Bonhoeffer, Advent, and Waiting

We are doing our best to observe the Advent calendar in our home this Christmas. One of the themes of Advent is the sense of waiting on the Lord in anticipation of his coming to rescue us, both in his incarnation on Christmas, and then again at His second coming. I came across these words penned by German pastor/theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer while he was imprisoned in Nazi Germany in his last years for conspiring with others against Adolf Hitler. He had only recently been engaged to his fiancee before being sent to prison. Good words to ponder on the theme of waiting, sometimes amidst trouble and suffering....

Celebrating Advent means being able to wait. Waiting is the art that our impatient age has forgotten. It wants to break open the ripe fruit when it has hardly finished planting the shoot. But all too often the greedy eyes are only deceived; the fruit that seemed so precious is still green on the inside, and disrespectful hands ungratefully toss aside what has so disappointed them. Whoever does not know the austere blessedness of waiting -- that is, of hopefully doing without -- will never experience the full blessing of fulfillment.

And again from prison in 1943, written in a letter to his fiancee:

Be brave, my dearest Maria, even if this letter is your only token of my love this Christmas-tide. We shall both experience a few dark hours -- why should we disguise that from each other? We shall ponder the incomprehensibility of our lot and be assailed by the question of why, over and above the darkness already enshrouding humanity. We are being subjected to the bitter anguish of a separation whose purpose we fail to understand. And then, just when everything is bearing down on us to such an extent that we can scarcely withstand it, the Christmas message comes to tell us that our ideas are wrong, and that what we take to be evil and dark is really good and light because it comes from God. Our eyes are at fault, that is all. God is in the manger.

Amen!

Incidentally, I highly recommend this recent biography of Bonhoeffer. This was one of the best books I read this past year and one of my favorite biographies I have read, period.