Saint Teresa of Ávila, one of the great mystics of the Catholic tradition, once threw her hourglass down the stairs rather than spend another hour in prayer. This is, somehow, comforting.
The feeling of not wanting to pray is not a sign of spiritual failure. It is, in fact, the normal condition of the spiritual life. The saints who wrote about prayer — Teresa, John of the Cross, Thérèse of Lisieux — wrote at length about aridity, dryness, and the long periods when God seems absent and prayer seems useless.
What dryness actually is
When prayer feels empty, there are usually two possibilities. The first is that something in your life needs attention: a habitual sin, a broken relationship, a pattern of avoidance. In this case, the dryness is diagnostic. It is pointing at something.
The second is simply the normal ebb and flow of the spiritual life. Consolations — the felt sense of God's presence, the warmth and ease of prayer — are given to beginners, often, to draw them in. Then they are often withdrawn, to see whether we will continue without them. This is not abandonment. It is invitation.
John of the Cross called these periods the "dark night of the senses" and the "dark night of the soul." They sound frightening. In his account, they are actually signs of progress.
The two-minute rule
Practical advice from a different tradition: show up anyway. Set a timer for two minutes. Pray nothing except "Lord, I don't want to be here. I don't feel anything. But here I am." Then sit with that.
You'd be surprised how often something shifts in the second minute.
The commitment isn't to feeling something. It's to the act of showing up. A marriage isn't sustained by the feeling of love alone; it's sustained by choices, day after day, including on the days when the feeling is absent. Prayer works the same way.
Use words that aren't yours
When you can't find your own words, borrow some. The Psalms were written precisely for this — for every state of the human heart, including desolation. Psalm 22 opens with "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" — the same words Jesus cried from the cross.
If Christ himself prayed from a place of felt absence, you are in good company.
The Rosary is particularly useful in dry periods, because it gives you something to do with your hands and a structure to inhabit. You don't have to generate anything. You just follow the mystery, one bead at a time, and let the prayer carry you where it goes.
The simplest prayer
When everything else fails, there is always this: "Jesus." One word. The name itself is a prayer. Hesychast monks have prayed it with every breath for centuries: "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner."
You can say it on a commute. You can say it at 3 AM when you can't sleep. You can say it on the days when it feels like you're talking to the ceiling.
The ceiling, it turns out, is not the end of the line.