Cardinal Ratzinger said in an interview, referring to the dark night of faith St. Therese endured in the last months of her life: "When you sense God is absent, it is not that He has withdrawn His presence from you. It is, rather, that He is present to you now in a new form: under the form of  yearning. And yearning stretches your capacity for love."

Many of us have experienced this sense of absence from God, of being far away from God. Our immediate thought is that we have done something wrong, that we have to do something to bring this presence back. Such a focus is on us. We fail to see that God  may have a bigger plan for us through this sense of absence. He may be calling us into a deeper union with him. But for this to be achieved, he must strip away our dependence on our sense of comfort with him. A parent knows there is a time to take away the bottle of milk from the infant in order to get the child to want something more nourishing, like vegetables. The child cries for the bottle and may reject the new food. But the parent persists for the sake of the child. That is what God does for us. Our yearning is not to be for the "bottle" but for him and for what he wants for us, even though we don't understand.