Don’t you hate it when your having a conversation with someone and it feels like they’re not paying attention to you at all?  They may be listening to you while also scanning the crowd, they could be listening to half or at least some of what you’re saying, or they’re just not listening at all.  At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter if they are listening to you or not; rather, it matters whether you feel listened to or not.  

The importance of feeling heard in prayer is the same, if not more hurtful because the person we’re talking to is the Blessed Trinity.  Whether we are conversing with God the Father, Christ our brother, or the Holy Spirit, if we don’t feel heard then our prayer quickly becomes frustrating and ends a lot sooner than we may have planned.  St. Ignatius of Loyola referred to this as “spiritual desolation,” when our prayer feels dry, one sided, and/or that God isn’t with us when we pray.  We feel alone or desolate (hence desolation) and this feeling can last as short as one prayer time or for years.  

When we find ourselves in the midst of spiritual desolation there are a couple things we should do.  First and foremost we don’t change a thing.  In the rules of St. Ignatius this falls under rule #5 and it’s full of wisdom.  Lets say your daily prayer is a rosary before lunch and the last couple days your rosary has been dry, you don’t feel the same excitement or joy when you pray, and you feel no contact with the Blessed Mother.  You shouldn’t stop praying the rosary every day because of this desolation.  If the desolation is coming from the evil one (the devil) then you would fall for the trick of him trying to get you to stop praying the rosary.  

The main reason we don’t change our prayer routine when we feel spiritual desolation is because we need to discern where the desolation is coming from.  The desolation could be coming from the evil one, in which case we need to fight the desolation with more prayer; the desolation could be a gift from God inviting us to dive deeper in prayer and opening up our hearts even more to receive the Holy Spirit; or the desolation could be coming from the world (hunger, anger, tiredness, etc.) in which case the desolation will be temporary and fixed by eating an apple or taking a nap.  

My main point here is that spiritual desolation happens all the time and we need to remain strong in the Lord and trust that the desolation will end.  Too many of us, myself included, use desolation as a reason to stop praying and that is when we need prayer the most.  Don’t let spiritual desolation keep you from the Lord.  Use the desolation as the motivation to grow deeper in prayer and remain faithful to God.  St. Theresa of Calcutta felt spiritual desolation for some 30 years and every day she prayed before the Blessed Sacrament, continued her vocation as a religious and her commitment to serving the poorest of the poor, and most importantly she continued receiving the Sacraments regularly.  30 years she felt dryness and didn’t feel God’s presence and she's Mother Theresa!  We can continue through our desolation too.  Stay calm and keep the faith.