Living Together Alone: Bonhoeffer in Iso
Ben Camino is too old to have heroes. But he does anyway(s). None of them is in the Marvel Universe. Wait, is that really a universe? Why do we let people co-opt the language in such ugly ways? For that matter, why do we let Ben Camino torture us with so many many rhetorical questions? Well, regardless, none of my heroes is a comic book or comic movie hero. In truth, none of them is even an athlete, despite Ben's love of baseball, basketball, and the two-hundred meter individual medley.
Sad but true, most of Ben's heroes have been crucified. One of those, according to the legends, didn't stay crucified, but we shall see about that come Sunday morning.
Now, when I say crucified, I speak only slightly figuratively. Many of them were, shall we say, exterminated by the powers that be. And thanks to my heroes, at least some of the time, those powers that be be not powers any longer.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer died today, April 9, 75 years ago. He has been my hero for so long and I am so old that I can remember the first time I organized a memorial chapel in his memory, 25 years ago. I did it again 15 years ago. Then I ran out of chaplains who would let me dedicate a day to his memory when we could, instead, have worship bands, big screens, and speakers wearing backwards baseball caps, addressing their congregations as "you guys."
Several years ago I went to Germany on a my own personal Bonhoeffer pilgrimage. I visited his family home in Berlin, the church where he was a sort of youth pastor (and perhaps occasionally let slip the German equivalent of "you guys" to the young people in his charge). I visited Zingst, a seaside town in the North of Germany, where at the ripe old age of 29 he took charge of an illegal seminary for the Confessing Church (German Protestants who refused to be controlled by Nazi policies). And where he developed an almost monastic style "common life" approach to pastoral education which became the source of his brilliant little book known in English as Life Together.
I visited the site of Tegel Prison in Berlin where he was held without being charged from April 1943 to October 1944. On that site is now built the Museum of Terror, documenting the activities of the SS.
And finally I visited the concentration camp at Flossenburg, where he was executed by hanging early in the morning April 9, 1945. That was a Monday. On the previous day, the Octave of Easter, Bonhoeffer had led an informal service for the other prisoners. He preached on the passage, "by his stripes we are healed." At the end of the service, some guards came in and took him away. Everyone knew what that meant.
Bonhoeffer was part of a large and close family. Reading his biography and his letters makes clear how important family relationships and rituals were in his life. Yet he spent much of his life after graduating seminary at age 21 apart from his closest and earliest community. He ministered in a church in Spain when he was 22. He went to America twice, once in 1930 (24) and again in 1939. In 1933, his radio broadcast was interpreted as being anti-Hitler (which it was) and was cut off before he could finish. Bonhoeffer soon left Germany to pastor two German-speaking congregations in London. Then came the underground seminary, then his work as part of the conspiracy, then prison.
In Chapter One of Life Together, Bonhoeffer sings the praises of Christian community, of life together. "The physical presence of other Christians is a source of incomparable joy and strength to the believer." And the book goes on to present a scriptural, theological, and practical guide (originally for his seminarians) to life in Christian community.
At some other time, because of my own disagreements with some contemporary models/versions of "Christian community," disagreements rooted in principles first planted in my head and heart by Bonhoeffer, I plan to look more closely at both his model of community and his criticism of false or inauthentic community. But, for now, I primarily want to say that this great theorist and practitioner of community was, ironically, denied it for much of his life as a disciple. His "following" (the German word Nachfolge, was the original title of the book translated into English as The Cost of Discipleship) was lived out, for many years including the entirety of his last two years alive, in loneliness, in separation, in isolation. Certainly he died alone, although several other conspirators were executed individually on the same day.
His greatest work, His Letters and Papers from Prison, collected by his friend, biographer, and brother-in-law Eberhard Bethge, makes clear how much he missed his family, his home, his homely routines (his favorite books, recordings, etc.), his friends, and his freedom. Yet through letters (smuggled in past friendly guards), occasional gifts, and even more occasional visits (during the first eighteen months), Bonhoeffer tried to keep up some semblance of connection to life as usual (if not together).
Ten years earlier, the young leader of the illegal seminary, living in community with his students, had sounded this eerily apropos caution to those who saw community as their right or privilege.
"It is not simply to be taken for granted that the Christian has the privilege of living among other Christians. Jesus Christ lived in the midst of his enemies. At the end all his disciples deserted him. On the Cross he was utterly alone, surrounded by evildoers and mockers. . . . Not all Christians receive this blessing. The imprisoned, the sick, the scattered lonely, the proclaimers of the Gospel in heathen lands stand alone." We might add, sometimes those who are not sick but are isolated so as not to contribute to the sickness of the larger community.
I need to finish this before midnight or it won't be Holy Thursday anymore. And that's the reason I'm writing. Well, that and the memory of my hero, Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
For today we remember Bonhoeffer, whose witness to Christ, both in community and in isolation, points us to the one who on Holy Thursday was deserted, betrayed, left to pray in anguish while his best friends fell asleep. The one who on this day broke bread and shared wine at the first of the common feasts we have come to call communion. The one who said to his friends, let me tell you how Christian community works -- wash one another's feet. Later that same evening, running late perhaps like Ben Camino, he begged them to stay with him and pray, because "my soul is sad, even unto death."
Theologians say it is because that hero of mine knew not only the abandonment of men named Peter and James but of the one he called Abba, Father.
But out of this isolation, this sense of being cut off from the common life we crave, came something else. A new community, perhaps, built not on laughter (and how we need laughter), not on human friendship (and how we need human friendship), not on proximity (and how we, or at least I, need that these days), but on something else. The cross.
Similarly, perhaps, Bonhoeffer's isolation led him to heroic activities of his own. Not the Marvel Universe kind, the other kind. He didn't stop the Nazi war machine. He failed to rescue the German church from its general (but not total) capitulation to Hitler's ideological control. He was never able to marry his fiance or bury his parents or preach at his sister's wedding (wait, he did do that, in his famous "wedding sermon from a prison cell"). But in his loneliness and his isolation, he developed or at least moved in the direction of a new theology, sometimes expressed as the "outlook from below."
That's not something to get into here. What is more relevant, perhaps, is this. In his loneliness, isolation, distanced condition, Bonhoeffer gained a voice, won the right to speak, to a larger community than that of Germany, than that of his church, than that of his age. As he also said in Life Together, sometimes false ideas of Christian community must be torn apart in order for the community that God wants to build to come to light. He remarks that many visions of Christian community are nothing but a "wish dream." He goes on to say that "God's grace speedily shatters such dreams" for "God will not permit us to live . . . in a dream world."
Like Jesus on Holy Thursday and Good Friday, the dreams of the kingdom and the glorious new community look shattered. Bonhoeffer's life was a failure. The seminary was scattered and closed. The conspiracy had lost. Our schools have shut down their on campus operations. Church buildings are closed. Those we need (it's a real need, no use denying it) to see and hold and touch are denied us.
It's not easy.
On the other hand, perhaps it's not over.
I didn't get to have another memorial service for my hero. I didn't even get to write the well-prepared tribute I hoped to write. But thanks for reading my words, thanking someone who is an integral part of my community, although he died long before I was born. And whose words and example continue to inspire us to find true community, true life together, even, ironically, when we are alone.
And thank you, Dietrich.
A picture I took at the execution site, Flossenburg Concentration Camp.
