Letters and Papers From Prison (42 page)

How I should have loved to baptize your little boy; but that’s of no great consequence. Above all, I hope the baptism will help to assure you that your own lives, as well as the child’s, are in safe keeping, and that you can face the future with confidence. Are you going to choose the text for the baptism yourself? If you’re still looking for one, what about II Tim. 2.1, or Prov. 23.26 or 4.18?
²⁰
(I only came across the last of these recently; I think it’s beautiful.)

I don’t want to bother you with too long a letter just at the beginning of your reunion; all I wanted to do was to send you my good wishes and tell you that I’m sharing your pleasure. Mind you have plenty of good music!

I wish you all imaginable good things with all my heart.

Your Dietrich.

To Eberhard Bethge

[Tegel] 16 May 1944

Dear Eberhard,

I’ve just heard that you’ve sent a message saying that you hope to arrive this morning. You can’t imagine how glad and relieved I am that you can be here just now.
²¹
For once I was almost ready to talk about ‘providence’ and ‘an answer to prayer’; and perhaps you feel the same. It would have been very hard for Renate if things had turned out otherwise, and for you, of course, as well. Since I received your letter today - to some extent as a welcome -at the same time as the news of your arrival, I think that it’s much better that your superior is now looking after himself for a while without you. I would hardly have been up to the kind of situation that you describe on that wine evening. However, things often seem rather different under the influence of alcohol than in naked reality, and there is a
façon de parler
among these people which often stands in an astonishing contradiction to their actual
behaviour. I keep noting this here with a mixture of amusement and embarrassment during the air raids. Still – it’s so much better that way.

So today you’re seeing your son for the first time … I expect that my letter to welcome you has arrived in the meantime. Your letter today once again aroused a strong desire to have a thorough talk with you again, but joy at your being here is so great that all personal wishes completely disappear behind it.

I think it would be right if you discussed the question of an army chaplaincy here at least once, preferably with Dohrmann himself. Mother can easily arrange that … I would think that one can proclaim the gospel very freely today and that one will at least find an attentive audience. If it came off, I would write to you very fully and would gladly also send you sermon meditations…

I don’t think that you really need to have any worry about my running out of notepaper. Quite apart from my stock of rough paper, I have the possibility of getting some more if necessary. Just let me know when it’s really short with you. Your letters really mustn’t be abbreviated any further. I hope the parcel for Renate will soon come from Upper Silesia. I
dont
want you to bring me any of it; you’re to enjoy it together. Now that waiting here has become my only task, I don’t need so much, and it is one of my greatest joys to be able to see to a little something for you even from here. Now enjoy the coming days to the full. With all best wishes, from my heart.

Your faithful Dietrich

I’m still writing something for the baptism. What would you think of Ps. 90.14 as a text? I might have suggested Isa. 8.18,
²²
but I thought it was rather too general.

To Renate and Eberhard Bethge

[Tegel] 18 May 1944

Dear Renate and Eberhard,

I very much wanted to write you something for the day of the baptism. It’s not come out right. I’m sending it just to show you
that I’m thinking very much about you. Thank you once again for choosing me as godfather for your child and for calling him after me. I hope you will always have specially happy memories of this day, and that it will give your short time together that essential quality that will endure across the time of your separation (which I trust will be brief). Some memories are painful, and others strengthen one; this day will strengthen you.

Who is baptizing him? Who will be sponsor? How will you celebrate it? I hope to hear everything soon, preferably from you yourselves. Please harbour no regrets about me. Martin
²³
has had nearly seven years of it, and that is a very different matter. The 21st will also be a day of great joy for me. How splendid that you returned on exactly your first wedding anniversary! I wish you much joy and peace.

Your faithful Dietrich

I’ve just heard the great news that I’m likely to see you here tomorrow - I had given up hoping for it. So I’m spending today getting ready for your visit. Who managed to arrange it? Whoever it was, I’m really
very
grateful.

Thoughts on the Day of the Baptism of Dietrich Wilhelm Rüdiger Bethge

May 1944

You are the first of a new generation in our family, and therefore the oldest representative of your generation. You will have the priceless advantage of spending a good part of your life with the third and fourth generation that went before you. Your greatgrandfather will be able to tell you, from his own personal memories, of people who were born in the eighteenth century; and one day, long after the year 2000, you will be the living bridge over which your descendants will get an oral tradition of more than 250 years - all this
sub conditione Jacobea,
‘if the Lord wills’. So your birth provides us with a suitable occasion to reflect on the changes that time brings, and to try to scan the outlines of the future.

The three names that you bear refer to three houses with which your life is, and always should be, inseparably connected. Your grandfather on your father’s side lived in a country parsonage. A simple, healthy life, with wide intellectual interests, joy in the most homely things, a natural and unaffected interest in ordinary people and their work, a capacity for self-help in practical things, and a modesty grounded in spiritual contentment - those are the earthly values which were at home in the country parsonage, and which you will meet in your father. In all the circumstances of life you will find them a firm basis for living together with other people, and for achieving real success and inward happiness.

The urban middle-class culture embodied in the home of your mother’s parents has led to pride in public service, intellectual achievement and leadership, and a deep-rooted sense of duty towards a great heritage and cultural tradition. This will give you,
even before you are aware of it, a way of thinking and acting which you can never lose without being untrue to yourself.

It was a kindly thought of your parents that you should be known by the name of your great-uncle, who is a pastor and a great friend of your father’s; he is at present sharing the fate of many other good Germans and Protestant Christians, and so he has only been able to participate at a distance in your parents’ wedding and in your own birth and baptism, but he looks forward to your future with great confidence and cheerful hope. He is striving to keep up the spirit - as far as he understands it – that is embodied in his parents’ (your great-grandparents’) home. He takes it as a good omen for your future that it was in that home that your parents got to know each other, and he hopes that one day you will be thankful for its spirit and draw on the strength that it gives.

By the time you have grown up, the old country parsonage and the old town villa will belong to a vanished world. But the old spirit, after a time of misunderstanding and weakness, withdrawal and recovery, preservation and rehabilitation, will produce new forms. To be deeply rooted in the soil of the past makes life harder, but it also makes it richer and more vigorous. There are in human life certain fundamental truths to which men will always return sooner or later. So there is no need to hurry; we have to be able to wait. ‘God seeks what has been driven away’ (Eccles. 3.15).

In the revolutionary times ahead the greatest gift will be to know the security of a good home. It will be a bulwark against all dangers from within and without. The time when children broke away in arrogance from their parents will be past. Children will be drawn into their parents’ protection, and they will seek refuge, counsel, peace, and enlightenment. You are lucky to have parents who know at first hand what it means to have a parental home in stormy times. In the general impoverishment of intellectual life you will find your parents’ home a storehouse of spiritual values and a source of intellectual stimulation. Music, as your parents understand and practise it, will help to dissolve your perplexities and purify your character and sensibility, and in times of care and sorrow will keep a ground-bass of joy alive in you. Your parents
will soon be teaching you to help yourself and never to be afraid of soiling your hands. The piety of your home will not be noisy or loquacious, but it will teach you to say your prayers, to fear and love God above everything, and to do the will of Jesus Christ. ‘My son, keep your father’s commandment, and forsake not your mother’s teaching. Bind them upon your heart always; tie them about your neck. When you walk, they will lead you; when you lie down, they will watch over you; and when you awake, they will talk with you’ (Prov. 6.20-22). ‘Today salvation has come to this house’ (Luke 19.9).

I wish you could grow up in the country; but it will not be the countryside in which your father grew up. People used to think that the big cities offered the fullest kind of life and lots of pleasure, and they used to flock to them as though to a festival; but those cities have now brought on themselves death and dying, with all imaginable horrors, and have become fearsome places from which women and children have fled. The age of big cities on our continent seems to have come to an end. According to the Bible, Cain founded the first city. It may be that a few world metropolises will survive, but their brilliance, however alluring it may be, will in any case have something uncanny about it for a European. On the other hand, the flight from the cities will mean that the countryside is completely changed. The peace and seclusion of country life have already been largely undermined by the radio, the car, and the telephone, and by the spread of bureaucracy into almost every department of life; and now if millions of people who can no longer endure the pace and the demands of city life are moving into the country, and if entire industries are dispersed into rural areas, then the urbanization of the country will go ahead fast, and the whole basic structure of life there will be changed. The village of thirty years ago no more exists today than the idyllic South Sea island. In spite of man’s longing for peace and solitude, these will be difficult to find. But with all these changes, it will be an advantage to have under one’s feet a plot of land from which to draw the resources of a new, natural, unpretentious, and contented day’s work and evening’s leisure. ‘There is great gain in godliness and
contentment; … if we have food and clothing, with these we shall be content’ (I Tim. 6.6f.). ‘Give me neither poverty nor riches; feed me with the food that is needful for me, lest I be full, and deny thee, and say, “Who is the Lord?”, or lest I be poor, and steal, and profane the name of my God’ (Prov. 30.8f). ‘Flee from the midst of Babylon … She was not healed … Forsake her, and let us go each to his own country’ (Jer. 51.6,9).

We have grown up with the experience of our parents and grandparents that a man can and must plan, develop, and shape his own life, and that life has a purpose, about which a man must make up his mind, and which he must then pursue with all his strength. But we have learnt by experience that we cannot plan even for the coming day, that what we have built up is being destroyed overnight, and that our life, in contrast to that of our parents, has become formless or even fragmentary. In spite of that, I can only say that I have no wish to live in any other time than our own, even though it is so inconsiderate of our outward well-being. We realize more clearly than formerly that the world lies under the wrath and grace of God. We read in Jer. 45: ‘Thus says the Lord: Behold, what I have built I am breaking down, and what I have planted I am plucking up … And do you seek great things for yourself? Seek them not; for, behold, I am bringing evil upon all flesh; … but I will give your life as a prize of war in all places to which you may go.’ If we can save our souls unscathed out of the wreckage of our material possessions, let us be satisfied with that. If the Creator destroys his own handiwork, what right have we to lament the destruction of ours? It will be the task of our generation, not to ‘seek great things’, but to save and preserve our souls out of the chaos, and to realize that it is the only thing we can carry as a ‘prize’ from the burning building. ‘Keep your heart with all vigilance; for from it flows the spring of life’ (Prov. 4.23). We shall have to keep our lives rather than shape them, to hope rather than plan, to hold out rather than march forward. But we do want to preserve for you, the rising generation, what will make it possible for you to plan, build up, and shape a new and better life.

We have spent too much time in thinking, supposing that if we weigh in advance the possibilities of any action, it will happen automatically. We have learnt, rather too late, that action comes, not from thought, but from a readiness for responsibility. For you thought and action will enter on a new relationship; your thinking will be confined to your responsibilities in action. With us thought was often the luxury of the onlooker; with you it will be entirely subordinated to action. ‘Not every one who
says
to me, “Lord, Lord”, shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who
does
the will of my Father who is in heaven’, said Jesus (Matt. 7.21).

For the greater part of our lives pain was a stranger to us. To be as free as possible from pain was unconsciously one of our guiding principles. Niceties of feeling, sensitivity to our own and other people’s pain are at once the strength and the weakness of our way of life. From its early days your generation will be tougher and closer to real life, for you will have had to endure privation and pain, and your patience will have been greatly tried. ‘It is good for a man that he bear the yoke in his youth’ (Lam. 3.27),