Mid-Week Musings : What Are You Prepared to Die For?
Dietrich Bonhoeffer died for what he believed. Character for him was what was formed in his childhood days at his father and mother's table when they studied the Bible, sang hymns, and affirmed the creed. Deposited into his soul at the deepest levels was a belief that people should be free, that oppression should be fought, and that God was man's highest authority.
That was why it wasn't hard to understand Bonhoeffer's choice when in the late 1930s, he chose to leave a professorship at Union Seminary in New York and return to his German fatherland and almost certain persecution. His friends begged him not to go, as the friends of the Apostle Paul once prevailed upon him not to go to Jerusalem. But he insisted that Hitler-dominated Germany was where he belonged. At one point he wrestled with the genuineness of his character in a marvelous poem :
Who am I? They often tell me
I could step from my cell's confinement
calmly, cheerfully, firmly,like a squire from his country-house.
Who am I? They often tell me
I would talk to my warders
freely and friendly and clearly,
as though it were mine to command.
Who am I? They also tell me
I would bear the day's misfortune
equably, smilingly, proudly,
like one accustomed to win.
Am I then really all that which other men tell of?
Or am I only what I know of myself,
restless and longing and sick, like a bird in a cage,
struggling for breath, as though hands are compressing my throat,
yearning for colours, for flowers, for the voices of birds,
thirsting for words of kindness, for neighbourliness,
trembling with anger at despotisms and petty humiliation,
tossing in expectation of great events,
powerlessly trembling for friends at an infinite distance,
weary and empty at praying, at thinking, at making,
faint, and ready to say farewell to it all?
Whom am I? This or the other?
Am I one person today, and tomorrow another?
Am I both at once? A hypocrite before others,
and before myself a comtemptibly woebegone weakling?
Or is something within me still like a beaten army,
feeling in disorder from victory already achieved?
Who am I? They mock me, these lonely questions of mine.
Whoever I am, thou knowest, O God, I am thine.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer died on the gallows at Flossenburg prison. There he commended his soul to God and died bravely. There was a character in his behaviour and attitude all the way to the end. A man of Godly valour.
Most of us do not know what we're prepared to die for. We've not lived in a time or a circumstance where death was required. The closest some of us have come to such a gutsy decision might be to lay a job on the line when a matter of ethics or legality is at stake.
posted by Mel-Vern @ 8:34 PM
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