In the midst of depression I once asked my spiritual director how I could be feeling such despair when not long before the depression hit I had been feeling so close to God?

“Simple,” she said. “The closer you get to light the closer you get to darkness.” The deepest things in life come not singly but in paradoxical pairs, where the light and the dark intermingle. The temptations story makes it clear that God’s Spirit is not safe but dangerous, that those who act on the Spirit’s urging will sometimes find themselves hungry and thirsty and filled with fear.

from The Active Life