An encouragement to a deeper surrender.

What this letter is. A brief, warm note — dashed off with a visitor waiting — to the sister he addresses, as always, "in the God-child." Its single theme is surrender (Gelassenheit, self-abandonment to God), and its single request is for more of it. Christ, he assures her, is already at work shaping her soul "after His own heart"; what is wanting is only "a little more blind and gentle surrender," and then "He would already know how to shape you." He states the principle with almost legal plainness: to give a thing over is to be "quit" of it — it is now in another's hand — whereas the soul that keeps eyeing and worrying over itself "takes hold again of what it had handed over." The counsel that follows is pure Tersteegen: not effort but sinking — "Sink, dear soul! sink softly into the eternal Love! Look only on the Love; love the Love, and let it devour your wretchednesses." And then, spilling out unbidden, a small poem — one of his loveliest — that gives the whole letter its image: the soul as a dust-mote in a sunbeam, so small it can only forget itself in the boundless light in which it "lives and floats." Its climax is a line of pure mystical intimacy — "Thou Being of Love art nearer to me than I to myself" — and its prayer is to be wholly consumed: "Devour what is mine wholly, O Sun!… and my soul Thy little mote!"

A few words and echoes.

• "In the God-child." Tersteegen's habitual greeting to this sister (identical to Brief 74) — to be enfolded in the incarnate humility of the Christ-child (cf. Matthew 18:3).
• "Form you after His own heart… shape you." The image of Christ as artist and the soul as material; cf. Galatians 4:19, "until Christ be formed in you," and Jeremiah 18, the potter and the clay. The one condition is pliancy — "blind and gentle surrender."
• "Whoever gives a thing over is quit of it." The plain logic of Gelassenheit: what is truly surrendered is no longer ours to manage; to keep "taking hold again" is not to have surrendered at all.
• "Sink softly into the eternal Love… love the Love." Not striving upward but sinking down into God, who is Love (1 John 4:8, 16); the soul's whole activity reduced to gazing at and loving Love itself, which then "devours" its miseries.
• "A little mote in the bright sunshine." The dust-speck dancing in a sunbeam — a favorite mystical emblem of the soul before God: utterly small, weightless, visible only within the light. The soul is nothing in itself and everything as held in the Sun.
• "I ever live and float in Being unmeasured." Acts 17:28, "in him we live, and move, and have our being" — existence itself as immersion in God.
• "Thou Being of Love art nearer to me than I to myself." Augustine's famous word that God is "interior intimo meo" — more inward to me than my own inmost self (Confessions III.6); Tersteegen turns it into prayer.
• "The Lord will fulfill it, who bless you!" Psalm 138:8, "The Lord will perfect that which concerneth me" — he trusts God to grant the very surrender the poem asks for. (The 1773 print sets this "Lord" in full capitals, which the small-caps preserve.)