devotional

M

The death of Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Mary Bosanquet

eanwhile, in the schoolhouse at Schonberg, Low Sunday had dawned. It occurred to Piinder to ask Bonhoeffer to hold a small service. Bonhoeffer

hesitated; most of his companions were Roman Catholic, and there was Kokorin from Communist Russia. But Kokorin himself begged for it, and under general pressure Bonhoeffer yielded. He gave an exposition of the Scripture passages for the day: ‘Trough his stripes we are healed’ [Isaiah 53.5] and ‘Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, which according to his abundant mercy hath begoten us again into a lively hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead’ [1 Peter 1.3]. ‘He reached the hearts of all,’ Payne Best remembers,

‘finding just the right words to express the spirit of our imprisonment, and the thoughts and resolutions which it had brought.’ Together with Bonhoeffer, all looked forward thankfully and hopefully into the future. Te litle service ended. Ten, during the moment of stillness that succeeded it, the door was flung open and two men stood in the doorway. ‘Prisoner Bonhoeffer, take your things and come with us.’ Bonhoeffer gathered his few belongings. In a copy of Plutarch that he had received for his birthday he wrote his

name in large leters and leſt it on the table. His last words to Payne Best were a message to his trusted English friend Bishop Bell. ‘Tell him,’ he said, ‘that for me this is the end, but also the beginning. With him I believe in the principle of our universal Christian brotherhood which rises above all national interests, and that our victory is certain. Tell him too that I have never forgoten his words at our last meeting.’ It must have been evening before Bonhoeffer reached

Flossenbürg. Te ‘trial’ went on throughout the night. Te prisoners were interrogated once more and confronted with one another. All were condemned. Te last picture that we have of Bonhoeffer comes from

the prison doctor, who wrote many years later: ‘On the morning of the day, some time between five and six o’clock, the prisoners, among them Admiral Canaris, General Oster and Sack the Judge Advocate General, were led out of their cells and the verdicts read to them. Trough the half-open door of a room in one of the huts I saw Pastor Bonhoeffer, still in his prison clothes, kneeling in fervent prayer to the Lord his God. Te devotion and evident conviction of being heard that I saw in the prayer of this intensely captivating man moved me to the depths.’ So the morning came. Now the prisoners were ordered to

strip. Tey were led down a litle flight of steps under the trees to the secluded place of execution. Tere was a pause. For the men about to die, time hung a moment susended. Naked under the scaffold in the sweet spring woods, Bonhoeffer knelt for the last time to pray. Five minutes later, his life was ended.

From Te Life and Death of Dietrich Bonhoeffer ND

sacred vision Stanley Spencer The Resurrection, Cookham

I

s this a Resurrection? Spencer himself said that it was a representation of a specific moment in time: 2.45 in the

afternoon of a Tuesday in May, 1924. This appears to have been the time when the virginal Spencer first experienced sexual intercourse. The painting is more about Stanley’s relationship with

Hilda Carling than an attempt to represent a dogma of the Catholic Church. The centre of the picture is the naked Spencer (his portraits of the nakedly fleshly are always poignant and telling) looking towards Hilda, who is still sleeping amidst the ivy of her tomb, like the princess in Burne-Jones’s Briar Rose. She is presumably to be awakened by his kiss – or something rather more. The artist himself gave a telling

description of the picture’s meaning in a newspaper interview in 1927. He told the reporter that he did not ‘believe necessarily that the resurrection of the dead is a physical one. To him, the resurrection can come to any man at any time, and consists in being aware of the

12 ■ newdirections ■ April 2010

real meaning of life and alive to its enormous possibilities.’ That the religion of the picture is the religion of what

Spencer once tellingly referred to as ‘The Church of Me’ is clear enough from the way in which the figure of God the Father, in the rose-embowered porch, is accompanied by a figure originally intended to be God the Son, but here transmuted into a woman holding three children. Spencer has produced a vast icon of Liberal Theology, where ‘resurrection’ is merely language about self-realisation.

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