Not the Gift, But the Giver
Why God Takes Away Spiritual Sweetness, and What Remains When He Does
There is an early stage of spiritual awakening in which God, as a divine pedagogue, grants the soul precisely what it can handle: perceptible consolation. It is not a reward, nor a guarantee, but a mercy. In the first flicker of return, when the will has begun to reorient itself toward the Absolute, the soul often finds itself flooded with tenderness. Prayer becomes luminous. Scripture stirs. One weeps not out of despair, but because something long dead has been touched. There is sweetness. And the sweetness feels like God.
But sweetness is not God. It is a token of nearness, not the nearness itself. A gentle symptom of grace—not grace in its essence, which cannot be grasped, let alone felt. And herein lies the a great danger for the one who would progress toward theosis, or divine union: attachment to spiritual consolation.
This attachment, precisely because it masquerades as devotion, is not easily diagnosed. It hides beneath the language of piety. It invokes the name of zeal. And yet it subtly bends the soul inward, causing it to measure the quality of its prayer not by fidelity or surrender, but by how it feels. The interior life becomes calibrated to sensation. Movement is confused with intimacy. Emotion becomes the metric of encounter.
Crutches of Devotion
St. John of the Cross identifies this condition as a species of spiritual gluttony. It is not that the soul desires evil. It desires good, but on its own terms. It wants God, but only when He comes bearing sweetness. It is, paradoxically, an attachment to the benefits of love rather than to love itself.
“Many beginners,” wrote St. John of the Cross, “think that because they experience spiritual sweetness and fervor in prayer, they are already very spiritual. But this is often a sign of weakness rather than strength.”
What a blow to our spiritual pride. The very consolations we cling to as proof of our devotion may, in fact, be the crutches of our infancy. God, in His wisdom, gives them when we need them. But when they are taken away, we rage like children deprived of sweets, never suspecting that the true meal lies beyond our palate’s reach.
The error is subtle but profound. It reduces divine encounter to felt experience. It reorders the hierarchy of goods, elevating the accidental above the essential. The gifts of God—peace, joy, illumination—are not God. They are temporal manifestations. Created effects. To mistake them for the Creator is to stop at the scent and never seek the flame.
Love Without Reward
But God is not content to be mistaken for His gifts. And so, if the soul is willing, or even if it is not, He begins to withdraw consolation. Not in punishment, but in invitation. The sensory and emotional components of the spiritual life begin to dissipate. The prayer that once overflowed now feels arid. Scripture no longer moves. The heart, once stirred to tears, becomes a stone in the hand.
This is not regression. It is initiation.
The soul is being weaned. It is being taught to love not by taste, but by fidelity. It is being trained in what John of the Cross calls the dark night of the senses, the initial purgation in which the soul is stripped of spiritual indulgence so that it might love without reward. This is not darkness in the moral sense. It is darkness in the mystical sense: the obscuring of spiritual sensation so that the soul may encounter God in a manner more congruent with His essence, which is not to be felt, but known in unknowing.
“Love is not found in consolation,” said Simone Weil, “but in consent to the absence.” This is the desert. This is the fire. This is the hidden joy of the one who has tasted God not in light, but in absence. Not in gifts, but in the hollow where gifts used to be. And there, in that hollow, He waits. Not beyond it, but within it.
The soul here learns that dryness is not absence, and silence is not abandonment. In fact, it is precisely in these conditions, when all interior confirmation is removed, that the soul is invited to make one of the purest act of love: to stay.
“It is not great favors or high delights that God desires from us,” writes St. Teresa of Avila, “but the resolute determination to remain in His presence, come what may.”
The Shift from Sensation to Surrender
If the soul persists in trying to recreate sweetness, it will stagnate. It will build its house in the lowlands of experience and never ascend the mountain of unitive love. But if the soul consents to remain in the dryness—if it dares to pray when prayer feels dead, to trust when the heavens are brass—then something astonishing occurs: the will is purified. The soul begins to desire God not for what He gives, but for who He is.
This is the critical shift. The soul no longer measures progress by sensation, but by surrender. It no longer fears aridity, because it has learned to pray within it. It no longer chases experiences, because it has begun to love in stillness. It no longer needs to feel close to God in order to believe He is near.
The light is often hidden. It does not parade itself. It shines most fiercely in the soul who continues to love through dryness, doubt, and desolation. In the soul who says, “Though He slay me, yet I will trust in Him.” In the soul who embraces the crucified silence and dares to call it love.
And that is the threshold of transformation.
John of the Cross insists that this purgation is essential for divine union. It is not an optional refinement for the spiritually elite. It is the appointed path for all who would love God with a purified heart.
Consolation must be lost, not because it is bad but because it is not enough. Only when the soul ceases to demand sweetness does it become capable of receiving something higher: God Himself, unmediated by sensation, uncontaminated by preference.
The Silence of Gethsemane
We forget, perhaps, that the holiest man to ever live once begged the Father for another way. That He wept blood. That He was answered with nothing but silence and a kiss of betrayal. The heavens were closed. And yet He did not flee. He stayed. He drank the cup.
Here is the wonder: this same Christ was most united to the will of God in His darkest hour. The silence was not absence. It was intimacy too deep for sound. If the Son of God could endure the silence of the Father, who are we to demand the sweetness of His voice.
To walk where Christ walked is to pass through Gethsemane. And then Golgotha. There is no other way to resurrection. And those who tell you otherwise, who offer endless consolations and unbroken peace, have not yet entered the tomb.
Love in the Absence
What, then, shall we make of the soul who prays without sweetness? Who worships without warmth? Who rises each morning into prayer and feels only the dust of her own breath?
We must call her blessed.
For she loves without reward. She kneels not for what she receives, but for who He is. She does not love the gifts, she loves the Giver. We will not be saved by how often we wept in worship. Nor by how often we felt Him in our chest. We will be saved by how we loved in the silence, by how we trusted when there was no feeling at all.
In time, consolation will return. But the soul no longer seeks it. It receives it lightly, gratefully, but without dependence. The sweetness has been unhooked from identity. The soul has tasted God in the absence of taste, and found Him sufficient. This is how the chain is broken. This is how the soul begins to walk by flame, not by flicker.
Holding the Gifts Lightly
Holy consolations are gifts from God. Do not shy from them. These fiery visitations, these holy stirrings, are God’s own kindness poured upon you. There will be sweetness in prayer, trembling in worship, and joy so fierce it makes you weep. Take them. Cherish them. Let them fall like petals on the path.
But do not grasp.
Do not turn back to gather what He has taken. The One who gave you sweetness will one day give you Himself. Entirely. Eternally. And then you will see that all the dryness was preparation. All the silence was mercy. All the emptiness was making room.
Not for the gift, but for the Giver.
This meets me right where I am now. I reread and turn it to prayer. I have meditated upon and been challenged much by your insights and writing. Thank you so much.
Another real Banger, Steve! Now in great respect and seriousness my lower jaw began to drop when you described how Christ ‘still’ took the cup even when he cried out, “My God (Abba) why have you forsaken me?” And of course, I’ve no words left to write except thank you. The Holy Spirit must come upon you…infiltrate you…fill you…in order for you to write as deeply and perfectly as you do. It’s all quite stirring, Steve.