A Wondrous Advent Piece

By a Jesuit confined by the Nazis, shortly before he died:

There is perhaps nothing we modern people need more than to be genuinely shaken up. Where life is firm we need to sense its firmness; and where it is unstable and uncertain and has no basis, no foundation, we need to know this too and endure it...Many of the things that are happening today would never have happened if we had been living in that movement and disquiet of heart which results when we are faced with God, the Lord, and when we look clearly at things as they really are. If we had done this, God would have withheld his hand from many things that have stirred up and shaken and crushed our lives. We would have seen the inner authorities, we would have seen and judged the limits of our own competence. But we have stood on this earth in false pathos, in false security; in our spiritual insanity we really believed we could, with the power of our own hand and arm, bring the stars down from heaven and kindle flames of eternity in the world. We believed that with our own forces we could avert the dangers and banish night, switch off and halt the internal quaking of the universe. We believed we could harness everything and fit it into a final order that would stand. Here is the message of Advent: faced with him who is the Last, the world will begin to shake...

Read the whole thing. Interesting side note: St. Maximilian Kolbe summarized his theology of Mary's relationship with the Holy Spirit in a quick note written just before the Nazis came and got him as well. The full sketch can be found in this book.