"What appears at first sight as a rare or highly specialized experience of mystical development 'writes large' the outline by which the surrender that is faith evolves into its own fullness in many lives."

     "It is in this deeply mysterious assimilation to Christ, this gradual movement from the initial stages of purification from expectations and conceptual clarity until the final moments of union, that John [of the Cross] throws into bold relief what is the experience, in various degrees and infinite varities, of many deeply good people.  What appears at first sight as a rare or highly specialized experience of mystical development 'writes large' the outline by which the surrender that is faith evolves into its own fullness in many lives.  Any serious following of Christ leads by way of the reversals of concepts or the disappointments of expectations, the sacrifice or the suffering—by way of the deconstruction of an initial understanding of God—into the loving awareness that God is beyond concept, beyond management, and beyond form.  There is in Christian living an abiding purification from expectations and projections that social workers or mothers of families or dedicated teachers undergo—must undergo if they are to continue faithful to the God who dwells in light inaccessible, whose incalculable reality is embodied in Jesus, and whose draw they feel within their own spirits. . . .
     "René Voillaume makes a similar point as he introduces the Journal of one of the major disciples of John of the Cross in the twentieth century, Raïssa Maritain:

The contemplative prayer of Raïssa, whose life was above all dedicated to intellectual work, and who was called on to testify mainly in the world of thought and of art, is but one with the experience of a factory girl or a woman wholly occupied in domestic tasks in a poor neighborhood.  I have known some such, who by these paths in appearance very different have found the same simplicity of gaze on God and endured the same acute ordeals of purification, to achieve a more complete union with the supreme object of their love.

This contemplative purification, which in one way or another catches up the lives of those who move within this grace, is delineated in its progressive moments and in its fullest completion by the mystical theology of John of the Cross.
     "Not all atheism comes out of Feuerbach and Freud; not all contemplatives are influenced by John of the Cross.  But there is an intersection here of religious criticism that seems to me highly significant.  If it is correct, then the concern of a theology that sees development somewhat dialectically should be less to refute Feuerbachian and Freudian analysis than to learn from them what they have to teach about the relentless remolding of the image of God by religious consciousness and to suggest alternative stages to the processes they elaborate of anthropological recognition and reduction."

     Michael J. Buckley, S.J., Denying and disclosing God:  the ambiguous progress of modern atheism (New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press, 2004), 118-119.