From an essay on Advent written by Alfred Delp, a Jesuit priest condemned as a traitor for his opposition to Hitler. He wrote this in a Nazi prison shortly before he was hanged in 1945. It's posted at the website of Bruderhof Communities.

[W]e 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. Only when we do not cling to false securities will our eyes be able to see this Last One and get to the bottom of things. Only then will we be able to guard our life from the frights and terrors into which God the Lord has let the world sink to teach us, so that we may awaken from sleep, as Paul says, and see that it is time to repent, time to change things. It is time to say, All right, it was night; but let that be over now and let us be ready for the day. We must do this with a decision that comes out of these very horrors we have experienced and all that is connected with them; and because of this our decision will be unshakable even in uncertainty.

Read the whole thing.

via Drell's Descants.

UPDATE (9 Dec.): Bruderhof Communites has gone offline, so the full essay is no longer available. More information here.