There is a sense in which people must count the cost of honest prayer. The answer to prayer may be a demand for something we would much rather avoid doing. If it is truly the Divine Lover who is encountered, we may be very uncomfortable. Idols of our own making have a way of making us feel comfortable and at ease with things as they are. The God of justice/love is the One who calls us out of complacency so that we share divine discontent with a world which worships death. We are met and challenged to live as people of the light in a world that loves the darkness... This fear of what God may open our eyes to see may, in fact, lie behind our own resistance to God, our fear of prayer and silence.
For inasmuch as this flame is a flame of the Divine Life, it wounds the soul with the tenderness of the life of God; and so deeply ... does it wound it and fill it with tenderness that causes it to melt in love, so that there may be fulfilled in it that which came to pass in the Bride in the Song of Songs; she conceived such great tenderness that she melted away.