Visible Signs of the Cross
One of the books I decided to read this year for Lent is Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s classic on Christian community, Life Together. This was my fifth time reading it, if memory serves me right. Each time I’m struck by something different, and each time I’m both challenged and encouraged.
I’ll just share one passage that stood out to me this time around. It seems to me that our spiritual lives and our churches are to a large extent shaped by cultural norms like individualism and efficiency in significant if subtle ways, and our understanding of faithfulness (or success) in those areas take shape accordingly. I think that’s concerning. Consider Bonhoeffer’s take on “interruptions” and what Christian community and service really mean:
We must be ready to allow ourselves to be interrupted by God. God will be constantly crossing our paths and cancelling our plans by sending us people with claims and petitions. We may pass them by, preoccupied with our more important tasks, as the priest passed by the man who had fallen among thieves, perhaps — reading the Bible. When we do that we pass by the visible sign of the Cross raised athwart our path to show us that, not our way, but God’s way must be done. It is strange fact that Christians and even ministers frequently consider their work so important and urgent that they will allow nothing to disturb them. They think they are doing God a service in this, but actually they are disdaining God’s “crooked yet straight path” (Gottfried Arnold). They do not want a life that is crossed and balked. But it is part of the discipline of humility that we must not spare our hand where it can perform a service and that we do not assume that our schedule is our own to manage, but allow it to be arranged by God.
In the monastery his vow of obedience to the abbot deprives the monk of the right to dispose of his own time. In evangelical community life, free service to one’s brother takes the place of the vow. Only where hands are not too good for deeds of love and mercy in everyday helpfulness can the mouth joyfully and convincingly proclaim the message of God’s love and mercy.
– Life Together (HarperOne, 1954), pp. 99-100.
What can Western Christians in the twenty-first century do to pinpoint and correct the ways in which individualism and efficiency have undermined our ability to proclaim and embody God’s love?
