It is easy, isn't it, to wonder at the body that excels: the fabulous major league pitcher, the amazing little gymnast, the willowy beautiful model, even the local aerobics instructor captures our attention and amazement. But these days I am just as aware of the wonder of my own body.

I am definitely a Holy Spirit person. I feel most alive when I am creative - when new things are blowing through me and I am inspired. This is particularly true when I am experiencing new forms of connectedness and relationship. After all one theological approach to the Holy Spirit is through the connectedness of the persons of God!

But this morning, laying on the radiation table, praying, I realized I direct prayer for healing to God as the Creator, the one who calls me into being. Or perhaps to a different persona of sort - a beloved image from my childhood as a Roman Catholic (though this is not a strictly Roman Catholic Image) of the great physician. This is particularly true in these days when my life is touched by so many caring, committed, capable, and surely called health professionals!

But I want to take a minute to look back at some of the experience of Bonhoeffer. Outside of the study, what was the experience of this independent/directed study like?

I thought Ulrich Tukur was very good in the role of Bonhoeffer. Just the right blend of clear caring and concern, and German control, except in the first scene (see further below.)

I thought that the movie, though was incredibly telescoped. Whole sections of the life of B that had relevance were telescoped into a word or two - and a huge amount was left out. In some cases it would have been very difficult to understand who someone was without already knowing the life of Bonhoeffer.

That said, there were a couple of things that really came out very clearly here. First was the sheer youth of Maria Von Wedermeyer. She was a mere 19 year old thing, engaged to a man 20 years her senior. If he weren't in prison it would almost be uncomfortable. I hadn't thought about that before. The second was the reluctance to really get involved, and the sheer amount of inner struggle over what to do between 1939 and the fall of France. Bethge presents it as almost an instantaneous decision, but the letters that Bonhoeffer writes around his trip to New York in 1939 present someone very much wrestling with what to do.

I really liked that the movie started out with him in New York, playing Spirituals on the piano with an African American friend (presumably Frank Fisher). In a real experience of gaity and a very emotional moment, just before heading back to Germany. This really places the story in a context that makes huge sense for me.

The movie is very much about the ethical struggle. I can recommend it, if you know something about Bonhoeffer. If you don't - watch the 2003 documentary BEFORE watching "Agent of Grace." You'll get more out of the latter.

In part this is a response to the church of his day, which relied on Martin Luther's doctrine of Two Kingdoms (Zwei Reiche) to keep the secular and the sacred specifically separate, and to ignore much of what was going on in the secular space, which allowed the church to remain silent in the face of the Third Reich and Adolph Hitler. Even worse, the National Socialists enforced their own kind of unity of profane and sacred in taking over the leadership of the German Church, installing a Reich Bishop, and essentially co-opting the spiritual lives of the German People.

Bonhoeffer, who was a part of the leadership of the breakaway Confessing Church, and who was part of the ecumenical movement for peace, not only separated himself from the German Christians, who stayed with the protestant churches as the Nazis took over, but indeed even felt that the Confessing Church was too accomodating to the threat, trying to save itself rather than speak out too loud. Only the students that Bonhoeffer taught at the Finkenwalde Seminary and later through the Collective Pastorates in Pomerania were anywhere close to where Bonhoeffer was, which was one reason that he ended up in a largely secular and military conspiracy to assassinate Hitler.

I've not posted recently, since I've been excessively busy, but I expect to more regularly over the next two weeks.

I did a paper on Bonhoeffer's approach to the Book of Psalms. My prof asked a couple of really good questions in his response to it, which I plan to respond to in this forum. All I need is time. :-)

I've continued reading, of course, getting through Letters and Papers from Prison, and am planning to do my next paper (again 5-7 pages) on the biblical basis of Religionless Christianity. One quick note on the Bible-centeredness of all this. First of all, Bonhoeffer was very bible-centered, in that tradition from Luther, and he connected with the earlier work of Luther, out of which much of the "scripture alone" part of the Lutheran approach to religion (fueled by the paradigm change coming out of the printing press). So it's important on that basis. From another POV, the prof directing my study is a bible prof, so the focus on the biblical hermeneutic of B. is part of the way this course is set up. I am looking forward to taking my exploration of Bonhoeffer further in the fall, when I take Systematic Theology, and can get deeper into that point of view.

On to the real point. Also have read several portions of the Cambridge Companion to Bonhoeffer, including one on personal spirituality which echoed amazingly my first paper!

Second paper on religionless Christianity focuses on the Bible basis, and I think I have a good handle on this - but I am also intruigued by other questions associated with this. Most notably, B's concepts have real resonance for the Church in our time, and particularly for the Church Vitality initiative. If B is right, then we need to become a "Religionless" Church, and I think that this is something that the UCC is indeed doing, using Bonhoeffer's way of looking at it. I don't have time today to think this through, but I will shortly, and will post on this topic.

For the next two weeks I'll be on vacation - but I hope to connect and to post to this blog while away. This is important, because my vacation includes three important Bonhoeffer sites: The church where he did his first pastoral work in Barcelona, the Ettal monastery where much of what became Ethics was written, and the Concentration Camp at Flossenbuerg, where he was executed. I hope to post impressions and pictures of all these sites, and of course several B-related books will be in my backpack as I enjoy some rest and relaxation.