Quotes from Alfred Delp

we pretend to be grown up and responsible; we are so proud and self-assured--and look at the result. The world lies in bomb dust and ruins about us.

Es steht schlimm um ein Leben, wenn es die Wüste nicht besteht oder sie meidet …

Man is truly human only when he transcends himself. He becomes small when he is content with things and values from his own life sphere. For this reason, he feels a sense of annoyance when fulfillment does not happen, since he still has the vague sense that values once dwelt among mankind. But then confusion entered in, and reality slipped from our fingers. Individuals, like mankind in general, keep falling into mental weariness—what is more, into the diabolical.

Blessed is the era that can honestly claim that it is not a desert wilderness. Woe, however, to the era in which the voices calling in the wilderness have fallen silent, shouted down by the noise of the day, or prohibited, or drowned in the intoxication with progress, or restricted and quiet out of fear and cowardice.

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.

Confession also means confessing to an assignment. "Who are you?" The austere figure of John the Baptist stands there and says: "I am the one crying in the wilderness." Confession means proclaiming, praising and really spreading the word.

Someone who goes through this wilderness among mankind again and again as the Seeker, and as the Caller, You can sense that that this is more than the call of man, or a power, or a greatness, or a thirst for dominance, or a violent force. This is the Calling God, who calls out in the midst of the wilderness through voices of men. He has filled them, and their very documents that such perfected people are among us sent by God.

If there was a little more light and truth in the world through one human being, his life has had meaning.