Dietrich Bonhoeffer
So I've spent a lot of time thinking about this guy. About his ideas and his writings and... it's been a bit difficult to come to some conclusion about who I think he was. Bonhoeffer is such a complicated character, and there are moments when I feel like he's completely contradicting himself. But it's often in those contradictions that I find myself most connected to him. It's in the contradictions that I can get away from the church sanctioned 21st century saint "Dietrich Bonhoeffer." That guy is not very interesting. But the man who took so seriously the struggle of justice in the world that he was willing to sacrifice not only his life, but his most sacred theology, and even conspire a murder plot - that's the man I'm trying to connect with in this piece. I read Life Together and I was bored beyond belief. Not because it wasn't written well. But it felt like it was written in a pulpit. I'm trying to figure out what it means that I'm most interested in the things he wrote while in prison. I made a painting of Bonhoeffer alone, in the dark, arms outstretched, falling on his knees, but suited up in his pastoral garb. Now the painting has been torn from the stretcher bar, and is falling around a plaster bust of my head, cradling my face, while a German bible rests on a table top, spine up, at my back. Unable to see the gilding burnished across Bonhoeffer's back, my eyes are submerged in the folds of his robes, unaware of the gold, as he covers my face, whispering the same questions he wrestled with.
