Annihilation of all sweetness in God… dryness, distaste, and trial… the pure spiritual cross and the nakedness of Christ’s poverty of spirit… A genuine spirit seeks rather the distasteful in God than the delectable, leans more toward suffering than toward consolation, more toward going without everything for God than toward possession, and toward dryness and affliction than toward sweet consolation, for it knows that in this consists the following of Christ.
Saint John of the Cross