RC,
Would you say that it is possible that someone like a saint who understands the spiritual dryness and recognizes it when it happens to them, realizes that this dryness even though feels like God is not there, is actually really when God is the closest?
In other words, they recognize that the dryness is actually a trial directly from God, so instead of feeling sorrow, they then are capable of feeling great happiness and see it as a gift instead? So it sort of cancels itself out?
All I can tell you is what I have learned from the lives of those few saints whose (auto)biographies I have read, remembering that in life they would have sternly rejected anyone calling them saints and saw themselves as sinners (though, of course, they were very advanced in the devout life).
All who reach a certain level in the devout life do enter this stage of dryness. As far as I can tell, a significant difference between those holy men and the average faithful lays in that: in the recognition that God was always close to them, though for a special trial He willed that they felt no consolation whatsoever, only the dry wood of the cross.
However, not one of them felt any happiness.
It was by a sheer act of will and obedience that they kept loving God and doing His will, and bearing the sorrows, sadness, darkness, and desolation.
And upon entering this stage, their greatest merit: to not ask God to end this trial, but, rather, to prostrate humbly before His majesty and say: “good Lord, let it be done to me according to your word…not what I want, but what you want!”
In this they were more perfectly made into the person of Christ, who felt no happiness whatsoever after His most sorrowful passion, and no consolation after, having sent His mother and His beloved disciple home, was abandoned by all and at one point also experienced the very same “dark night” in which even God is seemingly hidden.
The main difference is very subtle, then: it is a matter of despair versus endurance.
Christ endured on the cross and in the end of His trial said with a loud voice: “paid in full!” (translated also as “it is done!”). The saints, in their patient and obedient imitation of Christ, endured this most harsh trial and in the end (sometimes in the very last moment of their life, as we see with St. Therese of Lisieux, St. Anthony of Padova, St. Teresa de Los Andes, St. Padre Pio) were given one last instant of consolation before the eternal bliss.
St. Therese of Lisieux, the sweet
little flower, endured the horrific sorrows of tubercolosis, and in the very last instants of life radiated with joy as she said her last words: “My God, I love you!”
St. Anthony of Padova, on his deathbed, would look up one last time after a lifetime of great mortification and say: “I see my Lord!”
St. Teresa de Los Andes endured great sorrows of illness before death and felt God’s abandonment, pronouncing the very words of Christ on deathbed: “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?”…then at the very last instant, having a sister nun approached a crucifix to her, she smiled peacefully and said for the last time: “My spouse!”.
St. Padre Pio, after bearing the most sorrowful stigmata for 50 years (and the equally sorrowful stigmata of being discriminated and treated harshly to the extent of persecution even by his very brothers in the Church) was granted one day, his last day, without stigmata: he showed the world that they were miraculously healed on his very last Mass, the first one, perhaps, in 50 years celebrated without pain, and his smile (see
1 and
2) show how grateful he was for such a wonderful consolation…he would depart from this life that very night.
All these saints accomplish one wonderful work: to reflect Christ in their lives, sorrows, and death. For all they lived was, to a lesser extent, what Christ had experienced first. A lifetime of endurance, in which they did not look for sorrows or sufferings, but rather simply willed to do God’s will, to serve Him no matter what the price to pay, accepting to imitate Christ on the way of the cross, expecting nothing in return, asking for no consolation. And, as St. John of the Cross writes (though I paraphrase him), “when they had renounced to everything, everything was given to them”: in tribulation, they found peace; amidst sorrows, they did not experience despair but endured; amidst terror, they did not fear, but took courage; abandoned by all, they found brothers and sisters without number; and finally, having lost the feeling of the presence of God, they found themselves at the presence of God.
The secret of their wonderful imitation of Christ (and of His blessed mother) was then to experience the trial to its fullness, but to react to it diametrically differently from what the world expects…and this would make no sense whatsoever, unless they had believed that in the end of their way to Calvary stood Christ…if not with their eyes, with the strength of their free will.
I apologize for not having the gift of conciseness
I hope some of what I wrote actually helps in answering your very profound question.
