It is certainly permitted and even expedient for beginners to find sweetness and pleasure in images, oratories, and other visible objects of devotion, since they have not yet weaned their desire from things of the world, so that they can leave one pleasure for the other. They are like a child holding something in one of its hands; to make it loosen its hold on it we give it something else to hold in the other hand in case it should cry because both hands are empty.

But the spiritual person who would make progress must rid himself of all the pleasures and desires in which the will can rejoice. Pure spirituality is bound little to any of those objects, but only to interior recollection and mental conversation with God. Although he makes use of images and oratories, he does so only fleetingly; his spirit at once comes to rest in God and he forgets all things of the senses. –St John of the Cross ‘Ascent of Mount Carmel’ presented by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

St John of the Cross Adoring