I meant to post this a while back, but like most things I intend to post, it never left the intention phase.
I’ve been reading (very slowly) through Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison (LPP), and one of the greatest pulls to read even the most benign and prosaic details is the depth of joy that is so ubiquitous throughout his letters.
On November 26, 1943, his friend Bethge visited him in prison and delivered a cigar as a gift from Karl Barth.
This image—to have had the four people who are closest to me in my life around me for a moment—will accompany me now for a long time. When I came back up here to my cell, I simply walked back and forth for an hour, my food sat there getting cold, and finally I had to laugh at myself when I caught myself saying to myself from time to time, quite clichéd, “That was really wonderful!” I always have intellectual reservations when I use the word “indescribable” for something, for if one takes the trouble and insists on the necessary clarity, then to my mind there is very little that is truly “indescribable”; but at the moment this morning seems to me to belong in that category. Now Karl’s cigar is here before me, a truly improbable reality—so, was he nice? and understanding?
Most of my highlights in the book are of this simple, joyful quality.
He goes on to talk about the
misconception that being imprisoned is perceived as uninterrupted torment. That’s not how it is, and precisely such visits ease one’s life quite perceptibly for days afterward, even if they also naturally stir up some things that fortunately had been asleep for a while. But that too does no harm. One realizes again how rich one was, becomes thankful for it, and musters new hope and will to live. I thank you one and all very much.
Not enough can be said about this — about the things that today are not enough for us but that by tomorrow we might realize were more than enough. Imagine if we all spoke to and about our neighbors, or even voted and practiced our politics, from this second, revised perspective.
(Of course, I mean “neighbors” in the Christian sense, not simply the geographical one. As Bonhoeffer put it, “The transcendent is not the infinite, unattainable tasks, but the neighbor within reach in any given situation.”)
More than a hypothetical, this is the “how” that Bonhoeffer stressed was more important than any other thing:
I now often think of the beautiful song by Hugo Wolf, which we sang several times lately: “Over night, over night, joy and sorrow come, and sooner than you thought, they both leave you, and go to tell the Lord how you have borne them.” Indeed, everything depends on this “how”; it is more important than any external circumstances.
One of the most edge-of-your-seat books for me, one that spoke perhaps more than any other to the religious bone in my body, was Peter Hooton’s Bonhoeffer’s Religionless Christianity in Its Christological Context.
Speaking of Bonhoeffer’s use of the phrase “being for others,” Hooton writes,
The idea of “being for others” is not a new way of being human. It is, rather, the only way of being truly human and is as such characteristic of Christ’s inclusiveness; of life lived, theologically speaking, in the Christuswirklichkeit [“Christ reality”] shared by God and human beings, whence springs the sense of human wholeness, and confidence in God’s unfailing goodness and compassion. We may, of course, repudiate this, and cling instead to that illusory notion of the isolated individual which religion, as Bonhoeffer conceives it, shares with some expressions of secularity, but, for Bonhoeffer, the reality is that our “being for others” is synonymous with the life with God which is our life, and thus with our humanity.
For Christians, it’s epieikés or nothing. And I don’t think there can be any doubt that the joy visible in the letters from prison and the Christuswirklichkeit known through/as “human being for others” are a part of the same grace-infused feedback loop.
Much more could be said, but I want to avoid over-analyzing and lengthening this post.
…
Of course, several days later … I over-analyzed it and got caught up rereading highlights from Hooton’s book. I may put some quotes up, which is something I never got around to a couple years ago because I intended to write more about it.