How one is to receive the balm-drops of eternal love with humble thanks, and turn them to use.

What this letter is. A short letter of spiritual direction, written 4 October 1733 to Christiana Maria Griesenbeck — the eleventh in this run of letters to her. Its whole subject is how to handle grace when it comes gently: what Tersteegen calls "the balm-drops of eternal love." His answer is a lesson in not grasping — in receiving God's touches lightly, gratefully, and without straining after them.

Its counsel. The heart of the letter is an image of a flame that must not be fanned. When God gives a sense of His nearness, the temptation is to work it up — to "let the flame burn too brightly, through great agitations in the sensory part," to force the feeling. Tersteegen counsels the opposite: let grace "only so gently, in the ground of the spirit — unstirred and unblown — glow and work." Don't rake the coals, don't blow on them; just let them burn. And receive what comes "only innocently, just as it is, and love." The goal is not intense experience but a will quietly reshaped — "soft, pliant, and at last will-less" — the will of a child who no longer insists on its own way. "You must, together with me, become a child… that gives itself over to the God-Child without choosing and dividing; this is our calling." The child doesn't understand all that this surrender will cost — "but over that a child does not rack its brains beforehand," it simply leaves everything "to the dear Father."

A few words and echoes.

• "Balm-drops of eternal love." Tersteegen's tender name for the small, quiet touches of grace — moments of God's felt nearness — that are to be received with thanks rather than seized or worked up.
• "Who knows how to lead us so motherly." God pictured as a mother teaching a small child to walk with leading-strings (gängeln), letting "His glances of life and light rise upon us" again and again so we do not "fall wholly asleep in death." An echo of a soul stilled like a weaned child with its mother (Psalm 131:2).
• "Answer every glance… with a childlike glance in return." The whole of the spiritual life in one picture: God looks upon the soul in love, and the soul simply looks back — no technique, only a returning gaze.
• "Unstirred and unblown." The fire of grace is not to be raked over or fanned by our own effort; it burns best when left quietly alone in "the ground of the spirit."
• "Will-less." Not passivity or the loss of self, but a will no longer set on its own preferences — freed from "choosing and dividing," content to let God choose.
• "The bond… of which Renty has left a copy." Jean-Baptiste de Renty (1611–1649), a French nobleman famous for his life of hidden devotion, wrote out and signed a covenant of total self-surrender to God. Tersteegen points Christiana to it (in the Life of Renty and in the Lives of Holy Souls) as a model she may "boldly subscribe" — make her own — a deed of giving herself wholly over, come what may.