Moved in Spirit
“...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. It is because we have stood here on
the earth with a totally false and inauthentic sense of security. So now, God
lets the earth resound, and now He shudders it, and then He shakes it, not to
call forth a false anxiety—I will speak of that later. He does it to teach us
one thing again: how to be moved in spirit. Much of what is happening today
would not be happening if people were in the state of inner movement and
restlessness of heart in which man comes into the presence of God the Lord and
gains a clear view of things as they really are. Then man would have let go of
much that has thrown all our lives into disorder one way or another and has
thrashed and smashed our lives. He would have seen the inner appeals, would
have seen the boundaries, and could have coordinated the areas of
responsibility. Instead, man stood on this earth in a false pathos and a false
security, under a deep delusion in which he really believed he could
single-handedly fetch stars from heaven; could enkindle eternal lights in the
world and avert all danger from himself; that he could banish the night, and
intercept and interrupt the internal quaking of the cosmos, and maneuver and
manipulate the whole thing into the conditions standing before us now.
That is the first Advent message: before the end, the world
will be set quaking. And only where man does not cling inwardly to false
security will his eyes be capable of seeing the Ultimate...
...it is time for each individual to use every opportunity to
guide life into this order now—and to do it with the same ‘unshakeability’ with
which the Lord will come. Where life heeds your word, you must not misrepresent
the message. Where life rebels before your very eyes, you must set it right.
These days life lacks people who can come through the final shakings—as well as
through these present shakings—with the knowledge and the consciousness: those
who are watching for the Lord will not be affected, in the eternal sense, even
if they are hunted off the face of the earth.”
~Alfred Delp
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