God, we feel the full weight of decades, centuries, and millennia of our Christian Western civilization. We are tired and old, crawling, weary and ancient among the ruins of this Christian Western civilization, and we feel the shadow of transience, the shadow of death and darkness around us. And we would like to vanish in our bitterness, we would like to despair, weary in our bitterness, over Your light, over Your love, over Your eternal life!
God, we are afraid of the future, which torments and haunts us, fear of the beliefs that threaten us, that would drag us between heaven and earth!
God, we ask You, may You increasingly shatter all our gazes into the past, may You increasingly cloak all our gazes into the future. God, may You immerse deeper and deeper into the true baptismal bath all our adulthood. Make us children who know neither past nor future. Yes, remove from us all our proud humanity, so that we may live day by day like weeds and like butterflies, which You Yourself have said!
Remove from us all the pride of the past and all the conceit of the future and let us peacefully live for the moment that You give us. To drink from Your light, which You grant us in the moment, to experience Your love, which You bestow upon us in the moment – and nothing else. And therefore, truly and completely in You, who are the Moment itself – shining, glowing, flowing – the holy Moment of eternity.
(Erich Przywara SJ /1889–1972/,
Prayers of this age, 21; during the time of World War II)
