Daily Inspiration Quote by Johannes Tauler

“Like blind hens” is deliberately unflattering: Tauler chooses barnyard ridicule over pious uplift to puncture spiritual vanity. The image lands because it’s comic and cruel at once. A hen is busy, noisy, convinced it’s doing something important; blindness turns that industry into aimless pecking. Tauler’s intent is to shame the reader out of performative religiosity and into interior attention. He’s not calling people evil so much as distracted, self-satisfied, and spiritually incompetent by default.

The subtext is a warning about self-knowledge as the first battleground of faith. “Ignorant of our own self” isn’t modern self-help; it’s a theological diagnosis. For Tauler, the “self” is layered: surface habits and opinions mask a deeper interior where grace can act, and where the ego quietly runs the show. The “depths within us” are not a flattering reservoir of hidden greatness but a contested space - at once the place of God’s presence and the place where illusion breeds. Blindness here names the paradox of the religious life: you can memorize doctrine, obey rules, even feel devout, and still miss the actual terrain of your soul.

Context matters. Tauler, a 14th-century Dominican associated with the Rhineland mystics, preached in a Europe rattled by plague, social unrest, and institutional church tensions. His era had no shortage of external rituals and public piety; his project was to redirect attention inward, toward a lived, transformative encounter with God. The sting of the metaphor is pastoral strategy: insult as mercy, a slap meant to wake the hen up.