"...When will this sort of elevation be felt that, drunk with divine love, the mind may forget itself, making itself like a broken vessel...? To lose yourself like one who has no existence, and to have no self-consciousness whatever, and to be emptied of yourself and almost annihilated, belongs to heavenly not to human love. It is deifying to go through such an experience. As a little drop of water, blended with a large quantity of wine, seems utterly to pass away from itself and assumes the flavour and colour of wine, and as iron when glowing with fire loses its original or proper form and becomes just like the fire; and as the air, drenched in the light of the sun, is so changed into the same shining brightness that it seems to be not so much the recipient of the brightness as the actual brightness itself: so all human sensibility in the saints must then, in some ineffable manner, melt and pass out of itself, and be lent into the Will of God. How will God be all in all if something human survives in man?. ..."
- Saint Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153), Catholic mystic, Cistercian abbot & Doctor of the Church
