Writing It Again for the First Time
I labored mightily over a personal reflection piece that has just been published (“Our Man in Berlin is Not Ours” - print; “What Do We Want with Bonhoeffer” - digital) in the May/June 2025 issue of Christianity Today. (By the way, there’s a Mother’s Day special [MOTHER20], so consider subscribing and give a subscription too.) I wanted the essay to do something new, perhaps startlingly, as I returned to the subject in this eightieth anniversary year of the end of the World War II.
Revisiting my Bonhoeffer-Haus days, I found myself actively learning again. I talked with a lot of people, asked them questions, and listened deeply to their thoughts. The process was ripening, and yet I found myself marveling at how little I knew, how hard it is to keep knowing things truthfully and well. Life marches on; learning often limps behind.
The longer I live as a lifelong learner, the more I discover how little I actually know. The humbling that real education offers can be glittering and equally shadowy, tempting me to wonder how anyone can say anything all. Of course we are tempted to hit the magic button of generative AI, and just let the machines imitate human thinking for us.
The long-suffering editor I worked with endured eight separate drafts of this short essay. Eight (8)! Repeatedly, I was flummoxed that I found it hard to write. My self-talk was at times relentlessly impatient: How is this possible? How is it that I wrote an entire book about this subject and yet I’m finding a 3,000 word essay hard?! I thanked her repeatedly for being patient with me.
Now released, I am still startled that it was hard for me to write. It opens in a familiar pattern and articulates cross-cultural subtleties that I have labored to articulate after having lived them. It looks like the same old thing, again.
Yet I know it is not the same old thing. There is genuine ripening behind the words, and I hope some new and old readers alike will recognize its fragrance. Many of the shifts are within me. I am more keenly aware of and name in the essay what moved me to begin exploring Bonhoeffer’s life as I did nine years ago: 1) genuine fear, and 2) an unexamined instinct to look for a “fairy godfather,” theological or otherwise, who would emerge at last and save the day.
Both are important, culturally powerful elements that are nonetheless fully mine. To call them “cultural” doesn’t lessen my personal responsibility for participating in them. But I had to come to know these instincts in myself, know them as mine.
These are also the ordinary instincts that false prophets and misleaders exploit for their own ends; their predictable party tricks eventually run out and lay exposed in ruin, but my lands, their tricks do a lot of damage, leaving fearful, searching people even more lost and desperate than before. (There’s good reason Jesus repeatedly says, “Do not be afraid,” and why Jesus’s rescue of us involves us personally and actively.)
“Writing it again for the first time” sounds like that old sermon cliché about the good news being like Cornflakes: taste them again for the first time, as the old advertisement goes. We forget that we forget. We have to allow ourselves to be startled by the strangeness of what take for granted as familiar, wrestle with it all again for ourselves. That becomes especially important when the fog of arrogant amnesia cultivates and celebrates stupidity. It’s easy to get fearful and start looking around passively for a fairy godfather figure, theological or otherwise, to effectuate an easy magical rescue.
Revisiting it all again, I am less confident today about the subject matter than I was when I wrote the book. I am even less confident that any well-crafted or honeyed appeal I could possibly make to any sensitive readers’ moral or civic appetites will move anyone to prayer or righteous action.
None of this means that I do not have hope. Quite the opposite, in fact.
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What I’m reading and people I’m learning from:
Sacred Self-Care, by Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barnes. Short meditations that flow out of a powerful thesis that self-care isn’t just trendy but an expression of Christian discipleship. I love that she peppers her prose with biblical receipts.
Origins of Totalitarianism, by Hannah Arendt. Totalitarian regimes thrive when people are isolated and lonely, and through fear stoked by terror and the stupidity cultivated by appeals to simple “logicality” or to a “supersense” or nonsense that replaces common sense. The hunger for a neat and tidy narrative, some storyline that alleviates us from having to think or labor together (to participate in “common sense” for the common good), is a prime condition for totalitarianism.
Teresa of Avila: The Book of My Life, translated by Mirabai Starr. Thank God Teresa of Avila is counted among the sainted doctors of the Church. I have learned of her far too late in my life, but now that I have, I plan to keep on revisiting her wise, humble counsel.