I am praying for her
"…Now we intend to talk about the three stages that a person can be at - the lowest, the middle, or the highest. The first stage of an interior virtuous life that leads one directly to close proximity to God happens when a person turns to the marvellous works and signs of inexpressible gifts and effusions of the hidden goodness of God. Out of this is born a state of soul called jubilatio. The second stage is poverty of spirit and a strange abandonment by God that leaves the spirit tortured and naked. The third stage is the transformation to a divine-like existence, into a unity of the created spirit with the very being of the spirit of God. This one can call a conversion to an essentially higher plane. And one cannot imagine that those who right reach this stage could ever fall away from God.
…
(2) The second stage is like this: When God has drawn a person so far away from all things, and he is no longer a child and he has been strengthened with the comfort of sweetness. Then indeed one gives him coarse rye bread. He has become a man and has reached maturity. Solid, strong food is what is good and useful for a grown man. He shouldn’t be given milk and soft bread any longer, and such is withheld from him. He is then led on a terribly wild path, very gloomy and forsaken.
And on this path God takes back from him everything that he had ever given him. Then and there the person is left so completely to himself that he loses all notion of God and gets into such a disstressful state that he cannot remember whether things had ever gone right for him, so as not to know any more if he were ever on the right path, whether he has a God or not, nor does he know if God does or does not exist, or if he is alive or dead and whether he is the same person; and he suffers such incredible pain that this whole wide world is too confining for him. A very strange sorrow comes over him that makes him think that the whole world in its expanse oppresses him. He neither has any feeling for nor knowledge of God, and he has no liking for any other things and even all the rest seems repugnant to him, so that it seems that he is a prisoners between two walls. It seems to him that he is suspended between two walls with a sword in back of him and a sharp spear in front. What does he do then? He can go neither forward nor back. He can only sit down and say, “Hail, bitterer bitterness, full of grace!” If there could be hell in this life, this would seem to be more than hell - to be bereft of loving and the good thing loved. Anything that one might say to such a person would console him about as much as a stone. And he could stand even less hearing about creatures. The more the sense of and feel for God stood formerly in the foreground, the greater and more unendurable are the bitterness and misery of this abandonment.
Even then take heart! The Lord is certainly nearby. Hold fast to the support of the true living faith. Things will be fine. But it is unbelievable to the poor soul in its tortured state that this unbearable darkness could ever turn into light.
(3) When our Lord has prepared a person in this unbearable state of misery - for this prepares him much better than all the spiritual practices that all people might be able to accomplish - then our Lord comes and leads him to the third stage. In this stage the Lord removes the cloak from his eyes and reveals the truth to him. Bright sunshine appears and lifts him right out of all his misery. It seems to this person just as though the Lord had raised him from the dead. In this stage the Lord leads a person out of himself into
himself. He makes him forget all his former loneliness and heals all his wounds. God thus draws the person out of his human mode into a divine mode, out of all misery into divine security. Here a person becomes so divinized that everything he is and does God does and is in him. And he is lifted up so far above his natural state that he becomes through Grace what God in his essence is by nature. In this state a person feels and is aware that he has lost himself and does not at all feel himself or is he aware of himself. He is aware of nothing but one simple Being.
Children, to be truly in this stage is the deepest ground of genuine humility and annihilation. This, in truth, cannot be grasped by the senses. For here he receives the most profound insight possible into his nothingness. Here he sinks as deep as it is possible into the ground of humility; the deeper, the higher, because here high and deep are one and the same…In this state one achieves true unity of prayer spoken of in the epistle that truly brings it about that a person becomes one with God…"
- Johannes Tauler (c.1300-1361), Catholic mystic, Dominican priest & preacher
Please continue to keep her in your prayers.