This is the end—for me, the beginning of life.
—Dietrich Bonhoeffer
(from his last recorded words)
Words to a prison friend, spoken in haste.
Gestapo men had come to transfer him,
Low Sunday, sixty-seven years ago
Today. The next morning, he’d be hanged with others.
No question who was strong and who was weak.
A room of prisoners praying, when the door
Burst open. Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He went
But only after saying his goodbyes,
Stealing a few more minutes as a man
Might steal his own possessions from a thief.
Words can survive the worst, which is love’s trick;
Can, on occasion, be the love they praise.
On this distant Easter night, the world still writhes
In its uneven pain. Wakeful, I hear
Bonhoeffer voicing love’s contingency,
Love’s need, the thousand ways love dies and dies
And may live on in something someone says.
—Charles Hughes
YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE
Work Is for the Worker
In these early days of his pontificate, Pope Leo XIV has made one thing clear: The responsible…
Tunnel Vision
Alice Roberts is a familiar face in British media. A skilled archaeologist, she has for years hosted…
The German Bishops’ Conference, Over the Cliff
When it was first published in 1993, Pope St. John Paul II’s encyclical on the reform of…
