Vladimir Truhlar (1912 - 1977) was a Slovenian Jesuit theologian. He wrote most of his works in the 1960s and 1970s, and was especially important for his reflections on the Catholic Aggiornamento. Besides being one of the most important (if not the most important) Slovenian modernist theologian of the 20th century, with a crucial influence in the liberalisation of Slovenian Catholic thought in the 1960s and 1970s, he was also a poet. This aspect of his work is less known. In the past decades, his poems were rediscovered and many of them published for the first time. Virtually all of them are of religious nature, many have mystical elements. This is one of my favorite ones, entitled "God's Colorful Paths":
Since I
have recognized
you within
myself,
I can see
you coming
towards me
from the
external world, as well,
approaching
me
from everywhere:
through the little orange birds on
Paul Klee’s
paintings,
through dark
red
rebellions,
through
bread,
through Graham
Green,
through the
immaculateness
of sharks.
***
***
Pisana pota Boga
Odkar sem Te v sebi
prepoznal,
vidim:
tudi od zunaj,
od vsepovsod,
mi prihajaš nasproti:
po citronastih ptičkah
Paula Kleeja,
po uporih
v rjavordečem,
po kruhu,
Grahamu Greenu,
po brezmadežnosti
morskih psov.
