Life Together

“Why do you look for the living among the dead? Is the question being asked this Easter Morning. And the women said it was the last place we saw his body. Some of us would say it was the last place we were betrayed. Divorced. Disappointed. It was the last place we were afraid and buried our trauma and our hearts with it. Again, we are asked why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here; he has risen!”

Whatever acclamations we cry out on Easter Sunday must begin with a willingness to linger in the garden, desolate and alone, listening for the sound of our names, spoken back to us in love. For our testimonies to ring true, they must originate in radical, intimate encounter. The question is not, why should other people believe? But rather why do you believe? Why is the resurrection of Jesus essential to you? What does Christ rising look like in your life?.”

Happy Easter!

“Nothing that we despise in the other man is entirely absent from ourselves. We often expect from others more that we are willing to do ourselves. Why have we hitherto thought so intemperately about man and his frailty and temptability? We must learn to regard people less in the light of what they do or omit to do, and more in the light of what they suffer.”

~ Letters & Papers from Prison
Dietrich Bonhoeffer

" The fact that the fool is often stubborn must not mislead us into thinking that he is independent. One feels in fact, when talking to him, that one is dealing, not with the man himself, but with slogans, catchwords, and the like, which have taken hold of him. He is under a spell, he is blinded, his very nature is being misused and exploited. Having thus become a passive instrument, the fool will be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil. Here lies the danger of a diabolical exploitation that can do irreparable damage to human beings.

But at this point it is quite clear, too, that folly can be overcome, not by instruction, but only by an act of liberation; and so we have come to terms with the fact that in the great majority of cases inward liberation must be preceded by outward liberation, and that until that has taken place, we may as well abandon all attempts to convince the fool."

~ Letters & Papers from Prison
Dietrich Bonhoeffer