To endure all things, with an equable and peaceful mind, not only brings with it many blessings to the soul; but it also enables us, in the midst of … - John of the Cross

In a dark night, With anxious love inflamed, O, happy lot! Forth unobserved I went, My house being now at rest. TAKING these words, then, with reference to purgation, contemplation, or detachment, or poverty of spirit — these are, as it were, one and the same thing — they may be thus explained in this way, as if the soul were saying: In poverty, without protection and help1 in all my powers, the understanding in darkness, the will under constraint, the memory in trouble and distress, in the dark, in pure faith, which is the dark night of the natural faculties, the will alone touched by grief and affliction, and the anxieties of the love of God, I went forth out of myself, out of my low conceptions and lukewarm love, out of my scanty and poor sense of God, without being hindered by the flesh or the devil. 2. This was to me a great blessing, a happy lot, for by annihilating and subduing my faculties, passions, appetites,2 and affections — the instruments of my low conceptions of God — I went forth out of the scanty works and ways of my own to those of God; that is, my understanding went forth out of itself, and from human and natural3 became divine; for united to God in that purgation, it understands no more by its natural powers,4 but in the divine wisdom to which it is united. 3. My will went forth out of itself becoming divine, for now, united with the divine love, it loves no more meanly with the powers of its nature,5 but with the energy and pureness of the divine spirit. Thus the will acts now in the things of God, not in a human way, and the memory also is transformed in eternal apprehensions of glory. Finally, all the energies and affections of the soul are, in this night and purgation of the old man, renewed into a divine temper and delight.

There is nothing better or more necessary than love.

O spiritual soul, when thou seest thy desire obscured, thy will arid and constrained, and thy faculties incapable of any interior act, be not grieved at this, but look upon it rather as a great good, for God is delivering thee from thyself, taking the matter out of thy hands; for however strenuously thou mayest exert thyself, thou wilt never do anything so faultlessly, perfectly, and securely as now — because of the impurity and torpor of thy faculties — when God, taking thee by the hand, is guiding thee in the dark as one that is blind, along a road and to an end thou knowest