Today marks the 70th anniversary of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's death at the hands of the Nazi government. Here is something he wrote that I am enjoying thinking about today.
I was reading some Lessing the other day and came across this: "I am too proud to consider myself unlucky. Just grind your teeth and let your canoe sail where the wind and the waves take it. Enough that I have no intention of upsetting it myself." Is such an attitude to be forbidden to the Christian? Is it, for example, better for him to be soft-hearted and to surrender prematurely? Is there not a kind of self-possession which proudly grinds its teeth, but is quite different from a dour, rigid, lifeless and unthinking submission to the inevitable? I am sure we honour God more if we gratefully accept the life he gives us with all its blessings, loving it and drinking it to the full, grieving deeply and sincerely when we have belittled or thrown away any of the precious things of life (some people grumble at such behaviour and say it is bourgeois to be so weak and sensitive) than we do if we are insensitive to the blessings of life and therefore equally insensitive towards pain. Job's word, "The Lord hath given...", etc., includes that rather than excludes it, as can be seen from the speeches he makes with so much gnashing of teeth, and from their justification by God (Chapter 42:7ff.) in the face of the false, premature, pious submission of his friends.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, January 23rd 1944
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