The world is full of God

Alfred Delp was a German Jesuit priest who was executed by the Nazis during World War 2. The official accusation was that he knew about the July 20 1944 assassination attempt on Adolph Hitler. Delp had also been a member of the Kreisau Circle, an antiwar group that had secretly created plans for a post-war government. I'm reading about his life in the book With Bound Hands.

Delp was arrested on July 28 1944 after saying Mass at St Georg's in Munich. A while later he was transferred to Tegel prison in Berlin. With the help of the prison chaplains and 'the two Mariannes' he was able to smuggle letters into and out of prison. The two Mariannes were acquaintances in some way, and provided him with clean clothes and such. They bribed the guards with cigarettes, even to the point of smuggling in a bottle of wine and some communion wafers. Delp celebrated Mass from his prison cell, with his hands bound. Before starting Mass, he would tap on each side of his cell to let the others know, and they did the same. This continued from cell to cell so that all the prisoners could participate.

In a letter to Luise Oestreicher, November 17 1944, Delp writes:

This week in many ways has been really turbulent. Three of our number have gone the way that remains a bitter possibility for all of us and from which only a miracle of God can separate and protect us. Inside myself, I have much work to do, to ask, to offer up completely, before God. One thing is clear and tangible to me in a way that it seldom has been: the world is full of God. From every pore, God rushes out to us, as it were. But we're often blind. We're stuck in the good times and the bad times and don't experience them right up to the point where the spring flows forth from God. That's true for pleasant experiences as well as unhappy ones. In everything, God wants us to celebrate encounter and asks for the prayerful response of surrender. The trick and the duty is only this: to develop a lasting awareness and a lasting attitude out of these insights and graces - or rather, to allow them to develop. Then life becomes free, in that freedom which we have often looked for.

So, I just wanted to share this. I don't have any words to improve it and no insightful response to it. I think it stands on its own very nicely.

Comments

[Marie-Linda]

Beautiful! Actually, I really needed to read this today. Thanks for the book excerpt Steve!

[seriously ill]

I understand that Alfred Delp is known widely throughout Germany, but I can't understand why he is virtually unknown in the U.S. His courage and integrity exceed any "john Wayne" action hero America has produced.

[Steve Bogner]

Mr Ill - Thanks for stopping by & commenting. Alfred Delp certainly was a very brave man, and a good example for us all.