07 Dec December 7–Tegel Prison

Second Sunday of Advent

Delp writes, “The primary condition for a fruitful and rewarding Advent is renunciation, surrender.”  During this Advent of 1944 which he spends in Tegel Prison in Berlin, manacled and in isolation, he comes back again and again to this word: surrender–only God can open the door that keeps us imprisoned. 

On this Second Sunday of Advent he writes of the need for a change of heart—to move away from arrogance and self-satisfaction and to “fold our hands and kneel humbly before God.”  In this attitude “the icy loneliness and helplessness in which we are frozen melts under the divine warmth that fills and blesses us.”