This dying out of feelings and of tangible satisfaction is the context for the purifyıng experience in prayer that will be one indication, among others, of the possible onset of contemplative graces. Again, the ‘dark night of the senses”, a phrase Saint John of the Cross adopts for this transitional time, will be invoked as the telling metaphor for this purification, which dries up feeling and closes down fruitful experiences of reflection or of the imagination. Instead of the “light” that for some time shone on the practice of meditative reflection, providing new insights and steady consolation, the soul begins to encounter a sharp dissonance with its prior experience in prayer. A troubling sense of struggle with the exercise of meditation begins to arise. And there is no understandable reason or any evident solution to correct this. It is not simply as though a tool used in prayer had broken for the moment, a tool that could be fixed or replaced with a better tool; nor is it simply a need of finding an improved method of reflection that can cast richer light in meditation; nor is it a matter of manipulating feelings and restoring them to their former warmth. The reality of what seems now to be an ineffective effort in prayer has a source in God’s action on the soul. He apparently seeks, for one thing, to expose the soul to a greater awareness of its own inner poverty. –“St John of the Cross: Master of Contemplation” by Father Donald Haggerty