The following passage from Eric Metaxas’ massive biography
of Dietrich Bonhoeffer shows how Bonhoeffer’s obedience to God was
forward-oriented and zealous and free. At the age of 72, I find much to
contemplate in Bonhoeffer’s reflections.
“In recent years we have become increasingly familiar with
the thought of death. We surprise ourselves by the calmness with which we hear
of the death of one of our contemporaries. We cannot hate it as we used to for
we have discovered some good in it, and have almost come to terms with it.
Fundamentally we feel that we really belong to death already, and that every
new day is a miracle. It would probably not be true to say that we welcome
death (although we all know that weariness which we ought to avoid like the
plague), we are too inquisitive for that—or, to put it more seriously, we
should like to see something more of the meaning of our life’s broken
fragments. . . . We still love life, but I do not think that death can take us by
surprise now. After what we have been through during the war, we hardly dare
admit that we should like death to come to us, not accidentally and suddenly
through some trivial cause, but in the fullness of life and with everything at
stake. It is we ourselves, and not outward circumstances, who make death what
it can be: a death freely and voluntarily accepted.”
