KNOW DIETRICH? MEET MARIA!

I grew up in a Lutheran church and attended the Lutheran church through my college years. So, the name of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German Lutheran pastor and theologian, is and always has been familiar to me. He was introduced as a theologian, scholar, anti-Nazi conspirator and martyr, a tragic martyr, because he was hanged in the concentration camp at Flossenbürg on April 9, 1945, just short of a month before the end of World War II in Europe (May 8, 1945). I have read three of his books: Life Together, The Cost of Discipleship and Letters and Papers from Prison.

Nobody had told me then what I learned today, that he was engaged just before his arrest by the Nazis. His fiancé was Maria von Wedermeyer (born April 23, 1924, died November 16, 1977.). To share more deeply of his imprisonment, she marked out with chalk an enclosure the size of his cell on her bedroom floor, so that she could write to him as though she were with him. In his final letter to her, Bonhoeffer wrote, "I have often found that the quieter my surroundings, the more vividly I sense my connection with you." He was executed a few months later. Bonhoeffer’s correspondence with her has been published as Love Letters from Cell 92.

The story of Maria’s death has a poignant twist to it. When Joseph and Mary Lou Bayley’s son was killed in a sledding accident, his fiancé sent them a poem written by Dietrich Bonhoeffer for New Year’s Day, 1945. Joseph included the poem in his book, Heaven.

This is the poem:

Powers of Good
By Dietrich Bonhoeffer

With every power for good to stay and guide me,
comforted and inspired beyond all fear,
I'll live these days with you in thought beside me,
and pass, with you, into the coming year.

The old year still torments our hearts, unhastening;
the long days of our sorrow still endure;
Father, grant to the souls thou hast been chastening
that thou hast promised, the healing and the cure.

Should it be ours to drain the cup of grieving
even to the dregs of pain, at thy command,
we will not falter, thankfully receiving
all that is given by thy loving hand.

But should it be thy will once more to release us
to life's enjoyment and its good sunshine,
that which we've learned from sorrow shall increase us,
and all our life be dedicate as thine.

Today, let candles shed their radiant greeting;
lo, on our darkness are they not thy light
leading us, haply, to our longed-for meeting? -
Thou canst illumine even our darkest night.

When now the silence deepens for our hearkening,
grant we may hear thy children's voices raise
from all the unseen world around us darkening
their universal paean, in thy praise.

While all the powers of good aid and attend us,
boldly we'll face the future, come what may.
At even and at morn God will befriend us,
and oh, most surely on each newborn day!

-- December 1944

Years later, Joseph got a letter from a pastor-friend in Massachusettes, telling that some years before, he had been visiting a terminally ill woman in a Boston hospital. He brought her a copy of Bayley’s book. The woman stayed up that night reading it. The next day, when the pastor visited, the woman told him how much the book had helped her. A few hours later she died. The woman was Maria von Wedermeyer Weller, Bonhoeffer’s fiancé of 30 years earlier.

I have ordered Love Letters from Cell 92: The Correspondence Between Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Maria Von Wedemeyer, 1943-45 by Ruth-Alice Von Bismarck (Maria’s sister), Ulrich Itz, Ulrich Kabitz (Editor) and the DVD of Bonhoeffer (2003) starring Eberhard Bethge, Klaus Maria Brandauer Director: Martin Doblmeier. I’d like to get to know this icon, this stylized giant, as a man of and among common people. And I’d like to “meet” Maria.