It is one of the most universal sufferings in the life of faith: one prays, pleads, waits — and nothing answers. Heaven seems empty, prayer falls back on itself, and the soul wonders whether anyone is listening. “Why does God seem silent?” The question rises from suffering — bereavement, illness, a night of anxiety — but also from prayer itself, when the prayer that once consoled becomes dry, tasteless, without any felt presence.
The Catholic tradition takes this complaint seriously — so seriously that it sees it as a normal, and even precious, stage of spiritual life. Its answer begins with a decisive distinction: we must separate God's felt silence from his real absence. God may cease to make himself felt without ever ceasing to be there. According to her first biographer, her confessor Vincenzo Puccini, God had it announced to her before her great trial that she would be deprived not of his grace, but of the feeling of his grace[1]. The silence that hurts us is almost always a silence of consolation, not a silence of love.
This article does not address whether God grants our requests — that question is treated elsewhere in Does God hear every prayer? and Why does God not always answer as I ask?. It deals with something else: the experience of silence, of felt absence, of the God who seems to hide. Why is he silent? What does this silence conceal? And how can one pass through it without losing faith? To answer, we draw on Scripture — which gives words to this complaint — on the Catechism of the Catholic Church, and on the great masters of the night: Saint John of the Cross, Saint Therese of Lisieux, Saint Francis de Sales, and Saint Teresa of Calcutta.
A felt silence, not a real absence
The first and most painful mistake is to conclude, from the fact that God no longer makes himself felt, that he is no longer there. Yet the two things are radically different.
The basic misunderstanding
When we say “God is silent,” we almost always mean: “I no longer feel his presence, I hear no inner answer, the spiritual impulse has disappeared.” That is a statement about our sensitivity, not about the reality of God. Faith affirms that God, “in whom we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28), cannot be more absent precisely when we are seeking him: he is the one who sustains the very existence of the person who complains of not finding him. The feeling of absence is real; the absence itself is not.
The spiritual masters insist: the withdrawal we experience concerns feeling, never being. Her biographer thus recounts that God announced in advance to Saint Mary Magdalene de' Pazzi (1566-1607) the long trial of desolation she went through from the age of nineteen: she would be left without any feeling of God's grace, but not without his grace[2].
“You are a God who hides himself”: the Deus absconditus
The silence of God is not a late anomaly of spirituality: it is written into the very heart of Revelation. In the midst of a prophecy of salvation, the prophet Isaiah dares to address God with an astonishing word:
“Truly, you are a God who hides himself, O God of Israel, the Savior.” — Isaiah 45:15[3]
The Latin formula of this verse — Vere tu es Deus absconditus — nourished the whole theology of the “hidden God.” It does not say that God cannot be found, but that he is a God who veils himself, whose presence and action pass through secrecy, indirection, and the unexpected. The same God who “hides himself” is, in the same sentence, called Savior: his withdrawal is not abandonment; it is a mode of his presence. Here, in Isaiah 45:15, this withdrawal is therefore not equivalent to abandonment — whereas elsewhere, hiding his face can also express judgment on sin (cf. Dt 31:17-18)[4].
Is God silent, or speaking differently?
The episode of the prophet Elijah on Horeb is decisive here. Exhausted, persecuted, wishing for death, Elijah waits for God. And God passes by — but not where he was expected:
“And behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind tore the mountains and broke in pieces the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind. And after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. And after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire a still small voice.” — 1 Kings 19:11-12[5]
The lesson is immense. Elijah was looking for God in the spectacular — the hurricane, the earthquake, the fire. God reveals himself in “a still small voice” (rendered by the Jerusalem Bible as “the sound of a gentle breeze;” the Hebrew literally says qol demamah daqqah, “a voice of fine silence”)[6]. Very often, God's felt silence comes from the fact that we are waiting for him in thunder, while he is speaking in a whisper. He is not silent: he lowers his voice to teach us to listen differently.
This is exactly what the Catechism says about silent prayer: “It is in this silence, unbearable to the ‘outer’ man, that the Father speaks to us his incarnate Word, who suffered, died, and rose […]”[7]. God's silence is not emptiness: it is the place where he speaks his deepest Word.
The cry of the psalms: the Bible gives words to silence
Far from censoring the complaint of the believer who no longer feels God, Scripture places it on its own lips. The Psalter — the official prayer of the Church — contains cries of abandonment of striking rawness. In it, God teaches us to pray silence itself.
“How long will you hide your face from me?”
Psalm 13 does not bypass the suffering of absence: it addresses it directly to God.
“How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I take counsel in my soul and have sorrow in my heart all the day?” — Psalm 13:2-3[8]
The word returns like a refrain: “hide your face.” For the Bible, God's silence is spoken of in this way — not as a disappearance, but as a veiled face. And it is remarkable that this complaint is a prayer: it is still to God that one reproaches his silence. Psalm 13, moreover, ends in trust (“But I have trusted in your steadfast love”), proof that the complaint has not broken the bond.
Psalm 88, or the night without dawn
More radical still, Psalm 88, the darkest psalm in the Psalter, is the only one that does not end on a note of hope.
“O Lord, why do you cast my soul away? Why do you hide your face from me? […] You have caused my beloved and my friend to shun me; my companions have become darkness.” — Psalm 88:15, 19[9]
That the Church has kept this psalm in her prayer — she sings it every week at Compline on Friday (Psalm 87 in the numbering of the Liturgy of the Hours) — says something capital: there is room in faith for a cry that receives no apparent answer. God's silence does not exclude anyone from the believing people; on the contrary, it is the experience of so many just souls that Scripture has given it inspired words.
Complaint is not unbelief
Here a weight of guilt must be lifted. Many faithful people think they sin by complaining to God about his silence. Scripture says the opposite: lamentation addressed to God is an act of faith. One does not cry out to someone one believes absent or deaf. Job himself, who questions God vehemently, is declared to have “spoken rightly” of God, unlike his friends, whose speeches made his suffering the punishment for a hidden fault (Job 42:7)[10]. To pray the silence — to tell him about it, even to reproach him for it — is infinitely better than becoming silent in return.
Silence at the heart of Revelation: Christ himself
The Christian answer to the silence of God is not first an explanation: it is a person. The Son of God passed through, to the very end, the experience of the Father's silence.
Gethsemane: prayer in anguish
In the garden of Olives, Jesus prays “in agony,” to the point of sweating blood, asking that the cup pass from him — and the Father does not remove it. The Catechism sees in that hour the very model of prayer in the night: “Contemplative prayer is a communion of love bearing Life […] to the extent that it consents to abide in the night of faith. The Paschal night of the Resurrection passes through the night of the agony and the tomb”[11]. To keep watch in the apparent silence of God is to “watch one hour” with Christ in Gethsemane (Mt 26:40)[12].
The cry of the Cross
On the Cross, the Father's silence reaches its summit. And Jesus does not answer it with mute stoicism: he cries out the very words of a psalm of lament.
“And about the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice, saying, ‘Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?’ that is, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’” — The Gospel according to Saint Matthew 27:46[13]
These words are the first verse of Psalm 22 (“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? […] I cry by day, but you do not answer”)[14]. By making them his own, Christ does not despair: he takes up, from within, the cry of all the abandoned and transforms it into prayer. Psalm 22 begins in dereliction — the feeling of being totally abandoned, even by God — but ends in victory (“I will tell of your name to my brothers”). The Father's silence at Calvary was not rejection: it was the very depth of the work of salvation. No one has ever been more loved by the Father than the Son at the moment when he felt abandoned.
The great silence of Holy Saturday
Between the Cross and the Resurrection, the Church lives Holy Saturday: a whole day without Mass, without the Eucharistic presence exposed, when God himself seems dead and silent. This silence has become the symbol of all our nights. But it is not the last word: it immediately precedes the dawn of Easter. The silence of the tomb was not an ending, but a waiting. This is the Christian grammar of silence: it always stands between a Friday and a Sunday.
Why is God silent? The spiritual reasons for silence
If God remains present, why does he withdraw the feeling of his presence? The tradition does not invent a capricious God: it discerns in this withdrawal a pedagogy of love.
Purifying love: loving God, not his consolations
The deepest reason is also the most liberating. As long as God makes himself felt, we risk loving his consolations more than himself. By withdrawing from feeling, he tests and purifies our love: will we still love him when there is no sensible “reward”? Henri-Marie Boudon, grand archdeacon of Evreux, put it memorably:
“In consolations, creatures place themselves between God and us; in afflictions, God places himself between us and creatures in order to separate us from them. […] Our Lord told a holy soul that prayers were more pleasing to him when made in dryness, pain, suffering, and repugnance.” — Henri-Marie Boudon, The Holy Ways of the Cross[15]
In other words: silence separates love from self-interest. It moves the soul from “I love what I feel near God” to “I love God.”
Deepening desire and faith
Silence enlarges the heart. Saint Augustine taught that God sometimes delays so that desire may grow and become capable of receiving: “by delaying, God stretches desire; through desire he stretches the soul; by stretching it, he makes it capable”[16]. Silence is not a refusal to give: it is a deepening of the capacity to receive. And it strengthens faith by detaching it from its sensible supports: Saint Therese of Lisieux would write, in the middle of her trial, that she had “made more acts of faith in the past year than during her whole life”[17].
Dryness as a moment of pure faith
The Catechism names this experience precisely: dryness, and it locates it exactly.
“Another difficulty, especially for those who sincerely want to pray, is dryness. Dryness belongs to contemplative prayer when the heart is separated from God, with no taste for thoughts, memories, and feelings, even spiritual ones. This is the moment of sheer faith clinging faithfully to Jesus in his agony and in his tomb.” — Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 2731[18]
Dryness is therefore not a failure of prayer: most often, it is a maturation. “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it bears much fruit” (Jn 12:24), the same paragraph recalls[19]. What we experience as impoverishment is a weaning: milk is withdrawn in order to give bread.
Discernment: trial, tepidity, or simple nature?
Not every felt silence has the same cause, and the Catechism invites discernment: dryness may be a purification willed by God, but it may also come from a “lack of root,” that is, from tepidity or sin[20]. Alongside this, the Fathers distinguish acedia, “a form of depression due to lax ascetical practice, decreasing vigilance, carelessness of heart”[21]. Saint Francis de Sales, for his part, advised not worrying too much about the origin of the trouble:
“You always make too much consideration and examination to know where your dryness comes from. […] One must not be so curious as to want to know from where the diversity of the states of your life proceeds; one must be submitted to all that God ordains of it, and stop there.” — Saint Francis de Sales, letter of August 5, 1611[22]
The following table summarizes the main causes of felt silence and the conduct proper to each.
| Cause of felt silence | Distinctive sign | How to respond |
|---|---|---|
| Purification willed by God (dryness as trial) | One sincerely wants to pray; the will remains faithful despite the absence of taste | Persevere without shortening prayer; stand in bare faith[23] |
| Tepidity / sin (“lack of root”) | Relaxation, consented negligence, flight from prayer | Conversion, examination, return to the means of grace (sacraments)[24] |
| Acedia (spiritual weariness) | Discouragement, disgust with the combat, the reverse side of presumption | Vigilance, humility, constancy; do not be surprised by one's misery[25] |
| Natural cause (fatigue, illness, temperament) | The silence accompanies physical or psychological exhaustion | Patience, rest, gentleness toward oneself; do not confuse fatigue with abandonment by God |
The dark night: the experience of the saints
What the Catechism calls dryness, the great mystical tradition explored under the name dark night. Far from being reserved for struggling beginners, this night is, in the saints, the passage toward the highest union.
Saint John of the Cross and the night
The mystical doctor par excellence of God's silence is Saint John of the Cross (1542-1591). In The Dark Night, he distinguishes the “night of the senses” (where God withdraws sensible consolations to wean the still-childlike soul) from the “night of the spirit” (a more radical purification, where faith itself seems to waver). For him, this night is not a punishment: it is an infused contemplation — a knowledge of God received passively, without reasoning or effort — that the soul cannot yet recognize, because God's light, too strong, blinds it as the sun dazzles an eye accustomed to shadow. The Catechism, moreover, borrows from him the definition of contemplative prayer as “silent love”[26]. In John of the Cross, silence is not the opposite of encounter: it is its purest form.
Saint Therese of Lisieux: the night of nothingness
No witness is more accessible — or more moving — than that of Saint Therese of the Child Jesus. During the last eighteen months of her life, she passed through a violent “trial of faith,” which she describes in Manuscript C. The thought of Heaven, once so sweet, becomes “a subject of combat and torment”; a mocking voice suggests that death will give her “not what she hopes for, but a still deeper night, the night of nothingness”[27].
“When I sing of the happiness of Heaven, the eternal possession of God, I feel no joy, for I simply sing what I WANT TO BELIEVE. Sometimes, it is true, a very little ray of sunshine comes to illumine my darkness; then the trial ceases for an instant, but afterward the memory of this ray, instead of causing me joy, makes my darkness still thicker.” — Saint Therese of the Child Jesus, Autobiographical Manuscripts, Manuscript C[28]
Her answer became a summit of spirituality: not to fight doubt head-on, but to act the faith one no longer feels — “I simply sing what I want to believe.” Deprived of all enjoyment, she multiplied acts of faith and offered her night for unbelievers, accepting to eat “the bread of sorrow” without wanting to rise from “that table filled with bitterness where poor sinners eat” before the day fixed by God[29]. Her night ended only at her death.
Saint Teresa of Calcutta: half a century of silence
The most astonishing case in the contemporary era is that of Saint Teresa of Calcutta. The publication of her private correspondence in 2007 revealed that the foundress of the Missionaries of Charity lived, for nearly fifty years, an almost uninterrupted interior silence, experiencing neither presence nor consolation from God, while serving the poorest with a smile no one suspected was inhabited by this night[30]. “If I ever become a saint,” she wrote to a confidant, “I will surely be one of darkness”[31]. Her case shows that God's silence can coexist, without contradiction, with heroic charity and immense fruitfulness: the night did not paralyze her love; it made it disinterested.
How should one live through the silence of God?
Understanding the meaning of silence does not make it painless. The tradition gives concrete landmarks for passing through it without fleeing it or becoming lost in it.
Persevere in prayer without feeling it
The first rule, unanimous among the saints, is never to abandon prayer because of dryness. It is precisely there that prayer becomes pure and meritorious.
Saint Marie of the Incarnation (Marie Guyart) thus recommended never leaving prayer because of aridity or temptation, nor shortening its appointed time[32].
Saint Francis de Sales goes further: dryness and sterility matter little, provided that one loves God — persevering dryness thus becomes a proof of love[33]. And Marcel Van — Servant of God whose Colloques report the words he said he received from Jesus, Mary, and Therese — passes on this counsel of Therese for prayer in which “Jesus remains silent like you”: “resign yourself to remaining in that state,” for it is she who will act in our place[34].
Stand by bare faith, not by feeling
Love must be detached from feeling. Silence tests a liberating truth: one can love God intensely without feeling anything.
“The greatest saints passed through nights of the soul, painful dryness. Yet, in those hours of purification, they loved. Love is not sensible piety. Holiness is a disposition of the soul, of the heart, and above all of the will toward God, in which the sensible may play a role, but is not necessary.” — Father Jean du Coeur de Jesus d'Elbee, I Believe in Love[35]
Abandonment: silence as intimacy
At a certain degree, silence ceases to be merely an endured trial and becomes a place of abandonment, even of intimacy. John Tauler taught that true spiritual birth is accomplished only through a certain anguish accepted to the end[36]. Saint Peter Julian Eymard, for his part, restored courage:
“At the edge of a precipice, one must not look down into the depths, but fix one's gaze above oneself. […] Fix your heart in Our Lord, and be sure that he is there, in you, contemplating your combats and preparing to crown them.” — Saint Peter Julian Eymard[37]
A few concrete landmarks
To pass through a period of God's silence, the spiritual tradition suggests:
- Keep the time of prayer without shortening it, even when you taste nothing in it.
- Make acts of faith, trust, and love of the will, without waiting for feeling.
- Verify that there is no cherished sin or negligence (if there is, convert), but without excessive scruple.
- Care for the body: sleep, rest, health — many “dry spells” are first of all exhaustion.
- Turn to the sacraments, objective places of grace that do not depend on what one feels.
- Offer your night for others, following Therese who offered hers for unbelievers.
- Do not make major decisions on a movement of desolation, a constant counsel of spiritual discernment.
Silence is not the last word
In the end, the initial question is reversed. God is not silent out of indifference: he is silent by pedagogy, by purification, and sometimes by a delicacy we understand only afterward. Felt silence is almost always the crucible of a love made freer, barer, truer. “Darkness as well as light, desolation as well as consolation […], everything comes from his generous hand”[38].
The Christian history of silence is always read in the direction of Easter: after the wind, the earthquake, and the fire comes “the still small voice”; after the cry of the Cross and the silence of the tomb comes the dawn of the Resurrection. The God who hides himself (Is 45:15) is, in the same sentence, the saving God. Whoever perseveres in the night discovers one day that he was never alone — and that the voice he could not hear had, in truth, never stopped speaking, softly, in the most intimate depth of the soul.
What to remember
- God's felt silence is not his absence. It concerns feeling, never being: God remains present to the very person who complains of not finding him.
- Scripture gives words to silence: the “God who hides himself” (Is 45:15), the “still small voice” of Horeb (1 Kgs 19), the psalms of lament (13, 22, 88). Lamentation addressed to God is an act of faith, not a sin.
- Christ passed through the Father's silence — Gethsemane, the cry of the Cross, Holy Saturday — and transformed it from within into a path of salvation.
- God is silent in order to purify love: so that we love him himself, and not his consolations; so that desire may deepen and bare faith may grow stronger.
- Dryness calls for discernment (purification, tepidity, acedia, or fatigue), but never for abandoning prayer.
- The saints lived it — John of the Cross, Therese of Lisieux, Teresa of Calcutta — and found in it not the loss of God, but the deepest union.
Further reading
Notes and References
Vincenzo Puccini, confessor and first biographer of the saint, Vita di santa Maria Maddalena de' Pazzi, in the 1712 edition of her works, consulted in Italian in session: in ch. XXXIII, God predicts for her a trial of five years; in ch. XXXVII, she enters it “senza alcun sentimento della grazia di Dio” (without any feeling of God's grace). Her youthful revelations are published in French under the title Les huit jours de l'Esprit Saint: révélations et lumières (Jérôme Millon, 2004), a work not consulted: the point is therefore rendered here in indirect form, not as a verbatim quotation.
1 2Isaiah 45:15 (Louis Segond translation; cf. Jerusalem Bible: “Truly you are a God who hides himself”). The Latin of the Vulgate — Vere tu es Deus absconditus — founded the theology of the “hidden God.”
3Deuteronomy 31:17-18 (Louis Segond translation): "I will hide my face from them […] because of all the evil he will have done, turning to other gods" — here, the withdrawal expresses judgment, not indifference.
41 Kings 19:11-12 (Louis Segond translation). The theophany of Horeb: God is neither in the wind, nor in the earthquake, nor in the fire, but in “a still small voice.”
5Translations diverge on the famous qol demamah daqqah (Hebrew): Segond 1910, “a gentle and light whisper”; Jerusalem Bible (Éditions du Cerf), “the sound of a gentle breeze”; Hebrew qol demamah daqqah, literally “voice of fine silence.” All stress the tenuous, almost silent character of the divine manifestation.
6Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 2717: “It is in this silence, unbearable to the ‘outer’ man, that the Father speaks to us his incarnate Word, who suffered, died, and rose […]” (the sentence ends: “[…] and the filial Spirit makes us share in the prayer of Jesus”).
7Psalm 13:2-3 (Louis Segond translation). The psalm, which opens with the fourfold “How long?”, ends in restored trust (v. 6: “But I have trusted in your steadfast love”).
8Psalm 88:15 and 19 (Louis Segond translation; Hebrew numbering 88:14 and 18). The only psalm in the Psalter that does not end on a note of hope; sung every Friday at Compline (Psalm 87 in the numbering of the Liturgy of the Hours).
9Job 42:7: God declares to Eliphaz that Job has “spoken rightly” of him, unlike his three friends, whose speeches explained his misfortune by a hidden sin (theology of retribution).
10Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 2719: “Contemplative prayer is a communion of love […] to the extent that it consents to abide in the night of faith. The Paschal night of the Resurrection passes through the night of the agony and the tomb.”
11Matthew 26:40, cited by the Catechism no. 2719: “watch one hour” with Christ in Gethsemane as a figure of prayer in the night of faith.
12The Gospel according to Saint Matthew 27:46 (Louis Segond translation); cf. Mark 15:34. Jesus takes up in Aramaic the first verse of Psalm 22.
13Psalm 22:2-3 (Louis Segond translation): “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? […] I cry by day, but you do not answer.” The psalm passes from the cry of abandonment (“why have you forsaken me?”, v. 2) to praise and deliverance (vv. 23-32).
14Henri-Marie Boudon, Les Saintes voies de la Croix, Book I, chap. V. Boudon (1624-1702), grand archdeacon of Evreux, is one of the masters of the French school of spirituality in the seventeenth century.
15Saint Augustine, Commentary on the First Letter of Saint John, tractate 4, 6 (PL 35, 2008-2009): doctrine of desire enlarged by waiting, taken up by the spiritual tradition to explain God's silence and delay.
16Saint Therese of the Child Jesus, Autobiographical Manuscripts, Manuscript C (June 1897): “I believe I have made more acts of faith in the past year than during my whole life.”
17Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 2731: dryness, “the moment of sheer faith clinging faithfully to Jesus in his agony and in his tomb.”
18 23John 12:24, cited by the Catechism no. 2731: “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it bears much fruit.”
19Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 2731: “If dryness is due to the lack of root, because the word has fallen on rocky soil, the battle requires conversion” (cf. Lk 8:6, 13).
20 24Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 2733, on acedia: “a form of depression due to lax ascetical practice, decreasing vigilance, carelessness of heart. […] Discouragement, painful as it is, is the reverse of presumption.”
21 25Saint Francis de Sales, letter DCCIV to Mme de La Fléchère, of August 5, 1611 (Œuvres, Annecy edition; spelling modernized here, text verified in session). The doctor of gentleness therein counsels against anxious analysis of the origin of dryness, in favor of abandonment to the will of God.
22Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 2717, citing Saint John of the Cross to describe contemplative prayer as “silent love.”
26Saint Therese of the Child Jesus, Autobiographical Manuscripts, Manuscript C, on the trial of faith: the voice of darkness announcing “a still deeper night, the night of nothingness.”
27Saint Therese of the Child Jesus, Autobiographical Manuscripts, Manuscript C (June 1897), written for Mother Marie de Gonzague: “I simply sing what I WANT TO BELIEVE.”
28Saint Therese of the Child Jesus, Autobiographical Manuscripts, Manuscript C: “she agrees to eat, as long as you will, the bread of sorrow and does not want to rise from that table filled with bitterness where poor sinners eat,” the offering of her night for unbelievers.
29Saint Teresa of Calcutta, private correspondence published in Brian Kolodiejchuk (ed.), Come Be My Light. The Private Writings of the "Saint of Calcutta", Doubleday, 2007 (French trans. Viens, sois ma lumière, Lethielleux, 2008). The letters reveal an interior night of about half a century, parallel to her work among the poorest.
30Saint Teresa of Calcutta, letter cited in Come Be My Light, op. cit.: “If I ever become a saint, I will surely be one of darkness.”
31Saint Marie of the Incarnation (Marie Guyart, 1599-1672): counsel transmitted under Letter 99 (numbering and critical edition of Dom Guy Oury to be verified); the exact text having not been verified in session, it is rendered here in paraphrase, not as a verbatim quotation.
32Saint Francis de Sales, letter of November 21, 1604 (reference edition to be specified on the critical Annecy edition): the exact text having not been verified in session, the thought is rendered here in paraphrase, not as a verbatim quotation.
33Marcel Van, Colloques avec Jésus, Marie et Thérèse de l'Enfant-Jésus, Amis de Van, 2017, p. 85: words attributed to Saint Therese in a colloquy of November 1945 (private revelation) — “if after communion you do not know what to say to Jesus who remains silent like you […], you have only one thing to do: resign yourself to remaining in that state” (verbatim and page verified against the Amis de Van edition in session).
34Father Jean du Coeur de Jesus d'Elbee, Croire à l'Amour, Tequi, 2007, pp. 38-39: “Love is not sensible piety.”
35John Tauler (c. 1300-1361), Sermon 31: true spiritual birth is presented there as preceded by an anguish to be traversed to the end; the exact text having not been verified against the critical edition in session, it is rendered here in paraphrase. The Rhineland Dominican, a disciple of Eckhart's school, is a classical master of the spiritual night.
36Saint Peter Julian Eymard, letter of March 21, 1851 (CO 250), cited in Conseils de vie spirituelle, Nouvelle Cite, 2015, p. 17: “Fix your heart in Our Lord, and be sure that he is there, in you, contemplating your combats” (verbatim verified against the text of the letter in session).
37Blessed Dina Belanger (1897-1929), beatified by Saint John Paul II on March 20, 1993, cited in Jacques Gauthier, Je donnerai de la joie, Emmanuel, 2019, pp. 118-119: “Darkness as well as light, desolation as well as consolation […], everything comes from his generous hand” (passage confirmed against the text of her Autobiographie, vol. 2, consulted in session).
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