CONGRATULATIONS to Rodney Ward, minister of our Berwick & Horncliffe congregation, who has received second prize in a national competition that was publicised last year on this website.
Just one hundred years ago, on 4th February 1906, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was born with his twin, Sabine. One of the most gifted German theologians of his generation, Bonhoeffer was to play a leading part in the Confessing Church's active opposition to Hitler, and was executed by the Nazis just before the end of the War.
To celebrate this centenary Colloquy organised a poetry competition on the theme of "Resisting Tyranny". Competitors were asked to submit original poems of not more than 40 lines exploring any aspect of Bonhoeffer's life. Winners were announced at an exhibition of paintings, sculpture and icons, organised in conjunction with Amnesty International, at Westminster Central Hall.
Rodney submitted a poem entitled "Responsibility" and was informed at the end of January that he had been placed second.
“We have learnt, rather too late, that action comes, not from thought, but from a readiness for responsibility”
(from “Thoughts on the Day of the Baptism of Dietrich Wilhelm Rudiger Bethge”, May 1944 in “Letters and papers from prison”).Hi Bonhoeffer
I’m still hanging in there
nagging away at those questions
that began for me in the nineteen-sixties -
“religionless Christianity”
and all that.
But what really holds me
is the cost of your discipleship
worked out in a Nazi context
outward confidence
hiding the fragility of self-conscious questioning.
Your path took you through Tegel prison
Buchenwald
and Flossenberg.
Standing outside your home in Berlin
there are no signs there
in the lofty grandeur of its facade
of what was to come.
Sitting in the church
where you were ordained
it is empty of presence -
but the seeds are there
in the teenage decision to be a theologian.
“When Christ calls a man
he bids him come and die” -
not just a metaphor in your case
though it took time to show itself.
Visiting old sites
and revisiting old thoughts
I do not find you.
Our paths intersect
at the point of
readiness for responsibility
the context in my case
being secular indifference
which threatens not to strangle
but to suffocate
in material self satisfaction.
That too is a tyranny.© Rodney Ward, September 20th 2005
For permission to use in church magazines etc contact the author