Advent of the Heart Quotes

“Advent is the time of promise; it is not yet the time of fulfillment. We are still in the midst of everything and in the logical inexorability and relentlessness of destiny.…Space is still filled with the noise of destruction and annihilation, the shouts of self-assurance and arrogance, the weeping of despair and helplessness. But round about the horizon the eternal realities stand silent in their age-old longing. There shines on them already the first mild light of the radiant fulfillment to come. From afar sound the first notes as of pipes and voices, not yet discernable as a song or melody. It is all far off still, and only just announced and foretold. But it is happening, today.”
― Alfred Delp, Advent of the Heart: Seasonal Sermons and Prison Writings - 1941-1944

“Man is truly human only when he transcends himself. He becomes small when he is content with things and values from his own life sphere. For this reason, he feels a sense of annoyance when fulfillment does not happen, since he still has the vague sense that values once dwelt among mankind. But then confusion entered in, and reality slipped from our fingers. Individuals, like mankind in general, keep falling into mental weariness—what is more, into the diabolical.”
― Alfred Delp, Advent of the Heart: Seasonal Sermons and Writings - 1941-1944

“To believe in the golden seeds of God that the angels have scattered and continue to offer an open heart are the first things we must do with our lives. And the next is to go through these gray days as announcing messengers ourselves. So much courage needs strengthening; so much despair needs comforting; so much hardship needs a gentle hand and an illuminating interpretation; so much loneliness cries out for a liberating word; so much loss and pain seek a spiritual meaning. God’s messengers know about the blessing that the Lord God has planted, even within these historic times. To wait in faith, for the fruitfulness of the silent earth and for the abundance of the coming harvest, means to understand the world—even this world—in Advent. To wait in faith—no longer because we trust the earth or the stars or our temperament and good courage—but only because we have perceived God’s messages and know about His announcing angels, and even have encountered one.”
― Alfred Delp, Advent of the Heart: Seasonal Sermons and Writings - 1941-1944

“Perhaps what we modern people need most is to be genuinely shaken, so that where life is grounded, we would feel its stability; and where life is unstable and uncertain, immoral and unprincipled, we would know that, also, and endure it. Perhaps that is the ultimate answer to the question of why God has sent us into this time, why He permits this whirlwind to go over the earth, and why He holds us in such a state of chaos and in hopelessness and in darkness-and why there is no end in sight.”
― Alfred Delp, Advent of the Heart: Seasonal Sermons and Prison Writings - 1941-1944

“Blessed is the era that can honestly claim that it is not a desert wilderness. Woe, however, to the era in which the voices calling in the wilderness have fallen silent, shouted down by the noise of the day, or prohibited, or drowned in the intoxication with progress, or restricted and quiet out of fear and cowardice.”
― Alfred Delp, Advent of the Heart: Seasonal Sermons and Prison Writings - 1941-1944

“Someone who goes through this wilderness among mankind again and again as the Seeker, and as the Caller, You can sense that that this is more than the call of man, or a power, or a greatness, or a thirst for dominance, or a violent force. This is the Calling God, who calls out in the midst of the wilderness through voices of men. He has filled them, and their very documents that such perfected people are among us sent by God.”
― Alfred Delp, Advent of the Heart: Seasonal Sermons and Prison Writings - 1941-1944

“Confession also means confessing to an assignment. "Who are you?" The austere figure of John the Baptist stands there and says: "I am the one crying in the wilderness." Confession means proclaiming, praising and really spreading the word.”
― Alfred Delp, Advent of the Heart: Seasonal Sermons and Prison Writings - 1941-1944