Discerning Hearts.com, in cooperation with the Oblates of the Virgin Mary, presents

struggles in the spiritual life, their nature and their remedies, with Father Timothy Gallagher.

Father Gallagher is the author of many best-selling books on the theology and spirituality of St.

Ignatius of Loyola. He holds the St. Ignatius' chair of spiritual

formation at St. John Theological Seminary in Denver, Colorado. Struggles in the spiritual life,

their nature and their remedies, with Father Timothy Gallagher. I'm your host, Chris McGregor.

Welcome back, Father Gallagher. Once again, thank you, Chris.

We are approaching the final chapter, essentially, especially in the area of dryness as it pertains to spiritual desolation.

As you said before, dryness is something that is not a good thing, but actually, it kind of is

because it's showing that we're growing in prayer.

If we recognize it, we have to be aware, understand, and then know how to keep moving forward in that, correct?

Yes.

Whenever we feel dryness and prayer, it's like a flag that alerts us to something.

And as we've been seeing, that single sentence, my prayer is dry, can mean many different things.

That dryness can come from a number of different causes.

And that's what we're trying to lay out here for various things. Maybe we just need formation

in prayer or like a Kathy is growing or like a Paul's father. There's something we need to share

with the Lord and so forth. So that's what we're going through at this point. And we have one

more experience of dryness and prayer to take a look at. And So that's what we're going through at this point. And we have one more experience of dryness

and prayer to take a look at. And in this case, we have Bob. We've seen Bob a number of times and his

wife Julie throughout the book. And it's a year after we've last seen Bob. He too has been growing

in the spiritual life. And he's learned about a way of making the full Ignatian spiritual exercises that doesn't

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