Question and answer: how one may soonest mend one's faults, and raise oneself in unrest and sadness.
The Twenty-Ninth Letter.
Question and answer: how one may soonest mend one's faults, and raise oneself in unrest and sadness.
In the grace of Jesus, dearly beloved brother!
In your last you ask: How are my faults most surely, most easily and most quickly mended? And, in what manner must I raise myself when unrest and sadness press me down? To your first question I answer briefly.
All your faults are mended through the love-union with Jesus, and by letting Him live in you. If the tree is good, then the fruits are good too. From ourselves nothing good is to be expected. The dark, harsh, heavy, painful properties of our being are lifted only through the love-union with Jesus, when the divine light and the divine love can penetrate us from the ground up. Your caring and striving, your carefulness and faithfulness, your resolutions and supposed sincerity are insufficient — indeed sometimes a hindrance, when one leans on them, particularly now and for your own person, because they hold you fast in yourself. When your faults and imperfections are disclosed to you, whether indirectly or directly, you must not try to help the matter by caring and working, but must quietly consent to your own wretchedness, and be glad to have so fine an opportunity to let go of yourself more deeply, and to seek your perfection in Jesus. Do this then, as well as you can; sink away from yourself and from all your faults. The less foothold and support you find in yourself, the better fitted you are to trust purely in God, and to seek your foothold in Him, whose name alone must be hallowed in us.
If you cannot let go of yourself — for that is what the anxious mind would gladly manage by activity — then bear yourself with stillness and trust. If you cannot bear yourself either, because you are heavy, then let yourself fall, without looking round to see where you fall, and without taking any further charge of yourself. And this then is also the answer to your second question, namely: in all unrest and melancholy the best raising is that you only let yourself fall and give yourself up, as a thing that no longer belongs to you but to another, and for which therefore not you, but another, must and will care. Ah! how long we go on looking at ourselves and occupying ourselves with ourselves! Should we not at last look only at God, and love Him, without regard to ourselves? — since He indeed loves us without regard to what we are. In sum, brother: let go of yourself, bear yourself, let yourself fall, and unite yourself with Jesus in pure love. That He may wholly possess and enliven us is the wish of
Your devoted brother.
Mülheim, 22 September 1742.
German
Der neunundzwanzigste Brief.
Frage und Antwort: Wie man seine Fehler am ersten verbessern und sich in Unruh und Traurigkeit erheben könne.
In der Gnade JEsu herzlich geliebter Bruder!
In deinem letzteren fragest du: Wie werden meine Fehler aufs gewisseste, leichteste und erste verbessert? Und, auf welche Weise muß ich mich erheben, wann mich Unruh und Traurigkeit niederdrücken?
— Opening lines of the original German. The complete transcription of all 605 letters appears in the forthcoming Encounter Press critical edition; Brief 1 is shown in full as a sample.
German text: public domain (1773–75 first edition / 1845 Gesammelte Schriften).
Translator’s notes
What this letter is. Georg Heinrich Fischer had written with two questions, set down in order like a man consulting a physician: how are my faults most surely and most quickly mended? and how am I to lift myself when unrest and sadness weigh me down? Tersteegen answers both, in order — and the old printer, catching the shape of the thing, set the whole scaffolding of the consultation in a distinct typeface: the sentence introducing the questions, the questions themselves, and later the line announcing the second answer. The answers proper stand in the ordinary type, so that the letter reads on the page exactly as it was meant to be used.
Faults are mended, he says, "through the love-union with Jesus, and by letting Him live in you" — and then comes the sentence that must have cost Fischer something to read: "your caring and striving, your carefulness and faithfulness, your resolutions and supposed sincerity are insufficient — indeed sometimes a hindrance, when one leans on them… because they hold you fast in yourself." The remedy is not more resolve but less self-occupation: when a fault is shown you, do not set about repairing it, but "quietly consent to your own wretchedness, and be glad to have so fine an opportunity to let go of yourself more deeply."
Fischer had asked how to raise himself. The answer inverts the question: "in all unrest and melancholy the best raising is that you only let yourself fall and give yourself up, as a thing that no longer belongs to you but to another, and for which therefore not you, but another, must and will care." Tersteegen even grades it: if you cannot let go, then at least carry yourself quietly and trustingly; and if you are too heavy to carry yourself, then simply fall — "without looking round to see where you fall." The letter ends with the four verbs in a row, like a rule of life: let go of yourself, bear yourself, let yourself fall, and unite yourself with Jesus in pure love.
A few words and echoes.
- "If the tree is good, then the fruits are good too." Matthew 7:17–18 — the answer's whole logic: mend the tree, not the fruit.
- "whose name alone must be hallowed in us." Matthew 6:9 — the Lord's Prayer, turned inward.
- love-union. Liebes-Vereinigung — the letter's central term, and the only remedy it names.
- our being. Wesen — the print spaces the word out for emphasis: the dark and painful qualities belong not to our circumstances but to what we are.
- sink away. Entsinke dir — an unusual reflexive turn: to sink out of one's own reach, the opposite of pulling oneself together.
- foothold. Aufenthalt — a place to stand and stay; the less of it you find in yourself, the readier you are to find it in God.
- "a thing that no longer belongs to you but to another." 1 Corinthians 6:19–20 — "ye are not your own… ye are bought with a price"; hence 1 Peter 5:7, "casting all your care upon him; for he careth for you."
trans. Jarred Fenlason · gerhardtersteegen.com/letters/bdii-thiii-029 · all rights reservedEnglish translation © Jarred Fenlason · All rights reserved · gerhardtersteegen.com.