O true God and my Lord! It is a great consolation for the soul wearied by the loneliness of being separated from You to see that You are everywhere. But when the vehemence of love and the great impulses of this pain increase, there’s no remedy, my God. For the intellect is disturbed and the reason is so kept from knowing the truth of Your omnipresence that it can neither understand nor know. It only knows it is separated from You and it accepts no remedy. For the heart that greatly loves receives no counselor consolation except from the very one who wounded it, because from that one it hopes its pain will be cured. When You desire, Lord, You quickly heal the wound You have caused; prior to this there is no hope for healing or joy, except for the joy of such worthwhile suffering.
2. O true Lover, with how much compassion, with how much gentleness, with how much delight, with how much favor and with what extraordinary signs of love You cure these wounds, which with the darts of this same love You have caused! O my God and my rest from all pains, how entranced I am! How could there be human means to cure what the divine fire has made sick? Who is there who knows how deep this wound goes, or how it came about, or how so painful and delightful a torment can be mitigated? It would be unreasonable were so precious a sickness able to be mitigated by something so lowly as are the means mortals can use. How right the bride of the Canticles is in saying: My Beloved is for me and I for my Beloved and my Beloved for me,1 for it is impossible that a love like this begin with something so lowly as is my love.
3. Well, if it is lowly, my Spouse, how is it that it is not so lowly in rising from the creature to its Creator? Oh, my God, why “I for my Beloved”? You, my true Lover, have begun this war of love, because this love doesn’t seem to be anything else than a restlessness and dereliction on the part of all the faculties and senses; for they go out into the streets and squares entreating the daughters of Jerusalem to tell of their God.2 Once, Lord, this battle has begun, who are these faculties to fight against, if not against the one who has been made lord of this fortress where they dwell, which is the highest part of the soul? They are driven out so that they might return to conquer their Conqueror. And now, tired of seeing themselves without Him, they quickly surrender and lose all their forces, and fight better; and by surrendering they win the victory over their Victor.
4. O my soul, what a wonderful battle you have waged in this pain, and how literally true is what happens here! Since my Beloved is for me and I for my Beloved, who will be able to separate and extinguish two fires so enkindled? It would amount to laboring in vain, for the two fires have become one.