
The Passion of John the Baptist
August 29, 2020
The Faithful Spy
A True Story
Dietrich Bonhoffer and the Plot to Kill Hitler
John Henrrix
Book Review and Reflection
“Dietrich felt the Twigs snap
beneath his bare heels as
they punched through the
unusual April frost.
The Lord walked next to him.
He had always been there, but
now Dietrich could almost see him,
as if just on the other side of the veil.
He knelt and prayed aloud
for a final time.
Dietrich closed his eyes.
The Lord drew near.
Even closer.
Even closer.
———————————–
“Thou shalt not kill,” says Holy Scripture but how do you stop Hitler’s campaign of horror. This is a book full of beautiful art describing the struggle, in which Dietrich discovers in the end there are no black and white answers but only grey.
For me I wrote yesterday: “Life is about the unknowable be it health=-one day you are healthy, the next terribly sick; have friends, one day who are our bosom buddies, the next walk away; and death, in the words of yesterdays lectionary: “For you do not know the hour of my return.”Matthew 25:10. Death comes when it wishes.
Today I listened to a lady with a thriving business in March, and tomorrow she is closing down, mourning the loss of hard work and seeking to discover how she will make a living.
This week listening to people with housing a week ago, and now it is gone; in the past three months sitting with healthy people one minute, the next, near death’s door. Life is unknowable. All we are certain of is we will die. Our only secure reference point is God.
Through his forty five years Dietrich journeyed with the unknowable, and in the end was death. He shared this uncertainty, fears, and doubts in his writings.
Bonhoeffer at an early age entering into a living relationship with Jesus, he became obsessed with the notion of a universal Church outside of race and nation, and he asked himself the question, “What could this universal Church do if it left the comfort of the sanctuary?’
I have moved through the journey of life to the same conclusion, a belief in a universal church, with out walls, receiving everyone into her arms, living and breathing with her church, who ministers outside the doors of normalcy.
Looking around we see institutional churches locked down when there are people on the street, suffering from hunger, loneliness and lack of health insurance and housing. .
Today the Black Lives Movement teaches the inclusion of every one. I go from one area of Marin and San Francisco to a segregated not by law, but by choice of rich whites, to another of Latinos and Blacks. John the Baptist does not die because of his belief in Jesus, but as a result of speaking the truth.
I hang out with Latino and Black youth, and their parents, and we see how differently they are treated from their white neighbors. I see people who are the cream of the earth treated with disrespect, as a result of their color. Laws can not solve the problem, as Dorothy Day reminds us: “There must be a revolution of the heart.” We have to enter into that revolution, we have to make the effort. We have to work at the transformation of our hearts.
This is not something that any politician is going to fix, it begins with us, entering into relationship.
Bonhoeffer wrote his dissertation in 1927 called “Sanctorum Communion,” or communion of the saints asking what the church could do if God’s people acted in the world with one voice.
He concluded that the true church of God would not always agree with the world it inhabits and so it must be revolutionary, it must be different.
The night before he was hanged Dietrich had a dream, described the next morning, a dream that gives him hope and faith, and it is a dream, that we, Jew, Muslim, Buddhist, atheist, black, white, brown, grey haired, dyed hair, may have as we come to the end of our lives, and look back and see ourselves in the universal church:
“Down
he went
except down
became up!
He swam upward
through the salty water
it satiated his lungs.
but the water felt like air.
The sun was dawning over the surface above him as the light hit his face, he felt a weight fall off his body.
Suddenly a strong hand
plunged through the watery roiling veil
and held his arm fast
it jerked, and Dietrich shuddered.
The hand lifted
him straight up-
into the warmth,
into the Light.
“This is the end–
for me the BEGINNING OF LIFE.”
_____________________________
Father River Damien Sims, sfw. D.Min., D.S.T.
P.O. Box 642656
San Francisco, CA 94164
415-305-2124