Thou art My sister, since we belong to the same Father; My Spouse, since I have already betrothed, thee, and there wants but little before our marriage shall be consummated. My sister, My Spouse! O words of sweetness to a soul in affliction, whose grief overflows because the beauty she adores and by whom she is so tenderly loved, cannot yet be possessed! Thou hast wounded My heart! He says, thou hast wounded My heart! Thou hast inflicted, O Spouse, a double wound; one, by one of thine eyes, as if He would say, that which has wounded and delighted me to thee, is that all thine afflictions, all thine abasements and thy most extreme deprivations have not caused thee to turn thine eye away from Me that thou mightest behold thyself. Thou hast taken no more notice of the wounds [22] I have caused thee to receive, nor even of those which I myself inflicted, than if they had not been; because thy pure and upright love kept thee so steadily regarding Myself, that it did not permit thee to consider thyself nor thine own interest, but solely to contemplate Me with love as thy sovereign object.

But alas! exclaims this afflicted soul, how is it that I have steadfastly regarded Thee when I do not even know where Thou art? She knows not that her look has become so purified, that being ever direct and unreflective, it escapes her notice and does not perceive that she always sees. And besides, when we can see Him no longer, and have forgotten self and every creature, [23] we must of necessity behold God, and the interior eye is fixed upon Him alone. [24]

The other wound thou hast inflicted upon me, continues the Bridegroom, is by one tress of thy neck; by which is plainly meant that every affection of the Bride is concentred in God alone, and that she has lost all her will in His. Thus the abandonment of her entire self to the will of God, by the loss of all separate will, and the integrity with which she clings to God, without any further self-reflections, are the two arrows which have pierced the heart of the Bridegroom.