Prayer

When we know this feeling, when our environment becomes breathless and silent, when only our finest thoughts and feelings hold the soul together, when perhaps even these vanish and only a basic feeling remains directed toward the God who proclaims himself from the past, and toward the God from the future, when we know this and have learned to live in this feeling, then we realize that there are moments when the soul sees that it has turned away from, and disregards, all the cleverness it created by its own thinking. What it brought into being by its thinking and feelings, the ideals to which it had been educated and grasped in its will have all been swept away. It was given over to its highest thoughts and feelings, but even these were swept away, leaving only that last basic feeling. When we have come to feel this, we know that in the same way that the wonders of nature meet us when we look upon them with cleansed and purified eyes, these new feelings of which we were hitherto unaware shine into the soul. Impulses of will and ideals formerly strange to us rise up in it, germinating fruitful seeds.