how it feels

Dryness is not failure. Teresa learned that God is often at work most deeply when we feel nothing. The prophet Elijah looked for the Lord in the wind, the earthquake and the fire, and found Him in none of them, but only afterward, in a whistling of a gentle air (1 Kings 19:12, numbered 3 Kings in the Douay-Rheims). Stay faithful, and leave the results to God.

When prayer feels dry

Every person who prays seriously goes through seasons of dryness. Teresa offers three consolations for them.

First, dryness is common, and it does not mean God has left you. She went through it for years and later saw how much it had taught her about humility.

Second, faithfulness in dry prayer is itself an act of love. To spend time with a friend when you get nothing out of it is to give the friendship something real.

Third, small steps matter. Teresa compared the soul to a beautiful castle with many rooms, at whose center God dwells. The door into that castle, she says, is prayer. You do not have to reach the innermost room this year. You only have to go in.

Christ's gentle words to Martha are worth hearing on dry days:

Martha, Martha, thou art careful and art troubled about many things: But one thing is necessary. Mary hath chosen the best part, which shall not be taken away from her.Luke 10:41-42

St. Teresa's bookmark prayer

After her death, a short poem was found in Teresa's breviary. It is often called her bookmark, and it holds the whole of her spirituality in a few lines. This English version is by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow:

Many people pray it at the start of the day, before the news and the messages and the to-do list arrive. It is a good way to begin.

A prayer for the feast of St. Teresa

If you want help building the habit Teresa describes, start small. Give God the first ten minutes of tomorrow morning. Sit somewhere quiet, remember that He is with you, pray the Our Father slowly, read the day's Gospel, and tell Him honestly how you are. Do the same the next day. That is how every friendship grows.