A Wartime Prayer for Advent

Alfred Delp, the son of a Lutheran father and Catholic mother, was a young Jesuit priest in Munich during the war and a member of the Kreisau Circle, a Christian resistance movement against the Nazi regime. His sermons and prison writings stand today as powerful and unsentimental reflections on the meaning of Advent in the face of the hubris and despair of the modern age. Here is an excerpt from a devotion he wrote in Berlin's Tegel Prison in December 1944 while awaiting execution:

Let us pray for the openness and willingness to hear the warning prophets of the Lord and to overcome the devastation of life through conversion of heart. Let us not shun and suppress the earnest words of the calling voices, or those who are our executioners today may be our accusers once again tomorrow, because we silenced the truth.

Once again, let us kneel down and pray for keen eyes capable of seeing God's messengers of annunciation, for vigilant hearts wise enough to perceive the words of the promise. The world is more than its burden, and life is more than the sum of its grey days. The golden threads of the genuine reality are already shining through everywhere. Let us know this, and let us, ourselves, be comforting messengers. Hope grows through the one who is himself a person of the hope and promise.

One more time, we want to kneel and pray for faith in life's motherly consecration, in the figure of the blessed woman from Nazareth. Already, today and for always, life is torn away from the cruel and merciless powers. Let us be patient and wait, with an Advent waiting for the hour in which it pleases the Lord to appear anew, even in the night, as fruit and mystery of this time.

Advent is the time of promise, not yet the fulfilment. We are still standing in the middle of it all, in the logical relentlessness and inevitability of destiny. To captive eyes, it still appears that the ultimate throw of the dice indeed will be cast here below in these valleys, on these battlefields, in these camps, and prisons, and cellars. One keeping vigil, though, senses the other powers at work and can await their hour.

The sounds of devastation and destruction, the cries of self-importance and arrogance, the weeping of despair and powerlessness still fill the world. Yet, standing silently, all along the horizon are the eternal realities with their age-old longing. The first gentle light of the glorious abundance to come is already shining above them. From out there, the first sounds are ringing out ... They do not yet form a song or melody - it is all still too far off and only the first announcement and intimation. Still, it is happening. This is today. And tomorrow the angels will relate loudly and jubilantly what has happened, and we will know it and will be blessed if we have believed and trusted in Advent.

Alfred Delp, Advent of the Heart: Seasonal Sermons and Prison Writings, 1941-1944