Aridity in Prayer

Sister Christine examines difficult themes of aridity, silence, solitude, and the hidden work of God in the soul. Drawing deeply on the Carmelite tradition, especially St John of the Cross, as well as more recent spiritual guides, including Fr Gilbert Shaw, she considers the painful experience of dryness in prayer not as failure but as part of the soul’s purification and growth into deeper trust. Prayer, she suggests, often leads not to consolation but to a stripping away of certainties, drawing the soul into the silence and loneliness of the desert where God alone can sustain it. These essays combine spiritual realism with quiet hope, reflecting on solitude, temptation, contemplative vocation, and the ‘love behind the Passion’ that lies at the heart of Christian prayer. Rooted in lived experience, Sister Christine writes about boredom, fear, inner darkness, and perseverance, while revealing how contemplative prayer gradually enlarges the heart in love for God and for the suffering world.