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God highly esteems these works...done for him in aridity and hardship, for by such means the virtues and gifts are acquired in a high degree. Those acquired through this labor are for the most part more select, refined, and stable than if they were obtained with spiritual relish and enjoyment, for virtue takes root in dryness, difficulty, and labor, as God says to St. Paul: Virtue is made prefect in weakness.

In contemplation God teaches the soul very quietly and secretly, without its knowing how, without the sound of words, and without the help of any bodily or spiritual faculty, in silence and quietude, in darkness to all sensory and natural things.

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.

Those who desire nothing else than God walk not in darkness, however poor and dark they are in their own sight. And those who walk not presumptuously, nor according to their own satisfactions, whether from God or from creatures, nor do their own will in anything, have nothing to stumble over...

Through this humility acquired by means of self-knowledge, individuals are purged of all those imperfections of the vice of pride into which they fell in the time of their prosperity. Aware of their own dryness and wretchedness, the thought of their being more advanced than others does not even occur in its first movements, as it did before; on the contrary, they realize that others are better.

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.

Our life is the life of heaven. St John of the Cross has said that the contemplative has no task here below that she will not have in heaven. The difference is that on earth that task is done in the obscurity of faith; in heaven there will be no veil between God and us.

A work done without a feeling of pleasure is more pleasing to God than many others done with great delight and feeling. Therefore, when you find yourself in a state of dryness and depression, be glad and exult that God has deigned to give you those greater gifts and sweetest viands that He is wont to offer to those who are dearer to Him and more beloved by Him.

I give thanks to Jesus for making me walk in darkness, and in the darkness I enjoy profound peace. Indeed, I consent to remain through all my religious life in the gloomy passage into which He has led me. I desire only that my darkness may obtain light for sinners.

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.

Ordinarily this contemplation, which is secret and hidden from the very one who receives it, imparts to the soul, together with the dryness and emptiness it produces in the senses, an inclination to remain alone and in quietude.