Spiritual Quote of the Day (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, on the Hope of Advent)

“Look up, you whose gaze is fixed on this earth, who are spellbound by the little events and changes on the face of the earth. Look up to these words, you who have turned away from heaven disappointed. Look up, you whose eyes are heavy with tears and who are heavy and who are crying over the fact that the earth has gracelessly torn us away. Look up, you who, burdened with guilt, cannot lift your eyes. Look up, your redemption is drawing near. Something different from what you see daily will happen. Just be aware, be watchful, wait just another short moment. Wait and something quite new will break over you: God will come.”— German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945), God Is in the Manger: Reflections on Advent and Christmas (2012)

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, on Gratitude and the Richness of Life)

"In ordinary life we hardly realize that we receive a great deal more than we give, and that it is only with gratitude that life becomes rich. It is very easy to overestimate the importance of our own achievements in comparison with what we owe others."—German Lutheran theologian and anti-Nazi activist Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945), Letters and Papers from Prison: The Enlarged Edition, edited by Eberhard Bethge (1997)

Quote of the Day (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, on Why ‘Sin Wants to Remain Unknown’)

“Sin wants to remain unknown. It shuns the light. In the darkness of what is left unsaid sin poisons the whole being of a person.” — German theologian and anti-Nazi dissident Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945), Life Together: The Classic Exploration of Christian in Community (1939)

Quote of the Day (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, on ‘The Religious Act’ and Faith)

“The religious act is always something partial; ‘faith’ is something whole, involving the whole of one's life. Jesus calls us not to new religion but to life.'” —German theologian and anti-Nazi activist Dietrich Bonhoeffer, letter of July 18, 1944, in Letters and Papers from Prison (1997)

Quote of the Day (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, on ‘The Figure of the Crucified’)

“The figure of the Crucified invalidates all thought which takes success for its standard.” —Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945), Ethics, edited by Eberhard Bethge (1965)

Quote of the Day (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, on Jesus’ ‘Quiet and Vulnerable Stillness’)

“How can we know, in this time, make ourselves ready, so to wait that in the future we may live as we do now? How can we be sure that we shall not lose our own life in waiting only for God? The only way is to know that the God who will come in judgment has already come. It is to know that the same God who came into the midst of our history, in quiet and vulnerable stillness in Jesus Christ, is the First and the Last. God has come.  Therefore all we can do is wait and watch,  praying that he will come again and again, and knowing that he will eventually come at last, no longer clothed in our history, with its suffering and death, but seen by all the world as judge and redeemer at the end of time. It is because God has come that we wait.”—German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945), Advent Sunday sermon, November 29, 1931, in Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Christmas Sermons, edited and translated by Edwin Robertson (2005)

Quote of the Day (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, on Advent)

“A prison cell like this is a good analogy for Advent: one waits, hopes, does this or that—ultimately negligible things—the door is locked and can only be opened from the outside.” —Lutheran theologian and anti-Nazi martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Letters and Papers From Prison (1997)

Quote of the Day (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Scorning “Cheap Grace”)

“Cheap grace is the deadly enemy of our Church. We are fighting today for costly grace. Cheap grace means grace sold on the market like cheapjacks’ wares. The sacraments, the forgiveness of sin, and the consolations of religion are thrown away at cut prices. Grace is represented as the Church’s inexhaustible treasury, from which she showers blessings with generous hands, without asking questions or fixing limits. Grace without price; grace without cost! The essence of grace, we suppose, is that the account has been paid in advance; and, because it has been paid, everything can be had for nothing.”—Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945), The Cost of Discipleship

I included the first sentence of this quote in my post yesterday on Day Three at Chautauqua, but I think now that the full context of it makes Bonhoeffer’s words even more compelling.

Chautauqua Journal, Day Three—Tuesday

I don’t remember ever having looked at the Hall of Philosophy, one of the places I visit most frequently while on vacation here, from anything like the angle I took when I snapped the accompanying photograph yesterday. Like most visitors, I suspect, I normally approach it at eye level, by walking via the Brick Walk from the Amphitheatre.

But I beheld a whole new way of looking at it—as well as the larger Chautauqua mission—as I walked uphill from Lake Drive 24 hours ago, weighed down by the heat and humidity. From this perspective, through one arch and into another, the Hall of Philosophy evokes, even more than the normal approach taken to this sylvan spot, the Olympian perspective suggested by its marble classical pillars. You, too, can reach this height, the architecture and landscape suggest, but you’re going to have to work at it.

This hall is the traditional site for lecturers on religion, or simply authors who might not pull in the crowds that speakers at the amphitheater usually do. But these afternoon speakers, I’ve found, are, more often than not, provocative and/or simply fascinating, and today’s were no exceptions. Over the years, I've seen speakers discuss here the problematic elements of anti-Semitism in the New Testament, what polls were saying about upcoming elections, and stem-cell research, not to mention compelling theologians such as Karen Armstrong and John Dominic Crossan.

Some speakers are bound to make at least some members of the audience uncomfortable—that is, if they’re doing their jobs correctly. But that doesn’t necessarily mean you have to be physically uncomfortable while taking in what they say.

The hall looked pretty full when I arrived for today's 2 pm lecture by Geoffrey Kelly, an authority on the great German preacher and anti-Nazi martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer. I knew I didn’t want to be anywhere during this hour except under the hall's wooden roof—otherwise, I’d burn beneath the fierce afternoon sun.

So, as I scanned the hard white benches, I prayed (how appropriate!) for a spot that a) had good sightlines, unobstructed by those large pillars, and b) was unoccupied. It took a while, but something eventually turned up.

Kelly, a professor of systematic theology at LaSalle University, is author of 12 books, including five on Bonhoeffer. He was, then, unbelievably knowledgeable on this theologian whose hard, urgent brilliance still echoes across the more than 60 years since his death at the hands of the Nazi regime he’d opposed for more than a decade.

Bonhoeffer, who never wavered in the slightest from his belief in social justice and human rights, still underwent something of an evolution in how he hoped to achieve his ideals. A longtime consistent believer in pacifism, he had come, by the end of his life, to believe there was no way to bring about his ideals except through the death of Adolf Hitler. And so, he became involved in Operation Valkyrie, the failed attempt by German officers to assassinate Hitler. He paid for his participation through death in a concentration camp in the closing weeks of the war.

Kelly traced this Lutheran minister’s interaction with the African-American minister Franklin Fisher (who influenced him deeply by exposing him in Harlem to the black social gospel), Reinhold Niebuhr, and Mahatma Gandhi. Most of all, what lingers from the lecture is Kelly’s invocation of Bonhoeffer’s most impassioned statements on God and human fellowship:

• “God’s truth destroys our untruth.”
• “Peace must be dared; it is the great venture.”
• “Cheap grace is the mortal enemy of our church.”

After Kelly’s lecture came one by Willard Sterne Randall, a former investigative journalist who has made a second career for himself as a historian of Revolutionary War figures. I particularly admired his studies of Benedict Arnold and Benjamin Franklin and his Tory son, so I knew I had to hear what he had to say about Ethan Allen.

The official publication of Randall’s biography of the leading Green Mountain Boy isn’t until late next month, but he had copies on hand, and I was one of the lucky ones on line after the talk who were able to have him autograph it.

Certain aspects of Allen’s life speak with particular urgency today, Randall noted: Our time, like Allen’s, involves warfare far away in mountainous regions, and the suffering of Allen and other prisoners of war at the hands of the British has deeply affected American policy, in some way or other, down to the present day.

As for the week’s theme of spies: International Spy Museum executive director Peter Earnest spoke twice as long as his lecture in the amphitheater yesterday while continuing to be entertainment and informative on the subject of "Recruitment" in the morning class, “Espionage101,” and Bruce Riedel, a senior Brookings Institution fellow (and former CIA officer), gave a measured, cautiously optimistic assessment of “The Intelligence War With al-Qaida.”

He dwelt at particular length on Pakistan and the successful mission to get Osama bin Laden. (He found it hard to credit the notion that its military and intelligence services couldn't know that bin Laden was so close, but thought it possible that the country's president might have been unaware--a very disturbing possibility.)

The Value of Listening

Yesterday, sitting on the porch at Carey Cottage Inn, I overheard another visitor praising the lunches served at Hurlbut Community Church. For $6, she said, you could get a plate (a choice of soup/sandwich or salad; turkey salad; fruit plate; vegetable wrap, or the daily special, in this case a crab sandwich), and the meal would be ready for you.

In prior years, I saw signs around the grounds about these meals, but maybe hearing it endorsed by someone else made a difference this time. So, at the conclusion of Riedel’s lecture, I headed over to Hurlbut, and was glad I did.

This sounded awfully good to me, particularly since I almost had receipt shock at the Refectory the day before . My memory of that eatery—a place of simple but comparatively inexpensive food—must have been playing tricks on me, since my meal of a chicken sandwich, French fries and soda came to more than double what I discovered I could pay at Hurlbut.

In contrast, at Hurlbut, I was happily rewarded with an inexpensive, tasty, and even comparatively nutritious meal without having to wait forever--as well as the knowledge that I was contributing to a fine cause and institution. I’m hooked now for the rest of the week.

I wish that my experience tonight at the Bratton Theater, where I caught a production of Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters, had been as favorable. But I’ll write about it later in the week, when I won’t be so tired or grouchy as I am now and, hopefully, will be more tolerant.

Quote of the Day (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, on Advent vs. “The Gods of Our Time”)

“People of today have not grown. Technology and commerce have become a law unto themselves, which threatens to destroy the human person. They raise themselves up and their demons populate the heavens as the gods of our time….And in the knowledge of such degradation of the human person, there comes a great hope for a new kind of person, for a rebirth, for the future. Whether one sees this person as a political, moral, intellectual, a warrior, or the man of peace, there is basically one concern– the new person of the future. The human person must not go under, but must triumph. The powers of this world must neither tread the person down nor enslave him. He must remain lord of the world, lord of the future.”—German theologian and anti-Nazi martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945), November 29, 1931, in Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Christmas Sermons, edited and translated by Edwin Robertson

Quote of the Day (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, on What God Does and Doesn’t Give Us)

“God does not give us everything we want, but he does fulfill all his promises, i.e., he remains the Lord of the earth, he preserves his church, constantly renewing our faith and not laying on us more than we can bear, gladdening us with his nearness and help, hearing our prayers and leading us along the best and straightest paths to Himself.”—German Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, letter written while in prison, August 14, 1944, in Letters and Papers From Prison, edited by Eberhard Bethge (1970)

Quote of the Day (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, on the First Sunday of Advent)

“Thus we live today under the shadow of his coming, not some dreaded disaster or some fate, but the coming of the God of justice, of love, and of peace. Not finding our own way to God into the future, but receiving the future from God. We know that we cannot go to God, but God comes to us, enfolding us in his unbelievable grace, otherwise our life is lost, and our waiting is in vain. We can only wait, watchfully wait; that means patiently waiting, totally deaf to those who would sow doubts in our mind, blind to every power that stands between us and that future which God wills for us. One thing is needful: the conviction that we shall see God, we shall hear God, we shall receive God, we shall know God, we shall serve God. In some incomprehensible way, God will—otherwise nothing, absolutely nothing else, counts.”—Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “Advent Sunday” sermon, November 29, 1931, in Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Christmas Sermons, edited and translated by Edwin Robertson (2005)

This Day in World War II History (“Valkyrie” Plot to Kill Hitler Fails)

July 20, 1944—German resistance against the Nazis—a movement in which tens of thousands were jailed, exiled or executed—came the closest to its desired goal when Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, a high-level staff officer, placed a briefcase containing a bomb under an oak table in Adolf Hitler’s headquarters in East Prussia.

The count left the room as if to make a call. Shortly thereafter, upon seeing a body carried out, he assumed his plan to assassinate the Fuehrer had succeeded.

But the colonel’s diminished eyesight—the result of war wounds that left him without his left eye, right hand, and two fingers of his left hand—meant he was tragically mistaken, and shortly thereafter he and his circle of co-conspirators were apprehended and executed.

(Official Nazi records indicate that approximately 7,000 were arrested in the immediate wake of the failed coup; nearly 5,800 were executed in the closing months of 1944, with another 5,700 put to death for their involvement the following year.)

Faithful reader, have you seen Valkyrie? Is it worthwhile for me to get it on DVD? The supporting cast interested me, but I found ridiculous even the idea of casting Tom Cruise as the tragic Stauffenberg. When it comes to eyepatch heroes, I’ll take John Wayne’s Rooster Cogburn anytime.

I’m not sure how historically accurate this true-life thriller was, but the way I figure it, if you want a good sense of the events and people involved in the conspiracy, the best thing you can do is decidedly old-fashioned: turn to a good book:

* The main action in Peter Quinn’s topnotch detective thriller The Hour of the Cat occurs six years before the Valkyrie conspiracy, but it features one of the most shadowy figures in the July 1944 plot: Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, the Nazi spymaster who engaged in a dangerous double game to bring down the Fuehrer.

* Michael Beschloss’ history The Conquerors is principally about the two American Presidents who demolished the Third Reich and created a durable postwar European order—Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman. But the deft opening chapter economically but richly summarizes Stauffenberg’s plot and the Allied reaction to it (FDR had no comment—he did not want the Soviets to think he was going back on his “unconditional surrender” pledge, but figured that anything which weakened the Nazis couldn’t be all bad).

* Berlin Diaries, 1940-1945, by Marie Vassiltchikov is written from the point of view of a White Russian émigré princess, many of whose close friends participated in the conspiracy. You won’t find the logistics of the plotters, but will discover the kind of expertly observed atmospherics you’d expect to find in an espionage thriller: the hurried, whispered confidences of plotters; the initial euphoria when it appeared the plot had succeeded; and the dashed hopes upon learning “the Devil” (as Vassiltchikov called Hitler) had in fact survived. An amazing true story, which--big surprise!--Hollywood has completely ignored since its 1987 publication.

Cruise’s faith in Scientology became fodder for controversy during filming, with the Stauffenberg family in particular annoyed by his casting. But the actor’s religious beliefs bother me less than how Hollywood treats the spiritual convictions of the real-life conspirators.

Early in the war, for instance, Canaris had secretly employed the services of the anti-Nazi Lutheran minister Dietrich Bonhoeffer. By the time of the unraveling of the Valkyrie plot, the two men had already ended up in prison, but the Nazi hunt for a paper trail around the conspirators uncovered their role, too. Bonhoeffer, like Canaris, was executed in 1945, but his writings would go on to inspire Martin Luther King Jr. and Desmond Tutu.

The film Valkyrie does not include Bonhoeffer at all among its cast of characters. Just as odd is the omission of the spiritual motives behind the participation of Stauffenberg himself.

The colonel and his family were staunch Roman Catholics; in fact, Marie Vassiltchikov’s diary noted that a fellow conspirator was certain that the colonel was “such a fervent Christian that Masses are surely being said for him all over Germany” after his arrest.

In ransacking Stauffenberg’s papers for evidence, the Gestapo discovered Mit Brennender Sorge (“With Burning Anxiety”), Pope Pius XI’s 1937 encyclical condemning Nazism, as well as sermons by Bishop Clemens August von Galen, an opponent of Nazism who had loudly denounced the Nazis’ euthanasia program from the pulpit.

Galen’s traditionalism in politics and religion was an outlook shared by Stauffenberg, and Adolf Hitler indicated that, once victory was secured, the bishop would share the same fate—execution—as the courageous staff officer.

You could argue, I suppose, that a script doesn't have time for such background. But that's just an excuse. Character makes action plausible. I can't help but wonder if Hollywood's secular outlook colored how it looked at the background surrounding this great failed opportunity to bring down a tyrant.