Since being published by Ignatius Press in 2006, Fr. Alfred Delp's Advent of the Heart: Seasonal Sermons and Prison Writings - 1941-1944 (originally published, in part, in German in 1984/1985), has been increasingly recognized as a unique and deeply challenging book about Advent. In a December 11, 2011, editorial for Our Sunday Visitor newspaper, John Norton wrote about the book:
I stumbled across it recently and found it exceptionally moving.
Granted, this was written by a man who probably had a pretty good idea that his trial was to be a sham legal process and the Nazis 
would end up executing him. So there’s an intensity there that we, in relative peacetime abundance, understandably have difficulty mustering.
But there is also a warning he offers, and paid for with his life: If we cling to false securities and believe in our own power, eventually our world will be rocked and descend into chaos and darkness.
“There is perhaps nothing we modern people need more than to be genuinely shaken up,” he said, so that we reestablish God, and not ourselves, at the center of our lives. ...
God forbid that any of us ever finds ourselves in the situation that Father Delp did. We ought to take advantage of the clarity of vision his situation gave him.
“The great question to us,” he writes, “is whether we are still capable of being truly shocked or whether it is to remain so that we see thousands of things and know that they should not be and must not be, and that we get hardened to them. How many things have we become used to in the course of the years, of the weeks and months, so that we stand unshocked, unstirred, inwardly unmoved.
“Advent is a time when we ought to be shaken and brought to a realization of ourselves. ... Being shattered, being awakened — only with these is life made capable of Advent. In the bitterness of awakening, in the helplessness of ‘coming to,’ in the wretchedness of realizing our limitations, the golden threads that pass between heaven and earth in these times reach us. These golden threads give the world a taste of the abundance it can have.”
I've come across many other references to the book. In a recent post on his "Bangor to Bobbio" blog, Fr. Seán Coyle (Bacolod City, Negros Occidental, Philippines), wrote of the inspiring witness of Fr. Delp and quotes from a 2008 essay, "Advent — A Season to Find Hope Amid Despair In The World", by Joseph F. Pisani:
[Fr. Delp] often reflected on the need for courage in a world that had forgotten the meaning of Christmas. Isn't the same true today? Almost 65 years later, atrocities are still being committed, and hearts grow cold in the relentless pursuit of power, profit and possessions. We live in an age characterized by greed and gross insensitivity to suffering.
Delp was one of those principled men and women who appear in every generation and confront the insanity of a world dark with despair, illuminating the way for the rest of us. His example ignited the ideals of his fellow prisoners, who, by any reckoning, had no reason to be hopeful. The source of his strength was a realization that the child in the manger was greater than all the tyrants and totalitarian regimes in history.
In his last meditation, composed on Christmas Eve, a month before he would be hanged for treason, Delp wrote, "How many types of people today could honestly appear at the manger? Most of them have absolutely no desire to do so. The small, scanty door does not let anyone riding a high horse get through. ... How much of what we are living through today cannot stand in the presence of the Child!"
Even though the Nazis pressured him to leave the Jesuits, he resisted, and professed his final vows shortly before his execution on February 2, 1945. Facing death, he was in good spirits and joked with his confessor that, "In half an hour, I'll know more than you do."
Fr. Coyle also refers to a lengthy paper, "Advent of the Heart: The Prison Meditations of Alfred Delp, SJ" (available online as a PDF file), written in 2010 by Jenny Howell, a Ph.D. candidate in Theology at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. Howell writes:
He wonders: can joy be found here on earth? Of course! Joy can be experienced in the blooming of flowers, in a meeting with a true friend, in the sun, or the movement of water. There are joyful emotions that mean we are capable of truly loving and truly suffering. The earth, as well as heaven, can be a great occasion for joy. “I know perfectly well the many sources from which joy can flow out to man—and that all these sources can also fall silent.” That kind of joy is not what Father Delp sought to write about. Rather, “It’s about that old theme of my life: man becomes healthy through the order of God and in nearness to God. That is also where he becomes capable of joy and happiness. Establishing the order of God, and announcing God’s nearness, and teaching it and bringing it to others: that is what my life means and wants, and what it is sworn to and abides by.”
When Father Delp finally received his condemnation to death, he was surprised by his own surprise. Of course the outcome was inevitable, he mused, but how difficult to accept when his very nerves “tingled with life.” He did not embrace death passively. “To be quite honest I don’t want to die, particularly now that I feel I could do more important work and deliver a new message about values that I have only just discovered and understood. But it has turned out otherwise.” One thing was gradually becoming clear: Father Delp knew he must surrender himself completely. “This is seed-time, not harvest. God sows the seed and some time or other he will do the reaping. The only thing I must do is to make sure the seed falls on fertile ground,” he writes. “May others at some future time find it possible to have a better and happier life because we died in this hour of trial.”
Even in the last bits of writing he was able to smuggle out of his jail cell, Father Delp sustained a hope that transcended his own life. His hope rested on the belief that Christians would still be able to hear the Advent voice crying from the wilderness, “Prepare the way of the Lord!”
Fr. Delp also wrote about Christmas; here is a selection on Ignatius Insight:
Related Articles, Interviews, and Links:
• "All of life is Advent": On the life and death of Alfred Delp, S.J. | Abtei St. Walburg
• The Mystery Made Present To Us | Fr. Alfred Delp, S.J.
• Remembering Father Alfred Delp, S.J., Priest and Martyr | A Conversation with Father Karl Adolf Kreuser, S.J.
• Remembering a Priest and Martyr: On the Ordination Anniversary of Alfred Delp, S.J. | Abtei St. Walburg
• Faithful Even Unto Death: The Witness of Alfred Delp, S.J. | Fr. Albert Münch
• Alfred Delp Society website (German language only)
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