Demand not only an external detachment but an internal, radical, detachment, a complete death: but this means a radical renunciation of our proprietorship (identity as a human—in truth a child of God) and purely natural exercise of our feelings (being properly human), a renunciation thanks to which a greater love will vivify (enliven) our feelings.  It does not mean a radical destruction of daily reality and human experience….  Between these two sorts of death (external and internal) there is all the distance between the superhuman and the inhuman (authentically human–Godly, or perversely human–worldly): spiritually, it is a greater disaster to abandon oneself to the second, to become hard shelled and cold of heart (distant, aloof, and remote)…as it is to reject the first, which means to refuse the perfection of love and the value to be set upon love.”

….it is a death (internal and external) which does not destroy sensitivity, but on the contrary, refuses it, and makes it more exquisite.  It does not harden the fibers of being human, but, on the contrary, makes them supple, and spiritualizes them.  It is a death which transforms us into to love.  –Father Gerald Vann ‘The Divine Pity’.

Father Gerald Vann