I descend deep into my heart, to see who it is that dwells within it besides me and Thee, O Eternal God?
And with fear I find strangers without number, fighting over the division of my heart. I found as many of them in my heart as time since Adam contains human and inhuman souls.
And I understood why my heart has grown faint, so that it can receive neither Thee nor me into its chambers, but shoves us aside — the owners to the edge of their own estate.
Before I came forth from my mother's womb, the world with its desires took up its dwelling in me.
Every flattery of the world I paid for dearly, all too dearly, ever parting with and giving away a portion of my heart. Until I had surrendered my whole heart to the world, and until its flatteries grew loathsome to me.
Old men complain to me of their years, saying: from many years our heart has grown old.
Truly, old men, your heart has grown old not from many years but from many desires.
So I counsel my heart in solitude: tear yourself away from yesterday, for yesterday has already torn itself away from you. All those objects to which desire bound you exist no more today: some have changed, others sickness has disfigured, still others have died. Nor do the objects of your tomorrow's desires exist. With its whip time lashes its flock, and the flock sweats and bleeds from the blows. And the objects of the present day cast into you — already crammed full of the shadows of the dead — new desires, which tomorrow will themselves be shadows of the dead.
Do not repeat past feelings, for they will bind you to the pillar of time as many times as you repeat them, O my heart. And you will be a slave to time, and you will grow old and die before death.
Tear apart as quickly as you can the knots of passion, which have been tied from desires and feelings joined together and often repeated. It is easier to tear the single threads of desires and the threads of feelings than the strong knots of passion. But these too you must tear apart, though it draw blood, if you desire a new childhood, and a new youth, more beautiful and more eternal than your youth that is past.
Cast the world out of yourself, O my heart, and then behold it, how powerless it is. And behold yourself then, and you will feel a power undreamed of. The world seems mighty to us only so long as we are slaves to the world.
And you will be spacious as Eternity, and Eternity will take up its dwelling in you.
O Triune God, Who hast a heart not overcome by darkness and free from the world, cleanse my heart of the independent strangers who have streaked it with darkness. Let my heart be light, and let the darkness circle powerlessly around it, but let it not overcome it.
Let my heart be the heart of a son and a master, and not the heart of a servant and a thief.
Give me the heart of Jesus, around which the darkness groped in vain to enter, and could not enter.
O Queen of heavenly beauty, hedge my heart about with a mother's care.
O Holy and Almighty Spirit, make my heart fruitful with heavenly love. That all that is born and grows within it may be not of flesh and blood but of Thee, O Holy Spirit and my Lord.