So for the memory; even in prayer I must not seek to remember this or that person, or “intention,” but go direct to God, in whom the object of my petition, if it is to be granted, will be found.  I go, not to my friend, and take him up to God; but to God, and there, if He wills it, find my friend.  Even what is good, in memory, must be rejected, because of the tendency to rest upon it; just as a similar tendency is felt, to rest upon the vision—imaginative or intellectual—which, at the moment; fills me with divine delight.  In this way, even the will has to be “mortified,” and reduced (St John of the Cross says it seems) to silence.  Whatever grace, whatever help or spiritual success or communication God gives to me, is but new material for renunciation, until assuredly, since sense, memory, intelligence, and will, are one after the other transcended by the soul as it climbs its Carmel in the night, we well may ask, What, after all, is left?  –‘Upon God’s Holy Hills: the Guides of St Anthony of Egypt, St Bruno of Cologne, St John of the Cross’ by C.C.Martindale

St John of the Cross. Euclid, Ohio.