DARK
NIGHT OF THE SOUL
See also: Darkness
The soul sees nothing but clouds and darkness. She seeks God, and cannot find the least marks or footsteps of His Presence
Augustine Baker
For first He not only withdraws all comfortable observable infusions of light and grace, but also deprives her [the soul] of a power to exercise any perceptible operations of her superior spirit, and of all comfortable reflections upon His love, plunging her into the depth of her inferior powers.
Augustine Baker
In order to raise the soul from imperfection I withdraw Myself from her sentiment, depriving her of former consolations which I do in order to humiliate her, and cause her to seek Me in truth, and to prove her in the light of faith, so that she come to prudence. Then, if she love Me without thought of self, and with lively faith and with hatred of her own sensuality, she rejoices in the time of trouble, deeming herself unworthy of peace and quietness of mind.
Voice of God to Catherine of Genoa
When we have reached this total deprivation [when the spiritual world seems to disappear] what shall we do? Abide in simplicity and peace, as Job on his ash heap, repeating, “Blessed are the poor in spirit.”
de Caussade
I endured long periods of privation, towards the end almost continual: but still I had from time to time inflowings of Thy Divinity so deep and intimate, so vivid and so penetrating, that it was easy for me to judge that Thou wast but hidden from me and not lost.
Madame Guyon
The presence of God never left me for an instant. But how dear I paid for this time of happiness! For this possession, which seemed to me entire and perfect – and the more perfect the more it was secret, and foreign to the senses, steadfast and exempt from change – was but the preparation for a total deprivation, lasting many years, without any support or hope of its return.
Madame Guyon
The less the soul thinketh that it loveth or seeth God, the nearer it nigheth for to perceive the gift of the blessed love. For then is love master, and worketh in the soul, and maketh it for to forget itself, and for to see and behold only how love doth. And then is the soul more suffering than doing, and that is clean love.
Walter Hilton
Thou hast been a child at the breast, a spoiled child. Now I will withdraw all this.
Suso
Then first do we attain to the fulness of God’s love as His children, when it is no longer happiness or misery, prosperity or adversity, that draws us to Him or keeps us back from Him. What we should then experience none can utter; but it would be something far better than when we were burning with the first flame of love, and had great emotion, but less true submission.
John Tauler
In all those dark moments, O God, grant that I may understand that it is you who is painfully parting the fibers of my being in order to penetrate to the very marrow of my substance.
Teilhard de Chardin
I have never met a man so religious and devout that he has not experienced at some time a withdrawal of grace and felt a lessening of fervor.
Thomas à Kempis