The great illusion

"A Godless life is one delivered up to a vast army of kill-joys.  When man loses touch with the eternal truths he gets submerged in the weeds that sprout all over the garden of his life.  They are senseless trivialities that assume an air of real importance.  Though they pretend to have a purpose they are quite futile, and merely add obscurity and confusion to a life which is gradually engulfed in a sort of eternal twilight without light or direction. … Hunted and driven, and bewitched he is no longer master of his own fate, no longer a free man.  It is hard enough to meet the ordinary hazards incidental to every existence; but the Godless man has no defenses and is delivered up, bound and disarmed.  Left to cope with them in this defenseless fashion he falls back on the excuse that fate is against him and the world is all wrong.  He is a failure and it takes very little to keep him bogged down in depression and despair.  The world becomes a cheerless place, not worth living in, although there seems to be no way out of it.  Or, on the other hand, he may persuade himself that a flippant attitude is the right one to adopt, and he seeks a cheap way out of his troubles by various forms of escapism.  The great illusion begins, the age of noise and mass mentality and organized animation - 'circuses' - for crowds.  Till at last the earth begins to quake and underground rumblings, which have been more or less effectively drowned by the surface uproar, imperatively assert themselves.  Thunder crashes proclaiming the day of judgement." (pp. 37-38)

- Fr. Alfred Delp SJ, “The Prison Meditations of Father Alfred Delp”, 1963 Herder and Herder New York
See also: The Prison Meditations of Father Delp