If love is long-suffering and kind, a man who is contentious and malicious alienates himself from love. And he who is alienated from love is alienated from God, for God is love. (Maximos the Confessor)

Crucially - and I think, correctly - Maximos gives attention to how we alienate ourselves from God.

I have not experienced, and find it difficult to conceive of, God withdrawing.

Great saints have written of dark nights of the soul and such where God is absent. I wonder, though, if rather than God withdrawing, they have perceived the gulf of alienation they have created.

I have alienated myself from God. Through pride and its progeny I have - and will again today - draw farther away. I am too often too self-important to even turn and consider the breadth and depth that my pride has been dredging.

In the dark night of the soul it seems likely we turn and gape at the treacherous landscape we have left in our wake. In humility and recognized need, we begin to retrace our path made much harder by our own passing. Fortunately, we have God's help.