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Faith furnishes a certain but obscure knowledge to the understanding. In fact it shows us God as inaccessible light, as incomprehensible and infinite Being before whom every natural force gives way. And it is just for this motive that faith reduces reason to its intrinsic nothingness: to the realization of its impotence and of the grandeur of God.

The dark night becomes the school of all the virtues: it trains one to resignation, to patience, from the moment that one is faithful to the spiritual life without finding consolation and refreshment in it. The soul attains a high degree of love of God, inasmuch as it acts solely according to His will.

No earthly maternal joy resembles the bliss of a soul permitted to enkindle the light of grace in the night of sins. The way to this is the cross. Beneath the cross the Virgin of virgins becomes the Mother of Grace.

The divine life which is enkindled in the soul is the Light that came into the darkness-the mystery of the Holy Night. The one who bears it within himself understands its meaning...God is in us and we in Him; that is our portion of the kingdom of God, established by the Incarnation.

The darkness that leads to God is, as we already know, faith. It is the only means that leads to union because it sets God before our eyes as he is: as infinite, as triune. Faith resembles God in that both blind the intellect and appear to it as darkness. "The greater one's faith the closer is one's union with God."

Faith is the way that traverses the night leading to the goal of union with God; in it is accomplished the painful rebirth of the spirit, its transformation from natural being into supernatural being.

The soul ought to consider aridity and darkness as fortunate omens; as signs that God is beside it, freeing it from itself, taking the initiative out of its hand.

Who are you, sweet Light, who inundate
me and enlighten the night of my heart?
You guide me just like a mother's hand;
but if you leave me
I cannot advance a single step.
You are space
that surrounds my being
and in which it is concealed.
If you abandon me I fall into the abyss
of nothingness, from where
you called me into being.
You are nearer to me than myself
more intimate than my inmost being.
And yet no one touches you
or understands you
and you break the bonds of every name:
Holy Spirit - Eternal Love!

Just as Jesus in the extreme abandonment at His death surrendered Himself into the hands of the invisible and incomprehensible God, so will the soul yield herself to the midnight darkness of faith which is the only way to the incomprehensible God.

Whoever, led by the truth of faith, seeks God, will set out by his free effort precisely to there, where the mystically graced are drawn...into the empty solitude of his interior in order to linger there in dark faith- in a simply loving upward glance of the spirit to the hidden God who is presently veiled.

Faith furnishes a certain but obscure knowledge to the understanding. In fact it shows us God as inaccessible light, as incomprehensible and infinite Being before whom every natural force gives way. And it is just for this motive that faith reduces reason to its intrinsic nothingness: to the realization of its impotence and of the grandeur of God.

The soul ought to consider aridity and darkness as fortunate omens; as signs that God is beside it, freeing it from itself, taking the initiative out of its hand.