Bonhoeffer

April passed along with the 66th Anniversary of the death of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (February 4, 1906 – April 9, 1945) He wrote this in prison before his execution~

Death

Come now, solemnest feast on the road to eternal freedom

Death, and destroy those fetters that bow, those walls that imprison

This our transient life, these souls that linger in darkness,

So that at last we see what is here withheld from our vision.

Long did we seek you, freedom, in discipline, action and suffering

Now that we die, in the face of God himself we behold you

As Adolf Hitler and the Nazis seduced a nation, bullied a continent, and attempted to exterminate the Jews of Europe, a small number of dissidents and saboteurs worked to dismantle the Third Reich from the inside. One of these was Dietrich Bonhoeffer—a pastor and author, known as much for such spiritual classics as The Cost of Discipleship (poem above came from a book I read long ago) and Life Together, as for his 1945 execution in a concentration camp for his part in the plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler.

In the first major biography of Bonhoeffer in forty years, New York Times best-selling author Eric Metaxas takes both strands of Bonhoeffer’s life—(BONHOEFFER: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy) the theologian and the spy—and draws them together to tell a searing story of incredible moral courage in the face of monstrous evil- (I'd like to read this)