On peaceable self-abandonment.

What this letter is. A miniature, one paragraph that holds Tersteegen’s entire doctrine of the soul’s return to God in compressed form. Our very longing for God is not our own; it is what “the eternal Love breathes into us.” Our part is only to let that longing carry us home, “to turn it back again into its Origin,” and the road home is not effort or feeling but “peaceable self-abandonment” and a quiet “sinking-in into the ground of the soul.” In that ground the disordered desires die, and even the good desires are “purified and made essential,” turned from passing wishes into settled being. He is honest about the price, “what a death this costs our own active nature!” and that the cost is felt most sharply just when grace is pulling hardest. But the reward is the whole thing: the spirit finds “the gate to its Father’s house and to life” only there, and the outcome “rests, once for all, on God’s mercy alone.” The note closes with the warm shorthand of the letter-circle, a request for prayers and greetings to unnamed friends.

A few words and echoes.

• Peaceable self-abandonment (friedsame Gelassenheit). Tersteegen’s central word, inherited from Tauler and the Rhineland mystics: Gelassenheit is a letting-go, a released and unresisting yieldedness to God — here qualified as “peaceable,” i.e. without strain or self-torment.
• Her still Element (ihr stilles Element). The eternal Love’s own “element” or native medium — stillness; the soul reaches its completion by coming to rest in that stillness (cf. Psalm 116:7, “return unto thy rest, O my soul”).
• A sinking-in into the ground of the soul (Ersinkung in den Grund). The mystic Grund — the deepest center of the soul where God is present; the “sinking-in” is the inward descent below thought and feeling.
• Made essential (zum Wesen gemacht). One of Tersteegen’s signature moves — desires and virtues become not fleeting acts but Wesen, settled substance of the person; cf. the “essential” union of the letters around it.
• The gate to its Father’s house. John 14:2 (“in my Father’s house are many mansions”) and John 10:9 (“I am the door”) — the spirit, sunk into the ground, finds the very door to the Father.
• Remember me in the Lord. The reciprocal intercession of the circle; cf. Colossians 4:3, 1 Thessalonians 5:25. The “N. and N.” are redacted names, as throughout.