joy about one or another thing but is the full-throated shout of the soul
‘with tongue and mouth from the bottom of the heart’: ‘I rejoice for my
joy—from, with, by, upon, for and with my joy’—a heavenly refrain that
suddenly interrupts all our other songs, as it were; a joy that cools and
refreshes like a breath of wind, a gust from the trade wind that blows from
the grove of Mamre to the eternal dwelling places. May 19, 10:30A.M.”
This seems to be a brief account of a conversion, and in keeping with pi-
etistic practice, a record was made of the time it was written down, so he
could cling to the moment when worldly perdition had been replaced by
transfigured salvation. The words “with tongue and mouth from the bot-
tom of the heart” (which Kierkegaard put in quotation marks) do not, how-
ever, come from the apostle Paul. They are taken from the verses chanted
by night watchmen in Copenhagen; undeniably, this is quite a way from
the grove of Mamre, the oasis near Hebron which according to the Old
Testament was one of the places one could encounter God and receive his
prophetic promises.
So we do not know what really happened that morning in the middle of
May 1838. The journal entries that precede and follow it do not provide
the slightest clue. Perhaps the entry is merely a poetic sketch, but whatever
occasioned it, joy, indescribable joy, was linked to Christ. Søren Aabye had
come to understand, as if in a dizzying flash of insight, that—however things
might be with the world or with one’s own life—God is love and that God
is thus also the God of joy. He was so completely enveloped in joy that
language neither could nor needed say anything at all. One does not have
oneself to thank for such a joy. It isgiven. Joy is a gift, pure and simple, an
experience that proceeds inexplicably from the Father of Light and is there-
fore blindingly indescribable.
This is Christianity at its best.
Death of a Merchant
“I am,” the aged Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard wrote to his sister Else in
late June 1838, “although not really sick, very weak in both soul and body,
and I must say the same for my sons. This letter will probably be the last
you will receive from my hand, because I can no longer either think or
write, and I hope that my homeward journey is near at hand.—Pray for
me, my dear sister, just as I will pray for you, that God will grant us a blessed
exit from this sinful world.—When the harvest is finished, see if you can
send me a couple of words about how it went.”