From Alfred Delp, "The Shaking Reality of Advent," in When the Time Was Fulfilled, Farmington, PA: Plough, 1965
December 1, 2013
"There is perhaps nothing we modern people need more than to be genuinely shaken up. Where life is firm we need to sense its firmness; and where it is unstable and uncertain and has no basis, no foundation, we need to know this too and endure it.
We may ask why God has sent us into this time, why he has sent this whirlwind over the earth, why he keeps us in this chaos where all appears hopeless and dark and why there seems to be no end to this in sight. The answer to this question is perhaps that we were living on earth in an utterly false and counterfeit security. And now God strikes the earth till it resounds, now he shakes and shatters; not to pound us with fear, but to teach us one thing-the spirit's innermost moving and being moved.
Many of the things that are happening today would never have happened if we had been living in that movement and disquiet of heart which results when we are faced with God, the Lord, and when we look clearly at things as they really are…
Here is the message of Advent: faced with him who is Last, the world will begin to shake. Only when we do not cling to false securities will our eyes be able to see this Last One and get to the bottom of things…
If we want to transform life again, if Advent is truly to come again- the Advent of home and of hearts, the Advent of the people and the nations, a coming of the Lord in all this- then the great Advent question for us is whether we come out of these convulsions with this determination: yes, arise! It is time to awaken from sleep. It is time for a waking up to begin somewhere. It is time for us to go to work, with the same unshakable sureness that the Lord will will come, to set our life in God's order wherever we can."
- Alfred Delp