Be brave for
my sake, 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 should be 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 all 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, wealth in poverty,
light in darkness, succor in abandonment.
No evil can befall us; whatever men may do to us, they cannot but serve
the God who….rules the world and our lives.
From Dietrich Bonhoeffer's
letter to his fiancee Maria von Wedemeyer from prison, December 13, 1943
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