Letters from Lockdown

During the depths of the lockdown I picked a book off the study shelves as my spiritual reading, and at the time didn't twig how appropriate Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Letters and Papers from Prison would be. The thoughts arising from one great Christian mind out of the experience of separation and confinement were of course relevant, especially as I grappled with the attempts of the Church to respond with remote means of worship and, it seemed sometimes, to resist recognising the inevitable inadequacies of doing so, a debate which seems to have disappeared like mist a couple of months later. On the contrary, Bonhoeffer insists

we find the very idea of substitutes repulsive. All we can do is wait patiently; we must suffer the unutterable agony of separation, and feel the longing until it makes us sick. For that is the only way in which we can preserve our relationship with our loved ones unimpaired. ... There is nothing worse in such times than to try and find a substitute for the irreplaceable. It won't succeed anyhow, and can only lead to even greater indiscipline, for then the power to overcome tension, which can only come from looking the longing straight in the face, is used up, and endurance becomes even more intolerable. 

This is Bonhoeffer's more puritan side coming through, and in other places I find it hard to go along with, as when he warns against admitting that you are afraid of things: terror, he says, 'belongs to the pudenda', things to be ashamed of and hidden. I am sure there is something to be said for this if you are a Christian minister in a prison caught in a bombing raid, and in general a degree of reticence (which Bonhoeffer discusses a lot) about the inner life is always in order, but the tendency of people to pretend they do not feel problematic emotions also needs to be counteracted by an honesty which is not, in his terms, cynical. 

Virtually each of the fragmentary thoughts Bonhoeffer shares with his parents and friends could open into an entire book's worth of reflection and discussion and so we will not have a deep investigation of them here. Let it rest with his advice, 'this day of loneliness need not be a lost day, if it helps you to see more clearly the convictions on which you are going to build your life in time to come' - even if, we might add, that time isn't destined to be very long.