Bells of Mindfulness:Bonhoeffer, COVID-19, and the Climate Crisis Lisa E. Dahill (bio) This is a reflection on collective awakening. In October 1941, the Nazi regime was spewing war, terrorism, and genocide in all directions from Germany. Living in Berlin that fall, the country's human toll mounting as Allied bombing pressed into Germany and began to reach the capital, and witnessing the German army's suicidal push into Russia, Dietrich Bonhoeffer perceived his country facing the collective consequences of nearly ten years of national complicity with Hitler's lies and delusional hatred. Reflecting on Jeremiah 16:21,1 he wrote, "There is a last resort by which God leads [the] people (Israel), who have repeatedly misused and resisted God's grace and have toyed with it, to lead them to the recognition of God's authority: namely, the powerful angry strike of God's hand."2 A little over two years later he was back in Berlin, now imprisoned in the Nazis' Tegel Prison near the epicenter of Allied bombing campaigns on the city. Having survived an intense middle-of-the-night bomb along with his fellow prisoners and guards, he wrote to his close friend Eberhard Bethge (November 27, 1943), Our intensive experiences in the most harrowing aspects of war will, if we survive them, presumably provide the necessary experience for a rebuilding of the life of the peoples, internally and externally…. For this reason we must really preserve our experience, come to terms with it, let it become fruitful, and not push it away. We have never before been given such a palpable sense of the wrathful God, and that too is grace. "Today, if you hear [God's] voice, do not harden your hearts" [citing Psalm 95:7b-8a].3 The wrath of God is an unpopular theological topic, for understandable reasons. At least in the United States, a fringe element of the Christian right is quick to label any natural disaster proof of God's wrath against a given place for political and social policies seen as too liberal. More significantly, far too many children and adults—indeed, entire societies—have been terrorized over the centuries by images of divine fury; and colonial policies of the early-modern European powers translated that internalized sense of divine judgment on what is condemned in oneself out into global campaigns of racist, often genocidal terror that shaped and still inform the modern world.4 Contemporary [End Page 80] analyses show the persisting linkages between theologies of divine wrath and the violence and trauma upholding human structures of injustice.5 Such theological critique of the ways human rage projected onto God deform our capacity for true perception of the divine began centuries earlier, however, at least with Julian of Norwich, whose conviction that "there is no wrath in God" informed a radiant spirituality able to challenge the terrors of her day.6 We thrive when we lead toward others and toward ourselves with God's primal Yes, the very-good-ness of our existence and all life on Earth (Genesis 1:31). Psychologically, Julian and Martin Luther were correct: we are indeed healed by the experience (in his terms, "faith") of being loved utterly unconditionally ("grace"). But Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran, reminds us of the necessity of heeding as well the divine "No," echoing not only through the wreckage of Nazi Germany but also through our contemporary catastrophes of COVID-19, human injustice, greed, and ecological assault on the planet and future generations. In that 1941 biblical reflection, he ponders how the goodness of God, misused and exploited, shifts into a more ominous divine register, one to which most of us may be unaccustomed: "Once the friendly and admonishing word no longer does any good . . . comes the terrifying new teaching of the angry hand and might of God. War, crises, imprisonment, distress of all kinds—this is the 'alien' teaching of God, the 'alien' proclamation and self-revelation of God."7 This warning reads as a heightening of Bonhoeffer's earlier denunciations of cheap grace in his 1937 work, Discipleship. There, in the midst of Hitler's domestic terrorism and bellicosity, his co-opting of Christian symbols and allegiance...
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Oct 12, 2022
Isak Jacobus Olivier 
Open Access