Journaling Prompts for Spiritual Dryness and Faith Doubt
Spiritual dryness—the period when faith feels hollow, prayer feels like talking to no one, and the practices that once gave life seem to have gone silent—is a recognized experience across most religious traditions. But that doesn't make it less lonely or less frightening when it's happening to you. It can feel like abandonment, like evidence that belief was always an illusion, or like a personal failure of some kind. Writing during this period isn't about generating answers. It's about being honest about the dryness, sitting with the questions, and seeing what, if anything, comes.
Journaling Prompts
Describe what spiritual dryness feels like for you right now—not as a theological concept, but as a lived, daily experience. What has changed? What feels absent that used to feel present?
When did you last feel genuinely connected to something larger than yourself—spiritually, or even just in the sense of wonder and meaning? Describe that experience in detail.
What are you afraid the dryness means? That faith was never real, that you're being punished, that you've done something wrong, that this is permanent? Write that fear out clearly.
What would it mean to stay in the doubt honestly, without forcing resolution in either direction—neither forcing faith back nor walking away? What would that kind of patient uncertainty look like?
What does your spiritual life need right now—different practices, community, space, a harder conversation with your beliefs? What would it mean to give it that?