Some quotes I collected from my reading of Dorothee Soelle’s memoir, Against the Wind: A Memoir of a Radical Christian (ISBN: 0-8006-3079-3) where she writes about the events and relationships that shaped her life. Each of these quotes could get a post on their own; maybe I’ll just do a few select ones. Anyway, with no context… and perhaps a hope that someone else will find her work interesting, the quotes:
If there was such a thing as an “inner emigration” from Nazi Germany, surely it was the young people who had the greatest reason or a natural right to do it. To distance oneself and not to become involved was not merely a luxury of the bourgeoisie. It was necessary if one was to dream of another land, a different tomorrow.
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As I wrote in a previous post, this is often how I feel in relation to the Western church that seems to be championing and even glorying in such repulsive ideas in public discourse. I want to “transfer out,” but I also recognize I can’t do that completely. I am bound to the church, even in these darker times that “apart from them, I will not see wholeness.” (Heb 11:40) I know that the ideals which suppress human flourishing and dignity will not last.
Today I ask myself which institutions, groups, or social powers could have initiated such a turning back. Why was the church so silent?
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I hope that the church today will not be silent as wars rage on, human dignity is denied, and peoples are starved. I don’t want to be part of a church that watches atrocities go by without a word.
Quoting Anne Frank:
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Fine specimens of humanity, those Germans, and to think that I’m actually one of them! No, that’s not true, Hitler took away our nationality long ago. And besides, there are no greater enemies on earth than these Germans and the Jews. (October 9, 1942)
Fine specimens of humanity, those Christians, and to think that I’m actually one of them! No, that’s not true, the so-called moral conservatives took away our faith long ago. And besides, there are no greater enemies on earth than these Christians and the Christians.
But for me, a German, it is not quite so simple. In the end, all who did not put up resistance were implicated, entangled in the belief systems of “these” Germans, lending them a hand and sharing in the profits. Among those who “went along,” in the broadest sense of the words, were all who had practiced the art of looking away turning a deaf ear, and keeping silent. There has been much quarreling about collective guilt and responsibility, but my basic feeling is, rather, one of an ineradicable shame-the shame of belonging to this people, speaking the language of the concentration camp guards, singing the songs that were also sung in the Hitler Youth and the Company of German Girls That shame does not become superannuated; it must stay alive.
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I need this shame about my people; I do not want to forget anything, because forgetting nurtures the illusion that it is possible to be a truly human being without the lessons of the Dead. The truth of the matter is that we need their help. I need my friend Anne Frank very much.
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I need to remember the complicity of the church. They are my lessons from the Dead.
… theological reflection without political consequences was tantamount to blasphemy. I put it this way: Every theological statement has to be at the same time a political one.
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I know people today want to separate faith in politics. Politics gets mixed with power and that often leads to corruption, they say. But how often we fail to realize that those very dynamics drive the church. It’s not a “pure” faith, as if you can separate faith out as a set of beliefs, clinically distinct from the people who embody that faith with one another in the real world.
Do we not have to make use of every analytical tool that helps us both to comprehend the sources of injustice? Should we not recognize at the same time that victims of injustice are the possible forces for the change that breaks the yoke of oppression of both victim and perpetrator? Could we afford to ignore Marx in a time when it should be clear to every attentive observer of the misery of developing countries that capitalism is neither able nor willing to end hunger?
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Capitalism makes us happy only if we give up our humanity and mutual belonging.
Often the God of Christians is no more than a noncorporeal, heavenly being above and beyond history’s victories and defeats and is experienced exclusively by individuals in connection with their individual fortunes. This God lives in the realm of ideas and has neither a bodily nor a social dimension. It is a deity who certainly wants to have nothing to do with whatever happens to the body, to material society, and to social structures. In confronting philosophical materialism, I have learned to take material existence more seriously in its twofold sense of body and society. In this manner, hunger and unemployment, and the military-industrial complex and its impact on day-to-day life moved from the periphery to the forefront of my theological work.
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Perhaps one of the more influential ideas I learned in seminary and is often reiterated in my reading of theologians and pastors is that God cares about the body. I grew up with a religion centered upon ideas and beliefs and the body came second, if at all. That’s not the kind of faith that gives life. No one has life without a body.
If this separating of spheres of life [art and suffering] a characteristic of bourgeois culture, the new, post-bourgeois interest might well be to liberate both the arts and religion from their subjectivistic privatization and to turn them once again into media of communication and collective memory. Theology, the arts, and music are engaged in the archaic endeavor not to abandon language about what affects us most deeply but instead to foster communication among ourselves. Both theology and music make suffering less mute, iso-lated, animalistic, or petrified. They both move us to let tears flow.
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Building upon the previous reflections about my faith being more about ideas, doctrines, statements of beliefs — and these were often very precise in theological language and meaning — this quote underscores the lack of beauty and emotion in the faith of my upbringing. I learned very late in life to appreciate beauty in the way the church has historically applied art to communicate faith. Art does not have the technical precision available to words, but it has a grasp on beauty and mystery to awake one’s soul. Technical theology often puts people to sleep.
While of little or no help for one’s career or professional life, oppression is not without “advantages.” Being nurtured to be quiet and listen is sensitizing, and therefore humanizing. Female socialization can engender pride and not weeping. Living in wholeness and having the desire to be united with or to give oneself to someone are assets in the process of becoming human. Holding back, not allowing feelings to surface, and seeking to spare oneself are liabilities of male socialization. After all, why is male culture so bleak and dreadful? Surely it’s because men have resisted and destroyed so many female components within themselves.
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This line echoes so much of Bell Hook’s The Will to Change. Being male and “in charge” robs us of so much that ought to be available to us not as male or female, but as human beings.
What changes in the transition to the pain of hard labor? The pain is no smaller than before, but it becomes different because I bring it on myself. The separation between my pain and me, in which I was only a captive to pain, is over. I flex my muscles with all my strength, no longer using my inner energy defensively but proactively. Now I seek life and not protection from the enemy pain.
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What would a theology of pain look like that does not toil away at the question of theodicy and worry about how a great and all-good God can permit bad things to happen to good people? We need a different theology of pain that finally feminizes the questions and relates our pain to the pain of God. The question then will be: How does our pain become the pain of God? How do we become part of the messianic pain of liberation, part of the groaning of a creation that is in travail? How do we come to suffer so that our suffering becomes the pain of birth?
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These two quotes were very enlightening. A mother’s understanding of the necessity of pain, very much echoed in the scriptures, gives a different response to the question of theodicy. I wonder if this would be more well known if we had more women teaching in churches.
A marriage without common work, without common joy, without shared vision suffocates in its own restrictedness.
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In one of Bertolt Brecht’s stories, a woman is asked about her husband. She gives this reply: “I lived with him for twenty years. We slept in the same room and the same bed. We ate our meals together. He told me all about his business dealings. I was acquainted with his parents and socialized with all his friends. I knew of all his illnesses, even those he wasn’t aware of. Of all who knew him, I knew him best.” The decisive word to describe this woman’s relationship to her husband is “to know” She knows everything, and that means she is in control. For her, “being in the know” serves that control. Actually, we can know only something that is dead, an object. With what lives, we can only have experiences, and grow to be more and more engaged with it. “To know” is part of the domain of I-It relationships, the domain that with its sheer weight and routine makes many a marriage unbearable.
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Freedom comes from mutuality, not lopsided submission. Relationship must embrace a level of mystery and curiosity, acknowledging the divine depth in every person.
I was not born into the world of the church. I cannot consider myself deformed or neuroticized by the church. The policeman-god who checks under the bedcovers is known to me only from reports of people whom the church has damaged. I have never been employed by the church or received remuneration from it. The fact of this biographical dis tance from it has freed me for critique and affirmation, for anger and love. To put it concretely: It has freed me to distinguish between the church from above and the church from below.
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The majority of Germans today no longer believe in God. Thus far, this fact did not bother me very much, because what they believed in earlier I could not necessarily regard as God.
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I hope that the next generation will not be as confused by the term “Christianity” as my generation is today. What the Western Church believes now is so far removed from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, I don’t think it can get any clearer. I love that in one of my conversations earlier this year, someone found faith not because of what they saw on TV, but because they saw their heart’s longing echoed in Jesus’ words to the poor, the mourners, the meek, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, the merciful, the pure in heart, the persecuted for righteousness’ sake.
Liberation theology repeats again and again that the poor are the teachers. It sounds crazy, because we imagine that we are the great teachers and exporters of well-being, bringing medicine, technology, clean water, hygiene, and so forth to the poor. In the realm of the spiritual, there is so very much more we can learn from the poor, from their ability to hope, to begin anew, to make another attempt. We middle-class people are so easily discouraged. We sustain two or three setbacks, fail to arrive where we had planned to be, or are prevented here or there from publishing or speaking, and everything seems pointless. Here I am speaking about my own experiences. That discouragement is weakness, it is the cynicism growing among us. Often engaged in much more extensive struggles, and holding out even though the objective prospects are so much smaller, the poor know exactly where their strengths lie. They keep up their struggle.
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The poor are the teachers.
A broadsheet from the Chilean underground wrote the following to “those who are close to giving up and whose engagement is waning”:
This is where our greatest danger lies at the moment, which is also a great danger for our children and the coming generations: in the loss of moral sensitivity, the deliberate or at least accepted confusion between good and evil. There are things, after all, that we must cry out at least within our souls, if we may not say them out loud in the street. Otherwise, we will forget them. These lines were written so that you may not forget these things but wake up and burn bright like a torch.
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I pray we won’t forget the difference between good and evil. That evil is not allowed because the agents of evil have also done some good somewhere.
The word “peace,” without qualifiers, appeared more and more rarely in the speeches of leading politicians. One did not wish to leave peace “quite so unprotected”; it had to be combined with “security.” If one spoke loud enough and with the right amount of military logic about “security,” the addition of “and peace” was no longer threatening. First things first: absolute security first. That concept became more and more neurotic.
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Peace. If only peace. I highlighted this quote long before the missile volleys between Israel and Iran last week and the surprise entrance of the US into the conflict through their bombing of Tehran.
There are two kinds of compassion, childish and genuine. One is to regret the terrible things that happen in so many places of the world: we feel affected and shaken and are ready to give money; we think of the victims, but then put the situation behind us. Our day-to-day life is not touched; we go on living as before with apartheid in our heads and our hearts, separating us from “those poor South African blacks.”
Like every strong, immediate feeling, compassion can go in one of two directions. It can set itself apart from analysis, comprehension, and informed knowledge and remain childish, so to speak, and for that reason be quickly forgotten. Or it can become probing, persistent, and self-critical in its questioning, and it can train itself in analysis. Our media, to a large extent, opted for childish compassion and ruled out genuine compassion, the one that goes to the roots.
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Compassion can go in one of two directions. Let’s move from milk to meat.
Anyone who is reasonably alert has numerable chances to withhold participation and to say No to certain con-sumer goods, for example, or to an excessive consumption of energy or meat and, instead, raise critical questions about what industry produces. And there are also chances to change one’s lifestyle and one’s political consciousness, to join an organization seeking to achieve certain goals.
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This is pretty much a challenge to me and most of my online shopping. Her recollection about eating oranges at the top of this page (go get the book!) is pretty much me… except everyone around me is also complicit and keeping their mouth shut.
In the end, we [Dorothee and Elie Weisel] spoke of Cain and Abel. I asked whether we would not rather be Abel than Cain, if we had the choice. Wiesel repudiated my pacific dream and stressed that both brothers were accountable for the other’s destiny. I wanted to know in what sense Abel was responsible. “He was silent when Cain needed him. Abel said nothing.”
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Silent when Cain needed him. How often we justify ignoring the cries of those we consider enemies.
Whoever does not remember, whoever pretends not to have known, and whoever did not want to know later on… has understood nothing at all. God is memory, and that is why to remember is to approach God. To forget, to repress, is a way of getting rid of God.
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This is very much describing those who choose to not know. That reports of injustice are available but we’ve chosen not to get involved and to turn a blind eye or a deaf ear to them.
Facing me, he spoke movingly about the children of the Germans he had come to know. He criticized the notion of collective guilt without erasing that of collective shame. He referred to encounters with young Germans who had confided in him that they had learned only at age twenty of their fathers’ complicity and now tried to live with that reality.
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In the course of the discussion, someone asked whether the Holocaust spelled the end of Judaism. The answer–not from Elie Wiesel but from a younger Jewish woman –was no, but the end of Christianity. That reply held me captive for the whole day and has never let me go. I must hear it and want to refute it, not by arguments but by a lile before the One who has also told me what is good and what is required of me (Micah 6:8).
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The end of Christianity.
I think that it is a dimension of our First World reality that so many engaged and wonderful human beings are afraid to be regarded as “political,” and to be drawn into something unknown to them….
This means quite simply that we all must grow more profoundly into love. This growth signifies a politization of conscience, in utter contrast to our customary Christian education: It is so very busy privatizing our spiritual strength, to anchor it in the family and the individual. This arrests spiritual strength on the level of charity as interpreted by the bourgeois within us. Love that does not venture beyond its own horizon, and does not dare to search mercilessly for the foundation of terror, is not love.
Why are people so scared of being put into a particular corner? They are afraid and I also hear this from some of you-of being “co-opted” by an anonymous apparatus and its political “ideology.”
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I find this perspective helpful… how we tend to privatize our faith when politicization gets uncomfortable. We can lean into private faith so strongly and parade private faith as a strength as a way to ignore than public demands that our faith makes upon us.
The deed is simpler for people who are directly threatened by state terrorism, namely, the refugees themselves. But when we listen to them, we have to understand their critique of every form of cheap charity that ignores the sources of oppression. As one of the principles of liberation theology states: The poor are our teachers. When we hear them, we are drawn into analyzing the production of refugees and learn to name those who sustain the real terrorism because they derive profit from it. “Evil has an address,” Bertolt Brecht said in the ’30s. “It has a telephone number.” We still have to learn this lesson. We need to go beyond giving aid in catastrophes and beyond charitable action, and trust the Holy Spirit who is not afraid of organization, structure, and theory, but uses them all for her purposes.
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Evil has an address… It has a telephone number.
For 2,000 years there has existed a peculiar Christianity that burns witches at the stake, supports the conquista, invents the Inquisition, and creates oppression again and again. Nonetheless, I believe in Jesus Christ, in God, in hope, in humanity. I do so in a manner that acknowledges those terrible self-destructions. I do not try to evade them. It is my daily fare to meet people at every turn who have been disappointed, bent out of shape, even nauseated and destroyed by Christianity. They wonder what I still want to do with it.
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Many of those engaged in the civil rights movement of the GDR were asking themselves whether they should stay in the country or leave. I was acquainted with the discussion of this matter in the church and had made my own the position that was identified by the words of the prophet Isaiah: “Whoever believes, remains.” The church called on its co-workers not to go to the West, at least as a rule. Jeremiah’s word, “Seek the welfare of the city,” accompanied the church’s admonition.
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Whoever believes, remains.
I believe that theology is much more an art than a science. It has to understand itself as an attempt to cross the bounds of everyday language, oriented toward art rather than to the abstract, rational, and neutral. Why is it that in the world of the West only theology developed and not theopoetry?
The endeavor to communicate God does not lead me away from reality, or from images to levels of abstraction. I try to think in images and, even more so, in stories, in narratives. In this respect, I have always learned much from Judaism. Often I have experienced what it means to have a discussion with Jewish people. There always comes a point when they interrupt their argumentation and exclaim, accompanied by an inimitable gesture, “Now, I will tell you a story.” Jewish interpretation of Scripture works in much the same way; it is not oriented toward doctrinal assertions but toward application, toward wisdom for living.
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Theology cannot remain an abstraction. “Now, I will tell you a story…”
For me, praying and writing poetry, prayer and poem, are not alternatives. The message I wish to pass on is meant to encourage people to learn to speak themselves. For example, the idea that every human being can pray is for me an enormous affirmation of human creativity. Christianity presupposes that all hurnan beings are poets, namely, that they can pray That is the same as seeing with the eyes of God. When people try to say with the utmost capacity for truthfulness what really concerns them, they offer prayer and are poets at the same time.
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Prayer and poetry. This echoes much of Eugene Peterson’s idea that prayer is primal speech.
I experience our language as broken, horribly corrupted… This is especially true for the language of religion. “Jesus Christ is our redeemer” this is destroyed, dead language. It means absolutely nothing, no one understands it, it is religious babble that, although available in staggering quantity, no longer says anything. This is what I mean when I say that language is broken.
Let me tell about an opposite incident. My five-year-old granddaughter Johanna came home from kindergarten and said: “What happened to Jesus was very bad; they made him dead with nails through his hands. But then, there was Easter and, ha-ha, he got up again.” For that happily spontaneous “ha-ha,” I would gladly give away several yards of exegetical literature.
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I see this play out in what many now describe as “Christianese.” Faith words that now have no meaning because we use the terms so loosely. I also long for the “ha-ha” in our religious discourse to replace the dead language of theology.
I believe in the life after death, the life that goes on after my individual death. I believe in the peace that perhaps is to be some time long after I have gone, in justice and in joy. I do not believe in a continuation of individual existence, and I do not wish to be in a situation where I would have to believe in it. I regard such a belief to be a crutch for faith; we are, instead, to learn to walk and I want to learn to walk without having to rely on this bourgeois crutch.
If I had the faith of an Isaiah or Jeremiah, I would be satisfied, I do not need what Friedrich Nietzsche once called Christianity, “Platonism for the people,” but I do need faith in the one who elects, liberates, and walks beside us. A young woman once asked me, “Is everything over for you when you die?” I replied that it all depends on what she meant by “everything.” If you are “everything” to yourself, then everything is over for you. But if not, then everything goes on, as a beautiful Yiddish song puts it: “mir leben ejbik” (“we live eternally”).
Individual spiritual, psychic, and somatic existence comes to an end at death. That idea does not fill me with fright that I am a part of nature, that I fall like a leaf from a tree and decay while the tree and the grass go on growing, the birds sing, and I am a part of all that. I am at home in this cosmos without having to go on living that piece of the whole that was mine for perhaps seventy years.
I find that we can learn much from the religions of East Asia that have seen very clearly that the whole is larger than its parts and that each one of us is a part. Those religions have fostered trust in the whole. Paul Tillich once formulated this very beautifully, he called it “the courage to confirm one’s finitude,” that is, to comprehend “I am finite, I will die,” without having to despair because of it.
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This entire quote and idea. I’m still working with it and learning to see it as a different expression of universalism — not overly concerned with “going to heaven.” That we are present to leave our mark and that our meaning has extra meaning because it is finite. Not sure if I share this perspective but I can also be content with it.
My attempts to raise you as Christians had little chance of succeeding; the institution again and again attacked me from behind, the church was and is only rarely worthy of trust. But I am also very conscious of my own lack of credibly living out cus-toms and symbols, of making hymn and prayer part of everyday life. It is as if we parents had no house of religion to offer you to live in but a derelict one.
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On our trips we used to drag you into churches; on one occasion, the church we looked at was awful. I believe it was you, Caroline, who announced dryly, “No God in there.” Precisely that is not to be said in your lives, God is to be “in there,” at the sea and in the clouds, in the candle, in music, and, of course, in love.
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These two quotes come from a letter she writes to her children. It led me to reflect on my own parenting. I don’t know if the faith will persist. In many ways I hope that the faith I was brought up with does not persist, but that they would take up and perpetuate something new that does not carry the baggage I grew up with. What I do hope is that however they live, that people can see and say about their lives, “God is in there.”
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