Dear one,
Perspective: I wonder, in these days of coronavirus and racial protests, are we being led or are we being forced to experience life differently?
Perspective.
In great measure, I began to ponder afresh “perspective” as I read the unfolding correspondence (“love letters”?) of a couple, whose engagement was being sorely tested. Inexorably caught in a web, patiently they sought to extricate themselves.
Perspective.
Air raid sirens, bomb craters, and demolished buildings; search lights, the roar of engines overhead, and blackouts had become commonplace. Amid these, each day they sought a return to the life they had known: family meals and friends, books and career goals, midnight walks and a warm fire; but funeral services regularly impeded each attempted return. During the first year of their engagement, they had spent a total of eight, supervised hours in one another’s presence; writing letters became their love-line. With “reasonable” expectations, each knew that they might receive a reply to a letter written November 30 by December 14.
Perspective.
Thus as Christmas 1943 drew nigh, ever-concerned for her safety and convinced that they would not celebrate Yuletide together, he wrote:
“How hard it is, inwardly to accept what defies our understanding; how great is the temptation to feel ourselves at the mercy of blind chance; how sinister the way in which mistrust and resentment steal into our hearts at such times; and how readily we fall prey to the childish notion that the course of our lives reposes in human hands! And then, just when everything is bearing down on us …, the Christmas message comes to tell us that all our ideas are wrong, and that what we take to be evil and dark is really good and light because it comes from God. Our eyes are at fault ... God is in the manger, wealth in poverty, light in darkness, succor in abandonment. No evil can befall us; whatever men may do to us, they cannot but serve the God who is secretly revealed as love and rules the world and our lives.”[1]
Perspective.
Thus Dietrich Bonhoeffer, age thirty-seven, wrote to his beloved Maria, age nineteen, as he sat in his Gestapo cell. He had proposed in January of 1943; in April he had been arrested. Amid Allied bombing, they wrote and loved. He was executed on April 9, 1945, three weeks before Hitler’s suicide.
Perspective,
Stan
[1] Love Letters From Cell 92: The correspondence between Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Maria von Wedemeyer 1943-45 (Nashville, Abingdon Press, 1994), p.133.