15 Nov Confronted by God in prison

Alfred Delp painted in 1939 by his brother-in-law Fritz Kern, who was killed in Crimea in 1941.

Delp speaks of being confronted by God and begins to see everything as a sign of God’s presence–an unexpected pack of cigarettes, a favorite prayer book that came to him from Munich (“the dear grey book”), everything the Mariannes bring to him.  He writes: “The experience that a piece of bread can be a great grace is a new one for me.”

And elsewhere he says: “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 remain stuck in the good times and the bad times, and don’t experience them up to the point where the spring flows forth from God.”