I am back to reading Bonhoeffer. Whether for nostalgia or comfort, I don’t know. Perhaps when it feels like the world is falling in on itself, I am craving the other voices whose worlds had fallen almost a century ago.
Just like today, everything for Bonhoeffer was as clear as mud. He wasn’t told the reason for his arrest when he came into prison at the dawn of spring in 1943. The earliest letters offer a rugged optimism that as soon as the right information was transferred into the right hands, all would be sorted out. His family spoke of him coming back into the garden for shared meals over the summer. Yet, slowly but surely it became clear that none of that was to be. The chaos of the historic moment had more power than any certain fact. When testimony was offered on his behalf, he still was kept in prison at Tegel until his death by firing squad two years later.
Even when Bonhoeffer’s life is taken in by the sullen fog of prison, his letters reveal what sort of life he had cultivated. He talks of the “thrush that sings beautifully in the morning, and now in the evening, too. One is grateful for little things, and that is surely a gain.” In the face of missing his parents he speaks of memories of the wonderful things: “All discontent, ingratitude, and selfishness melt away, and in a moment we are left only with our pleasant memories hovering round us like gracious spirits. I really cannot count all the memories that come alive to me, and they all inspire peace, thankfulness, and confidence. If only one could help other people more!” These were his reflections with his parents right before he expressed worry that the “windows of their air raid shelter were to be walled in.”
Bonhoeffer served in the German Army during WWII as a chaplain. His family was influential and privileged in Berlin, with a family holiday home in the Black Forest. His father was a professor, a deeply respected psychologist. The family shared abundance and took pride in being German. There are many details of his life that make him an imperfect voice for inspiration in this American historical moment. After all, at the end of the day, he is another straight white man.
Yet there is a glimpse in his life of what it looks like to cultivate a faith that transcends time. Bonhoeffer spent his life attending worship, serving the church, and reading the Bible. When all was said and done, the end of his life held almost none of these practices (though he was able to have a Bible in his cell). He reminds us that the practices support the formation of faith — they are not the faith itself. What he finds as he moves through his prison life, is that his faith in fact was not a sham. He questions the role of the church, its place in the national conversation, and how the institution finds itself involved in a delicate and sometimes detrimental dance with power. But he is very clear that his faith is not the church. His God is not worship. His Bible functions as the guide for his soul, not as source of jargon.
That is not to say that doubt does not enter the frame. After a year of imprisonment, he wonders if “there is any ground left for the church, or whether that ground has gone for good.” But even his doubts reveal his care for the world in its state. The question that he exposes in his most probing moments is, how can the Christian project really matter in a world that has come of age/grown up? He wants to name the importance not of an institution, but a faith. And the real question he begins to deal with is talking about that with a world that has shrugged off religion without sounding like a fantastical beast himself.
I suppose this straight, white man is a friend to me through the pages because his questions were prescient and his practice built a faith of meaning, respect, and fortitude. He did not face the firing squad with a care for the future of the institution, he faced the firing squad with conviction that the practice of his faith bore witness to the Resurrected One. That is it. At the end of the day, that is all that we have. It is all that we ever will have.
It is strange to live in a world where facing a firing squad feels rather Western and even somewhat banal. The 21st century promises much more dramatic chaos with maybe only a third of the vocabulary of the mid-20th century. Each day is even more unexpected than the previous, while offering even less substance to make sense of reality. Post modernism, it seems, has come to the (post)-grocery (post)-store. Perhaps this is just why I am reading Bonhoeffer again. There is a steadying presence in his life of mere isolation without the addition of aggressive and lawless biology. His requests for cigarettes and woolen suits offer just enough romanticism to stave off the ongoing pain of a now where sung melodies have been banned and public school is a mere memory. It makes me feel like I’d rather take a drag of nicotine than make my peace with this post-singing, post-school future that we’re all heading toward.
But ultimately it is a sheer gift to see a human being travel such excruciating circumstances with such grace and inner power. It is a way of peering into the capacity of faith in the face of terror and seeing a healing balm. In my last blog about the future of the church, I talked about the importance of leading the faith rather than just leading the church. I believe Bonhoeffer was doing just this. His former work as a pastor was immaterial compared with the expression of his faith. At the end of the day, he shows us the depth that the heart can hold.
I do not think anyone knows what the church will look like when we can meet again. We are hoping for some continuity. We may get it. We may not. It is too soon to tell. But here we remain in isolation. It breaks our hearts that the church cannot meet, that music cannot be sung, that baptismal waters cannot be churned, that the bread cannot be broken. Yet all of that was only there to bear witness to the one that is in us now. Now. In this seeming eternal moment of chaos and the worlds undoing, that one is still here in each of us.
Often we think the presence will be made manifest in a resounding organ score or the lingering evanescence of a descant. But no. Actually, the real lessons of faith are in the banal. No one learns this by choice. We’d all choose to be IG Faith Influencers, depending on our religious flavor. Only in prison and separation did Bonhoeffer learn the presence of God is in the care of his parents during the air raids, the longing of his family to share the garden, and the memories that he carried before the war. This is the substance of his faith in his own personal crucible. It took a desperate hour to reveal it. But it was there. These small hidden moments are what he takes before the firing squad when he says, “this is the end, for me — the beginning of life.”
Perhaps I am reading Bonhoeffer to learn again how to gather up these small hidden moments. These yawning hours that feel too banal for words. Perhaps I am reading him to recall that this is where religion ends and faith begins. Religion speaks of God, but faith makes room for the presence of God. Words about God have changed very few people for the better. Sadly, it often works the other way around. It is only the presence of God that lives in the small hidden moments of human history. And the presence of God is the only thing that has the capacity to stretch and heal the human heart.