A time of purification to increase the purity of love

This is the second book of meditations following St. John's [The Ascent of Mount Carmel].
The saint who said, "We call purification the dark night," said that the purification that humans must go through in order to become one with God, that is, the night, is of two types: emotional and spiritual, and that its aspects are also of two types: active and passive.


The night of activity is "nothing other than a severance and washing away, a severance and washing away of all the external things of the world, all that is pleasant to the flesh, and all that is delicious to the will," and [The Way of Mount Carmel] deals with this.
However, this [dark night] is based on the passive night of emotion and spirituality.


To use the expression of an adult, "active means that the soul can and does do the work of going to sleep at night," while "passive means that the soul does nothing, but God works in it and the soul is in a passive state."


In other words, the passive night of the senses and spirituality is the absolute purification that human activity cannot possibly achieve, governed by the merciful hand of God the Father, and this is the night that the genius of St. John of the Cross reveals in an unprecedented way.
This book encourages us to contemplate how we can darken our emotions and spirituality through renunciation and cleansing, allowing the light of God to penetrate us.


The shortcut to unity with God is thorough self-renunciation, that is, self-denial, so only the soul purified through the dark night can achieve deep unity with God.
We need to learn this humble attitude here, and I hope that we will read it while striving for unity, even if the content is difficult and somewhat difficult to understand.