Darkness

"The second stage is like this: When God has drawn a person so far away from all things, and he is no longer a child and he has been strengthened with the comfort of sweetness. Then indeed one gives him good coarse rye bread. He has become a man and has reached maturity. Solid, strong food is what is good and useful for a grown man. He shouldn't be given milk and soft bread any longer, and such is withheld from him. He is then led onto a terribly wild path, very gloomy and forsaken. And on this path God takes back from him everything that he had ever given him. Then and there the person is left so completely to himself that he loses all notion of God and gets into such a distressful state that he cannot remember whether things had ever gone right for him, whether he has a God or not, and whether he is the same person; and he suffers such incredible pain that this whole wide world is too confining for him. He has neither any feeling for nor knowledge of God, and he has no liking for any other things. It seems to him that he is suspended between two walls with a sword in back of him and a sharp spear in front. What does he do then? He can go neither forward nor back. He can only sit down and say, 'Hail, bitterer bitterness, full of grace!' If there could be hell in this life, this would seem to be more than hell--to be bereft of loving and the good thing loved. Anything that one might then say to such a person would console him about as much as a stone. And he could stand even less hearing about creatures. The more the sense of and feel for God stood formerly in the foreground, the greater and more unendurable are the bitterness and misery of this abandonment." -John Tauler, Sermon 39, 14th century