I was reading from the Mucknell website a passage by the Abbot who quotes in his turn this passage from Rowan Williams' book 'tokens of trust' which I read last year.

“It means letting go of the images we are used to, moving beyond ideas and pictures of God that belong in our comfort zone. It means letting go of the emotions that we’d like to have, letting go of what we think makes us happy – not to cultivate misery, but to get used to the idea that real joy might be so strange and overwhelming that we’d fail to recognise it unless we’d put some distance between us and our usual comforts and re-assurances. As the prosaic and daily level, it can involve a great deal of sitting there facing frustration and self-doubt of the most acute sort: God calls me to delight and eternal fulfilment – so why exactly am I sitting here twiddling my thumbs, shifting from buttock to buttock, and wondering where and what and who God is?”

He goes on: 

“Bit by bit, the props are being taken away. In the work of one of the very greatest masters of Christian contemplation, St John of the Cross in sixteenth century Spain, the picture is of a journey into deeper and deeper darkness, a sense of being completely lost, imaginatively and emotionally. We face not only dryness and boredom but spells of desolation and fear that can be shocking in their intensity. As John says, we have to pass through midnight before it turns towards dawn. Only when the last traces of self-serving and self-comforting have been shaken and broken are we free to receive what God wants to give us. Only then shall we have made room for God’s reality by disentangling God from all – or at least some – of the mess within our psyches. Prayer is letting God be himself in and for us.”