Dear one,
“Collateral grace”? Such is how I view their WW2 correspondence.
Through her grandmother, in late 1942, Maria von Wedemeyer and Dietrich Bonhoeffer became reacquainted. (“Grandmother” helped Dietrich and the Confessing Church establish a clandestine seminary, where pastors, opposed to Hitler and his henchmen, were trained.) Soon after their “reunion,” the young, truly bright and beautiful Maria, and Dietrich, gifted author, theologian, and pastor experienced a sudden, deeply-binding love. In January of 1943, they were quietly engaged, but three months later, on April 5, the Gestapo arrested him, and until his execution, April 9, 1945, he was “Prisoner Bonhoeffer.”
Before and during his incarceration, never once did Maria and Dietrich truly know a moment alone, unsupervised; even so, their love, uniquely strengthening and supporting, flourished.
As I have read, I have found their letters hope-filled. For instance: with fear, longing, and love she lamented the Allied bombing of Berlin, where he was imprisoned; and he, often feeling like “a bird in a cage, struggling for breath,”[1] feared her travels, even as he delighted in her descriptions of those travels. But equally they shared the same belief:
“All will come right at the time appointed by God.”[2]
And yet as I read, I knew that they would never realize a life together; that when she wrote: “Sleep well my dearest,” little did she know that, a year hence, his sleep would be eternal. Moreover, I have begun to view the impact of those bombs she feared, not from an American but from a German perspective—albeit, a German view that sought Hitler’s death.
As I have read their letters amid covid19, I have paused: as difficult as our experience has been, I know other, collateral perspectives exist. With 4.5million of his countrymen infected, the Indian seminary professor who struggles to provide online teaching for students without books; or the Filipino pastor, whose six-month, government-imposed quarantine is tantamount to “house-arrest.” Do we and they view the present as “collateral damage” or as “collateral grace”?
The Apostle Paul, familiar with collateral suffering—and his enigmatic “thorn in the flesh”—received with apparent aplomb his Lord’s encouragement: “My grace is sufficient for you” (2Corinthians 12:9).
I wonder: From hindsight, how will we view these covid-days—as of damage or as of grace?
Maria and Dietrich, amid the War’s damage, knew collateral grace.
Pausing,
Stan
[1] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1967), p.189.
[2] Letters from Cell 92: The Correspondence between Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Maria von Wedemeyer, von Bismarck and Kabitz, eds. (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1995), p.203.