yanking out” would be a more accurate translation) from the kitsch that has invaded the devotion.139 The principal themes of Delp’s meditations on this devotion are the recognition of humankind’s brokenness, God’s initiative to save humanity, prayer as the dialogical event wherein one encounters the rescuing love of God in Jesus Christ, and the encounter with Christ that re-creates the human person as a disciple.140
Delp followed the theme of the Sacred Heart with a meditation on Advent. His first Advent meditation was titled the “People of Advent.” His words were quite sobering, yet they did not fall prey to bitterness or despair despite his trying circumstances. Faced with humiliation, privation, pain, and inescapable death, he encountered a deep and fulfilling divine love that prepared him for martyrdom. He wrote,
The terror of this time would not be bearable—any more than the terror brought on by our world situation if we comprehend it—except for this other knowledge that continually encourages us and sets us straight. It is the knowledge of the promises that are being spoken right in the middle of the terror and that are valid.141
Such knowledge is not abstract but rather a lived experience of consolation that allows him to encourage people not to fall prey to desolation:
To wait in faith, for the fruitfulness of the silent earth and 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 even have encountered one.142
With these words, Delp invited himself and others to see and hear God’s love even in the midst of the horrors of war.
Delp continued the theme of confidence in God in his meditation on the First Sunday of Advent when he wrote that the holy season brought to people’s attention the awareness of the powerlessness and futility of human life without God.143 The impotence and hopelessness of human existence were consequences of sin and acted as boundaries of creaturely existence. Nonetheless, sin did not have the final say in human life. Advent communicated God’s alliance with people, who meets men and women in their limitations. In the Incarnation, Delp stated, “God resolved to raise the boundaries of our existence and to overcome the consequences of sin.”144 God’s love enabled Delp to see who he was meant to be and liberated him from any Nazi distortions of the human person and attempts to dehumanize him. He wrote,
May God help us to wake up to ourselves and in doing so, to move from ourselves toward him. Every temptation to live according to other conditions is a deception. Our participation in this existential lie is the sin for which we today—as individuals, as a generation, and as a continent—are so horribly doing penance. The way to salvation will be found only in an existential conversion and return to the truth.145
For the second Sunday in Advent, Delp continued to develop the theme of encountering the Divine in the midst of darkness. He noted that the encounter included the divine initiative to save humankind and humankind’s decision to accept God’s offer of salvation. For Delp, the concrete place of the encounter was in Christ—“the way of salvation is the way of the Savior. . . . One must see this and say it clearly, not water it down.”146 Accordingly, the healing and liberation that God offers do not relieve Christians of responsibility and commitment to the world. God’s liberation of human persons serves the purpose of deepening Christian discipleship in the world.
The theme of the Third Sunday of Advent is the decision, the deliberate choice of salvation in Christ. One’s salvation depends much upon the “Christianization of life, through the personal bond with the figure and mission of Christ himself.”147 For Delp, this decision for Christ enabled men and women to experience a power greater than the threat of death or spiritual lostness. As such, at the end of his life, Delp returned to and deepened themes that he intellectually and spiritually wrestled with since the beginning of his Jesuit formation. The solution to the ills of modernity, particularly finding meaning and fulfillment amid sensemaking crises, was resolved in being bound to Jesus Christ from which one engaged the world.
The Recognition of Oneself as God’s Gift
In prison, Delp became conscious of a “transformation” taking place in him—a change that included his Kreisau Circle collaborators. Before their imprisonment, the Christian members of the Kreisau Circle collaborated as Catholics and Protestants. During their internment, as they awaited their trial, sentencing, and potential execution, they worshipped and prayed as brothers in Christ. The collaboration that had started during the Kreisau Circle’s clandestine meetings was now deepened into a spiritual union, made all the more intense by their furtive communication.148 Through the process of prayer, Delp came to know Christ on an intimate level. A close friendship with Christ, as with other persons, requires an openness to change or to be converted. Delp’s prison meditations and letters reveal a man matured by his friendship with Christ. The early months of imprisonment appeared to be an occasion for a profound surrender of self.
Tegel Prison was an opportunity to encounter God in Christ not in some supra-sensible oasis kept free from a broken world but rather in the wreck of human existence. In the same letter he writes:
Mass in the evening was full of grace . . . I did not sleep much last night. For a long time, I sat before the tabernacle and just kept praying the Suscipe 149 in all the variations that comes to me in this situation.150
It is important to note that the Suscipe is found at the end of the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola. The one praying the Suscipe has matured and come to understand whose power is truly undergirding him. The subject of most of the verbs is God, by whose power alone one can hope to do great things for God’s creation. In alluding to the Suscipe at this point in his life, Delp spoke of the unpredictable ways in which God loved him. He recognized in himself a reawakening to the never-ending presence and power of God in Christ. He sensed the nearness of God, despite his situation.
In the hostile environment of Tegel Prison, where pain and suffering reign, Delp’s note of experiencing grace conveys that he sees himself as a gift of God. In this context, if one substitutes “grace” with “gift,” then one can say that despite his anxiety and suffering, Delp does not see himself as abandoned by God. He is not on his own. Moreover, he recognizes his personhood comes from God—his Creator. In recognizing God as the Creator, Delp acknowledges himself as being graced: that his existence is gifted. As such, in his imprisonment, he bears witness to the fact that a Christian can be the point of intersection between God and creation. Even in a crisis or a state of anxiety, Delp expresses a surprising attitude of gratitude to God for the wondrous gift of himself.
Consequently, the collaboration that had begun during the clandestine meetings of the Kreisau Circle deepened into an en-graced life with Christ. A transformed group of men emerged from the depths of Tegel Prison. Through whispers, Delp and friends shared their prayers or meditations on particular Bible passages. They looked to the parable of the wheat seed in John 12: 24 (unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a grain of wheat; but if it dies, it produces much fruit) as an interpretation of their impending death. In a letter to his brother Jesuits at the end of December, Delp referred to this group in prison as “this praying Una Sancta in chains.”151 The “praying Una Sancta in chains” points toward a new mission for Christians. Delp wrote the following in a Christmas letter after he received a small Christmas gift from a fellow Protestant prisoner:
This was a beautiful Christmas gift. And if we are outside again, we should show that it meant much more . . . History will have to carry further the burden and inheritance of the divided churches. The division should never again become a scandal to Christ. I believe so little in utopian ideas, but Christ is nevertheless undivided, and where there is undivided love, we are led to
