Time & Perspective Quote by Søren Kierkegaard

Kierkegaard reaches for erotic intimacy not to romanticize prayer, but to make it uncomfortably concrete. He knows that “mysticism” can drift into abstractions - elevated fog, spiritual self-regard. So he yanks it back to the body: breath, whisper, the almost embarrassing nearness of two people trying to say what can’t be said. The point isn’t that prayer is “like” love; it’s that both are acts of exposure. You don’t stand at a safe distance and admire God the way you might admire an idea. You risk closeness.

The phrasing does a lot of sly work. “Breathe forth” and “souls blend” suggest an exchange that dissolves boundaries, but then Kierkegaard drops “as it were” and “creep,” which puncture any sentimental glow. “Creep into God” is deliberately small, even furtive. It implies humility, dependence, maybe even a guilty awareness that what the mystic wants could be mistaken for possession. Kierkegaard’s Protestant suspicion of spiritual shortcuts hovers here: union with God is not a technique or a transcendence hack. It’s a longing that feels bodily, but must remain reverent.

Context matters: Kierkegaard wrote against the self-satisfied Christianity of his Denmark, where faith had been domesticated into social membership and polite doctrine. By comparing prayer to lovers at their most vulnerable, he insists that genuine spirituality is not public performance. It’s private, risky, and intimate - and it makes the person praying smaller, not grander.