In this same month of May, fifty two year ago in a prison camp at Tegel to the north west of Berlin, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was writing letters to his friends about his changing beliefs and about his love of music. He was one of Germany’s leading Protestant theologians, imprisoned for his minor involvement in a plot to assassinate Hitler; Bonhoeffer’s experience of prison and his fellow prisoners led him to develop his thinking about God and Christianity in remarkably prophetic ways. The mid twentieth century was moving, he felt, towards a religion-less society; people cannot any longer be told everything by means of words, whether theological or pious; the time of inwardness and conscience is over; people may think of themselves as religious or Christian but those words no longer mean what they used to. In prison Bonhoeffer found himself drawn more often to those who had no religion not through a wish to evangelise but simply out of a sense of brotherhood. To religious people he found himself unable to use religious language because it seemed not to ring true. Yet to those without faith he found he could on occasion mention God quite calmly and naturally.
He began to think of God as the beyond in the midst’; not a God who was the answer to questions we couldn’t otherwise answer; not a God who would sort out our problems when all else failed. He was searching for a way of talking about God that somehow combined immediacy with reticence. The great words of faith reconciliation, redemption, regeneration, love of enemies, Holy Spirit, Cross, resurrection, discipleship all of them still contained for him something revolutionary that was even so not yet ready to be grasped or expressed. Only prayer and righteous action were left to him. And so in his imprisonment he struggled to love this God who is both present in prayer and loving acts and yet beyond words and definitions.
And in trying to express himself Bonhoeffer sometimes resorted to musical imagery, more specifically the language of polyphony, the cantus firmus’ and the ground bass. The cantus firmus or fixed melody is the plainsong chant or sometimes a popular song melody that is played or sung while faster moving lines of melody are elaborated around it. We hear such things in the masses of the sixteenth century. Perhaps the best known example of a ground bass is the fixed pattern of notes which like a cantus firmus’ provides the underpinning to Dido’s great aria When I am laid in earth.’ For Bonhoeffer our attempt to love God forms the fixed melody or stable underpinning to which all the other melodies of our life form the counterpoint, the interweaving of different voices. They are all distinct yet related to or grounded on the fixed melody. Polyphonic living as Bonhoeffer calls it, is this rooting of every aspect of our lives in the cantus firmus of God. Only a polyphony of this kind’ he write, can give life a wholeness and at the same time reassure us that nothing calamitous can happen as long as the cantus firmus is kept going.
Turning to the writings associated with John’s name in the New Testament we find the vine occupying a similar symbolic position to Bonhoeffer’s cantus firmus’. The branches are like the interweaving melodies expressed in the varying witness of the disciples. But even more powerfully related to this theme is John’s discussion of love. John’s language here can be dangerously misinterpreted as though love is the answer to everything which perhaps it is, provided we understand that love is as hard to understand and to live by as is God. When we hear John say, God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God and God abides in them,’ there is no sense in which this makes anything easier to understand.
John tells us three things about this love. First it is responsive. You can’t just say to yourself out of the blue, I will be more loving.’ To be able to love you must believe you are loved. And that is the first step of faith to accept that you come into this world and are upheld throughout your life by a love which is there whether you feel it or not. And it is by accepting that we are cherished by God that we are then made free to love.
Our loving is responsive and second it is fearless. Perfect love casts out fear and the fear it casts out is the fear of punishment. This fear exists in many shapes and sizes. It can be associated with other people, with parental figures, with God or with a kind of nameless fear of simply being found out and judged. The only way such fears can be dealt with is through the conviction that you are attended to, listened to, forgiven, healed and emboldened by the love which is God, discovered through other people or in your own pondering in prayer.
And finally this love is demonstrated in the story of Jesus. God sent his son into the world that we might live through him.’ If we want a demonstration of the love that John says we abide in, we look to the story of God’s son we must inhabit that story we must weave our stories round it as the counterpoint is woven round the cantus firmus the fixed song.
Bonhoeffer was hanged on Himmler’s orders at Flossenberg on April 9th 1945, a few days before the camp was liberated by the allies. The faith he struggled to hold onto through out his imprisonment was an inspiration to those who encountered him. He was aware of how he impressed others with his seeming confidence and cheerfulness, but he was also aware of his own restlessness and longing, his loneliness, and weariness, empty at praying, at thinking, at making.’ He wrote a poem about this contrast between how he appeared to others and to himself, which ends with these words which sum up both his questioning and his certainty.
Is something within me still like a beaten army
Fleeing in disorder from victory already achieved?
Who am I? They mock me these lonely questions of mine.
Whoever I am, Thou knowest, O God, I am thine.’
Stephen Tucker