Following up her book, THE WORD: A Meditation on the Prologue of St. John's Gospel, this beautiful work by the mystic Adrienne von Speyr continues these meditations to the end of chapter five.
Von Speyr reflects deeply on the text, taking it sentence by sentence, but this precise adherence to the words is developed into a much broader picture. The meditations are confluent with the scenes and themes of the Gospel itself, and perhaps the most characteristic note of her meditations is determined by the author's use of the whole imagery of St. John to convey his thought.
The result is that her thought is not presented to us in a language of abstraction but retains the living, moving and dramatic quality of the original language from the Gospel. In these meditations the imagery of St. John is everywhere seen as leading into eternal life, and that life as beginning here and now.
Adrienne von Speyr (1902–1967) was a Swiss medical doctor, a convert to Catholicism, a mystic, and an author of more than sixty books on spirituality and theology. She collaborated closely with theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, her confessor for twenty-seven years, and together they founded the Community of Saint John. Among her most important works are Handmaid of the Lord, Man before God, Confession, and her commentaries on the Gospel of Saint John.