“Therefore, O spiritual soul, when you see your desire obscured,
your affections arid and constrained,
and your faculties bereft of their capacity for any interior exercise,
be not afflicted by this,
but rather consider it a great happiness,
since God is freeing you from yourself and taking the work from your hands.
For with those hands, howsoever well they may serve you,
you would never labor so effectively,
so perfectly and so securely (because of their clumsiness and uncleanness) as now,
when God takes your hand and guides you in the darkness as though you were blind to an end
and by a way which you know not
nor could you ever hope to travel with the aid of your own eyes and feet,
howsoever good you may be as a walker.”
~St. John of the Cross
