"The loss of a sense of His presence, the loss of His inner reassurances, and the loss of the joys of His service may be sent to us to ensure that we love Him and not His gifts, to ensure that we are indeed stripped and poor and naked and are not pretending to ourselves that we love Him when in reality we love only ourselves" --Fr Gerald Vann, O.P.
God chooses to adorn His bride with many graces and blessings. He laid down His life that He might present her to Him spotless and without blemish (cf Ephesians 5). How glorious this graces are when He lavishes them upon us, His bride, that we may be found pleasing to Him! We must never turn away from these graces, no matter how overwhelming or undeserved; our love for Him must be so complete that we abandon ourselves to His whims to be made pleasing to Him, trusting that He is Goodness and Mercy.
If God will remove these graces to ensure that we love Him and not His gifts, how much more so will He remove them to prove to us that He loves his bride, not His gifts!!!!!!!!!! This is the immeasurable blessing of spiritual dryness: that we can KNOW, without a shadow of a doubt, that He loves us as we are, weak and miserable. So much so that He adorns us with His grace that He may unite us to Himself and give us His perfect Joy and Love!!
This is true then also in marriage; the fading of the honeymoon "love" allows man and wife to truly love the other, and not themselves. A true Christian should rejoice at this first opportunity in marriage to ensure a true, holy love that is an act of total self-donation to the other without self-love intermixed, thanking God for the privledge of the opportunity to love each other as He loves them, weak and miserable.
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