The number one trusted online resource for Catholic values
Menu
A+ A A-

The Numbness of Those Who Try to Kill Jesus

  • FATHER ALFRED DELP, S.J.

A life that has hardened into numbness is mortally sick.


jesusdavinciAll that is vital in life succumbs to the hardening process.  A numbed person deludes himself into believing that he cannot hear the inner voice that calls on him to shake off this numbness and rise out of himself.  He is bound and fettered to himself and wastes away in that condition.  He becomes incapable of living faith, as he is incapable of entering into the dialogue, the fundamental form of creative life in every respect.

True faith, reverence, respect, love, adoration — all these are forms of the dialogue and all of them are stifled in the numbness brought about by the hardening of heart.  So a person really ought to make every effort to maintain the dialogue and not to miss a single moment of contact with the invisible partner.

More grievous than any external hardness or difficulty is this inner numbness, whether it results from habit, or fear, or shock, from pettiness, or pride.

This is Meaghen Gonzalez, Editor of CERC. I hope you appreciated this piece. We curate these articles especially for believers like you.

Please show your appreciation by making a $3 donation. CERC is entirely reader supported.

dividertop

Acknowledgement

delp Father Alfred Delp, S.J. "The Numbness of Those Who Try to Kill Jesus." from Advent of the Heart: Seasonal Sermons and Prison Writings (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 2006).

Reprinted with permission from Ignatius Press.

This excerpt appeared in Magnificat in March 2016.

The Author

DelpDelp1Father Alfred Delp, S.J. (1907-1945) was a German Jesuit priest and a philosopher of the German Resistance. Part of the inner Kreisau Circle resistance group, he is considered a significant figure in Catholic resistance to Nazism. Implicated in the failed 1944 July Plot to overthrow the Nazi Dictator Adolf Hitler, Delp was arrested, and sentenced to death. He was executed in 1945. Father Delp is the author of Advent Of The Heart, and Prison Writings

Copyright © 2006 Ignatius Press