A Prayer for Advent, by Kierkegaard

Lord Jesus Christ, there is so much to draw us back: empty achievements, meaningless pleasures, unworthy concerns. There is so much to scare us back: a pride that is too cowardly to let itself be helped, a cowardly timidity that shirks to its own ruin, an anxiety of sin that shuns the purity of holiness as illness shuns the remedy. But you are still the strongest–so draw us, and even more strongly, to yourself. We call you our Savior and Redeemer, and you came to earth in order to free us from the chains in which we were bound or in which we had bound ourselves and in order to rescue the redeemed. This was your task, which you have completed and which you will complete until the end of time, for just as you yourself have said it, so will you do it: lifted up from the earth, you will draw all to yourself.

This prayer begins the third section of Practice in Christianity (1848), a text written by Kierkegaard, but ascribed to a pseudonymn,

“Anti-Climacus.” As a footnote to this prayer, Kierkegaard (or, rather, “Anti-Climacus”) noted, “this discourse was delivered by Magister Kierkegaard in Frue Church on Friday, September 1, 1848.” Kierkegaard used a sermon he delivered into the larger material of the text–and he notes elsewhere that his sermon gave him the idea for the title of the larger work. I would have liked to have been there in the church when this prayer, and the following “sermon” (discourse) was given. Practice in Christianity was the text that really instigated my interest in Kierkegaard as a religious thinker, an incisive critic of “Christendom,” and as a theologian who inspires a fascination in and devotion to Jesus. In my next post, I’ll say a bit more about Kierkegaard’s Jesus–the one articulated by Anti-Climacus.