Are You There, God? Why Prayer Suddenly Feels Empty Sometimes

Ever sit down to pray and immediately start thinking about literally everything else?

Your grocery list. That awkward conversation from three days ago. The email you forgot to answer. Whether everyone else in adoration is having some profound saint-level encounter with God while you’re mentally reorganizing your kitchen cabinets.

Yeah. Same.

In this episode of Rebel Saints, Nicole Olea talks about spiritual dryness, distractions in prayer, and the weird pressure a lot of Catholics feel to make prayer feel emotional or dramatic all the time. We’re talking about the lie that if you’re not feeling something, you must be doing prayer wrong.

Drawing from Scripture, the saints, and Catholic teaching, this episode explores what it actually means to have a relationship with God when prayer feels ordinary, repetitive, frustrating, or quiet.

Because holiness is not built on emotional highs. Most of the time, it’s built in the decision to keep showing up anyway.

Key Topics Covered in This Episode:

• Overcoming Distractions in Prayer: Why thinking about emails or laundry during a Holy Hour doesn't mean you're failing, but simply means you're human.
• The Catechism on Prayer (CCC 2725): A look at why the Church defines prayer as both a "gift of grace" and a "determined response." When the emotional feelings fade, that determination is where faithfulness is formed.
• Mother Teresa’s Dark Night of the Soul: How Saint Teresa of Calcutta endured nearly 50 years of interior spiritual dryness while remaining deeply united to God.
• Contemplative Prayer vs. Modern Optimization: Shifting our mindset from viewing prayer as a productivity app to viewing it as a slow, relational transformation.
• Lessons from Elijah (1 Kings 18-19): How God meets us in our exhaustion with rest and physical nourishment before speaking to us, not in the fire or earthquake, but in a "light silent sound" or whisper.

A Note of Encouragement for Your Spiritual Journey:

"Most days my own prayer life feels less like building a cathedral and more like showing up to a construction site holding a crooked brick and an iced coffee asking the Holy Spirit to please work with me. If your rosary feels distracted... you are participating in the slow, hidden, incredibly holy work of becoming faithful."

Resources & Scripture Mentioned:

• Church Teaching: The Catechism of the Catholic Church, Paragraph 2725
• Scripture Reflection: 1 Kings 18 (Elijah on Mount Carmel) and 1 Kings 19 (God in the whisper)
• Catholic Spiritual Classics: References to Saint John of the Cross (Dark Night of the Soul) and Saint Teresa of Avila.

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Transcript

Rebel Saints Podcast

Episode 33: Are You There, God? It’s Me 

Nicole Olea:

Hey Rebels, welcome back to Rebel Saints. I’m Nicole, and this episode in particular has been sitting on my heart for a while because prayer is one of those things where we can spend our whole lives learning. It’s constantly evolving as we grow in our relationship with God.

The saints understood that holiness is often formed through consistency, attentiveness, humility, and remaining close to God across the ordinary, mundane days of our lives. Prayer can be the thing that grounds us, but it’s also an area where we may feel not as close to God as we’d like.

That’s actually the topic of this episode. We’re going to talk about prayer, particularly when we don’t feel holy, or like we’re doing it right, or even if God is really hearing us.

So take a breath. Put down the pressure to have your prayer life all figured out. Grab a coffee, a rosary, or whatever is getting you through today, and let’s sit with God together for a little while.

So I need to ask if anyone else has ever had this experience, because I genuinely thought for a long time that maybe I was doing prayer incorrectly. Not like heretically incorrectly. I wasn’t summoning spirits in the woods or replacing the rosary with astrology TikTok or anything.

I mean more like I kept hearing other Christians talk about prayer in ways that sounded so vivid and emotionally intense that eventually I started wondering if I had somehow missed an orientation meeting everyone else attended.

You know what I mean?

You hear people say things like:

• “The Lord told me…”
• “The Holy Spirit revealed…”
• “I received this word in prayer…”

Meanwhile, I’m sitting in Eucharistic adoration trying not to think about whether I answered all my emails or if I left clothes in the washing machine overnight again.

And I think a lot of Catholics, especially sincere Catholics who are genuinely trying to have a good prayer life, wonder whether something is wrong with them because their prayer life feels ordinary.

Not empty maybe. Not hopeless. Just silent. Steady. Peaceful sometimes. Distracted other times. Mostly just… normal.

And because modern culture constantly teaches us to associate intensity with authenticity, we begin assuming that if God is truly close to us, we should feel Him intensely all the time.

You might wonder:

• “Wouldn’t I hear Him more clearly?”
• “Shouldn’t I be having mystical insights all the time?”
• “Shouldn’t I feel some kind of emotional certainty attached to this?”

But Catholic spirituality has never actually taught that.

Honestly, social media has this really amazing way sometimes of making you feel like you’re not good enough or less than. Spirituality has become stylized.

You’ll come across these accounts where someone appears to be having this emotional encounter with God, but it’s incredibly cinematic. They’re standing in golden sunlight holding a coffee mug the size of a small cauldron.

And then I think about my own experience where I’m just trying to get five intentional minutes to pray while one of my kids is yelling from another room that someone stole their charger and my dog is barking because I closed the door and she can’t find me.

Honestly, when I really think about it, that feels spiritually significant in its own way because the struggle is real.

Somewhere along the line many of us absorbed this idea that prayer is primarily about experiencing God emotionally instead of remaining with Him relationally.

The Church has always understood that emotional consolation and God’s presence are not identical things.

The Catechism says prayer is both a gift of grace and a determined response on our part.

I love that definition because it feels honest. Prayer is a gift and a response.

Sometimes prayer does feel like a gift emotionally. There are moments when you leave Mass feeling anchored and renewed and aware of God’s presence in a way that feels undeniable. Sometimes Scripture pierces through your defenses in a way that feels deeply personal.

But most of the time, prayer involves determination.

There are days where prayer feels distracted, dry, repetitive, and honestly unimpressive from the outside. There’s no golden sunlight. But it’s in those moments especially that we are called to faithfulness.

The Church has never treated spiritual dryness as evidence that God has disappeared.

Saint Teresa of Calcutta is one of the clearest examples we have of this. Most people are surprised when they learn about her interior life because we tend to imagine saints as people who lived in a state of perpetual spiritual closeness where God’s presence always felt emotionally obvious to them.

But Mother Teresa endured years of profound interior dryness. Years where emotionally she felt an absence of consolation from God. Yet she remained faithful. She continued serving Christ while experiencing spiritual darkness interiorly.

That reality matters because it reminds us holiness is not measured by emotional intensity. A person can feel spiritually dry and still be united to God.

We can sit before the Blessed Sacrament and feel distracted while still being transformed by grace.

When I used to have adoration with my teens back when I was a youth minister, I would tell them:

“If you sit here and feel nothing, that’s okay. Just sit. If you get tired and fall asleep, even that’s okay. There’s nothing better than taking a nap at the feet of Jesus.”

Modern culture trains us to evaluate everything through immediate emotional feedback. If something feels emotionally stimulating, we assume it has meaning. If it doesn’t, we assume it lacks value.

But the deepest relationships of our lives are rarely sustained through constant emotional intensity. Marriage doesn’t work that way. Meaningful friendships don’t work that way. Parenthood doesn’t work that way.

Prayer doesn’t either.

Saint Teresa of Calcutta referred to this extended period of spiritual emptiness as her “dark night of the soul,” a term originally coined by the sixteenth-century Spanish mystic Saint John of the Cross.

He described the profound phase of spiritual dryness where a person feels God’s absence but continues holding onto faith.

Mother Teresa experienced this perceived silence from God for nearly fifty years, from around 1946 until her death in 1997. Yet everyone around her encountered extraordinary love throughout her life.

That means emotional intensity and holiness are not identical things.

Some of the deepest forms of love eventually stop announcing themselves dramatically and become woven into the structure of our lives. Prayer can become like that too.

A few months ago I sat in adoration mentally, physically, and emotionally exhausted. My brain genuinely felt like soup. I hoped for one of those beautiful spiritual reset moments people write about in books.

That did not happen.

I was distracted before I even sat down. Someone nearby kept coughing. My mind drifted back to my to-do list. I replayed conversations from earlier that day. At one point I remember staring at the monstrance and thinking:

“I am objectively terrible at contemplative prayer.”

And then I realized how prideful that actually was because I expected to sit down for one holy hour and immediately become some kind of desert mystic because I needed it so badly.

But despite all the distractions, I still spent time with Christ. I still showed up. I didn’t get up and leave.

I stayed there staring at the monstrance and finally said:

“I’m doing the best I can right now.”

And in that moment this thought ran through my mind:

“I got you, boo.”

I like to think maybe that was the Holy Spirit breaking into my psyche to tell me everything was going to be okay.

But honestly? When I walked out of that chapel I was still restless.

And I think we dismiss too many ordinary moments of prayer simply because they don’t feel emotionally impressive enough to describe publicly.

Nobody goes online saying:

“Today I spent an hour distracted in adoration and slowly realized God still loved me there.”

But honestly, that’s probably a much more relatable Catholic experience.

The Church traditionally speaks about different forms of prayer: vocal prayer, meditation, contemplation, the Ignatian method, and more.

Sometimes I think people imagine contemplative prayer means achieving some elite mystical state where God starts transmitting information directly into your frontal lobe.

But contemplation, at least in the Catholic understanding, is fundamentally relational before it’s informational.

It is loving attentiveness. Remaining with God. Building relationship first.

God is not a productivity app. Catholic spirituality is not built around optimization. We can’t hashtag our prayers and expect immediate results.

Prayer changes us slowly.

Like watching light move across a room throughout the day. You don’t notice it happening in real time, but eventually you realize the whole room has changed.

Maybe you become a little more patient. A little more forgiving. Slightly less willing to tell white lies. Maybe less prone to use the F-word in traffic.

For me personally, I consider that evidence of sanctification.

One of the most dramatic public miracles in the Old Testament is the story of Elijah on Mount Carmel in 1 Kings 18. Israel had fallen into widespread idolatry under King Ahab and Queen Jezebel. Elijah called for a public showdown between the prophets of Baal and the God of Israel.

Two altars were prepared. The God who answered with fire from heaven would be revealed as the true God.

The prophets of Baal cried out for hours, danced around the altar, and even cut themselves trying to get Baal to respond. Nothing happened.

Then Elijah mocked them in one of the funniest moments in Scripture and basically suggested maybe Baal had gone to the bathroom.

Elijah rebuilt the altar of the Lord, soaked it with water repeatedly, and then prayed a simple prayer. No theatrics. No screaming. Just trust.

And God sent fire from heaven.

The sacrifice, the wood, the stones, the dust, and even the water in the trench were consumed. The people fell to the ground crying out:

“The Lord is God!”

The Church Fathers saw this moment as a warning against divided hearts.

Most of us aren’t worshipping statues of Baal, but modern idols still exist: power, comfort, image, wealth, control, distraction.

But what fascinates me most is what happens afterward. Even after witnessing fire fall from heaven, Elijah emotionally collapses.

He’s exhausted. Afraid. Convinced he’s alone.

And that brings us to 1 Kings 19.

In this chapter Elijah flees into the wilderness. He’s overwhelmed. Burnt out. Despairing. He even asks God to let him die.

But before God speaks to Elijah, He feeds him. Gives him water. Lets him sleep.

I love that.

Before revelation comes food, water, and rest.

Then Elijah stands on the mountain. A violent wind comes. An earthquake. Fire. Yet Scripture specifically says God was not in them.

And afterward comes “a light silent sound.”

The whisper.

That’s where Elijah encounters God.

The Church has reflected on this passage for centuries because it reveals something profound about prayer. God absolutely can work through dramatic miracles. But most of the time He forms us much more gently than we expect.

Saint Teresa of Avila and Saint John of the Cross both write about this movement toward interior silence where God gradually draws the soul away from dependence on emotional intensity and into deeper trust.

And honestly? We struggle with this because we are overstimulated all the time.

Whispering requires attentiveness. It requires slowing down.

Silence is hard right now because we carry entire worlds of noise around in our pockets.

But God often forms us subtly over time, and subtlety does not mean absence.

Some of the most important movements of grace in my own life unfolded so gradually I only recognized them afterward.

So if your prayer life feels ordinary…

If you feel spiritually dry…

If it feels like you’re “just showing up”…

I want you to know you are not failing at being Catholic.

Most days my own prayer life feels less like building a cathedral and more like showing up to a construction site holding a crooked brick and an iced coffee asking the Holy Spirit to please work with me.

If your rosary feels distracted, you are not failing.

If your mind drifts during Mass, you are not failing.

If your holy hour turns into thinking about groceries and emails, you are not failing.

You are human.

And more than that, you are participating in the slow, hidden, incredibly holy work of becoming faithful.

Most saints probably looked ordinary while it was happening.

Exhausted parents whispering prayers after everyone else fell asleep. Students praying before exams. People dragging themselves into daily Mass before sunrise because somewhere beneath the exhaustion they still believed God was worth showing up for.

People returning to confession over and over because they still believed mercy was real.

And slowly, through years of ordinary faithfulness, grace transformed them into saints.

Not polished saints.

Not floating-above-the-earth saints.

Saints who got distracted. Saints who got tired. Saints who kept coming back anyway.

Rebel saints.

Prayer

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Hi Lord, it’s me again.

Thank You for meeting me here exactly as I am. Thank You for listening to the prayers I say clearly and the ones I struggle to put into words. Thank You for staying close to me through every ordinary day, every distraction, every moment I feel uncertain, tired, or overwhelmed.

Lord, teach me how to slow down long enough to notice You. There is so much noise around me all the time. My mind races. My attention drifts. Help me become more attentive to Your presence in the middle of ordinary life.

Help me trust that You are still working in ways I cannot recognize yet.

When prayer feels peaceful, thank You for that gift. When prayer feels dry or distracted, help me keep showing up anyway.

Lord, I pray for every person listening right now who feels spiritually exhausted. Some are carrying grief. Some anxiety. Some are trying so hard to remain faithful while wondering whether You are listening.

Please remind them You are near.

Remind them holiness is often formed through small acts of daily faithfulness repeated over time. Through confession. Through the Eucharist. Through choosing love again and again.

Like Elijah in the wilderness, remind us You care for tired people tenderly. You fed him before You spoke to him. You let him rest. You stayed with him in fear and discouragement.

Lord, do that for us too.

Bring peace to the weary places in our hearts. Help us hear Your voice beneath all the noise we carry every day.

And tomorrow when we wake up and begin again, help us remember that every small prayer still matters. Every quiet act of faithfulness matters. Every time we turn toward You matters.

Hi Lord, it’s me again.

Amen.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Well Rebels, that’s all I’ve got for you for this episode.

If this episode meant something to you, make sure you hit follow and tap that little plus sign so you don’t miss future episodes of Rebel Saints.

And if you want to help us build something really beautiful together, come join the Restless Hearts Society over on Patreon. We’re just getting started over there, which honestly makes this the fun part. The early days. The founding rebels. The people helping shape this community from the ground up.

You’ll also find us inside the Restless Hearts Social Club on Facebook where we keep the conversation going throughout the week. Faith, life, prayer, saints, questions, encouragement, chaos, grace… all of it.

You can find all the links in the show notes.

Until next time, I’m Nicole, and this is Rebel Saints, a Catholic podcast for restless hearts.

Restless hearts, you are welcome here.