One of the most poignant sentences in all Bonhoeffer’s writings comes early in Life Together: “The believer need not feel any shame when yearning for the physical presence of other Christians, as if one were still living too much in the flesh.” I cannot read it without my heart jumping ahead and seeing Dietrich in prison. Even the slightest contact with spiritual or biological family gave him great joy. Most of the long, long hours between such contacts he was, in the words of his poem “Who am I?”, he was “Restless, yearning, sick, like a caged bird, struggling for life breath, as if I were being strangled. . .”
In Life Together he is writing about the experiences of the Finkenwalde seminary he had established. It was a blending of school, church, monastery, and mission base. When I think of our churches, it seems a glaring contrast to what Bonhoeffer and the seminarians experienced: We are together so very little and share our hearts so seldom. We barely qualify as real koinonia, real fellowship, don’t you think?
Yet our hearts yearn to know and to be known by our Lord and by one another. What holds us back?
I know the commonly given reason: We’re too busy. I don’t believe that for a moment. We have manufactured busyness as a means of evading the very thing we most deeply want, loving and being loved. We fear being disappointed, let down, rejected. We are underestimating the capacity for love and grace which our Lord has given to each of us. So we don’t open up because we fear our imperfect hearts won’t be respected.
And just as commonly, I believe, we underestimate what our love and care could mean to another person. We don’t reach out because we fear our love won’t matter.
Bonhoeffer taught his students not just to devote time each day to concentrate on opening themselves to the Spirit of God in private times of meditation but to open themselves to one another in confession. But such matters were fit into a broader context of living together, studying together, worshiping and singing together, and playing together.