A quote from a lecture Father Chris Dierkes gave about the Christian mysticism of Bernadette Roberts in a course I took with him:

Traditional Christian mysticism, as stated, sees the mystical path as a three‐fold journey, from purification toillumination to union. The harrowing chasm separating illumination from union is the Dark Night of the Soul. God has entered so closely to the mystic, as if right behind her heart and mind and eyes, that she can no longer “see” God or sense the Divine Presence, particularly under the form of illuminations, locutions, ecstasies and the like as perhaps were common during the illuminative, subtle phase. God has not abandoned the soul, but has in fact grown closer. The soul, however, does not know this and experiences this change as a loss of the divine. The spiritual energy and presence of God are so utterly transcendent as to be undetected by any human faculties, even the subtle faculties. The three‐fold mysticism historically and experientially grounds itself in The Paschal Mystery — The Death and Resurrection of Christ. The Dark Night of the Soul represents the mystic’s participation in the Crucifixion of Christ; The Resurrection then is the movement into the unitive stage.

While this interpretation is not incorrect, Roberts forces us to question whether it is indeed the most accurate or at least the only valid one. According to Roberts we cannot take the human Christ’s mystical experience to be eternal. Christ’s human nature is indeed created. Jesus was born at a certain point in timeand space and died in another point of time and space. Jesus was not always manifest in the physical and has ceased to be so since Resurrection and Ascension. Jesus, the tradition maintains, as an Incarnation [...] was born in union with God. Jesus did not have to go through Dark Nights, purifications and the like to attain union—“He was like us in all things except sin [i.e.separation] (Letter to the Hebrews).” While a non‐Christian may not accept the belief that Jesus was born into union with God, the reader can certainly believe that he had attained such a stage by the time of his public ministry. For our purposes the point is this: assuming Jesus was in a permanent state of union with God (i.e. union of spirits, mystical marriage, theosis, union of separate, created self with God), and the Dark Night of the Soul is in fact the complete participation in the death of Jesus, then the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus did not in fact engender a transformation of consciousness. Every transformation of a stage of consciousness requires death to identification with that particular stage, to clear the way for a “rebirth” to a higher stage of consciousness. In this sense, paralleling the Dark Night‐Rebirth as Unitive Mystic with the Death‐Resurrection is perfectly valid.

Roberts, however, provokes the reader to question whether the Crucifixion is more adequately interpreted, for the mystic, as the death of the self, the unitive self itself? Here is what she says, “To return to this original oneness [the eternal oneness of the Divine Christ as Person of the Godhead] Christ had to die and, in dying, go beyond the human unitive experience of oneness with the Father. Surrendering this human oneness for the infinitely greater oneness of the Godhead is the true nature of Christ’s death...” This is an extremely important point. Christian mysticism, in simplest terms, is the participation in the Paschal Mystery. Now The Paschal Mystery is usually taken to mean the suffering, death, and resurrection of Christ. All of these are certainly part of the Paschal Mystery. The completion of the Paschal Mystery, however, is the Ascension, the return of the Resurrected Christ into heaven. If the three‐fold mysticism of union and theosis grounds itself in the historical experience of Christ, AND, as Roberts states, the crucifixion is the experience of Jesus losing his self‐united‐to‐God in order to experience the Absolute Nature of Godhead, then may the Christian experience heaven (The Absolute Trinitarian Christ) in this life? Medieval Theology, and even most forms of Medieval Mystical Theology (e.g. St. Bernard) answered no. Roberts however from her own experience, answers yes.