Celebrating Advent means learning to wait. Waiting is a skill that our impatient world has forgotten. Today, people want to pick the fruit before the plant has even grown. But often, they are disappointed; the fruit that looks so good on the outside is still unripe inside. Impatient hands throw it away because it did not meet their expectations. Those who do not understand the blessing of waiting—of hoping and doing without for a time—will never truly enjoy the joy of fulfillment.
People who have never struggled with the deepest questions of life and waited patiently for answers cannot imagine the beauty of the moment when they finally understand. Those who do not patiently seek friendship and love—who do not open their hearts and wait for these things to grow—will never know the true joy of two souls deeply connected in friendship and love.
The greatest, deepest, and most delicate things in life require waiting. These things do not come quickly or easily. They grow according to divine laws of planting, growing, and becoming.
Be brave for my sake, dearest Maria, even if this letter is your only token of my love this Christmas-tide. We shall both experience a few dark hours—why should we disguise that from each other? We shall ponder the incomprehensibility of our lot and be assailed by the question of why, over and above the darkness already enshrouding humanity, we should be subjected to the bitter anguish of a separation whose purpose we fail to understand.… And then, just when everything is bearing down on us to such an extent that we can scarcely withstand it, the Christmas message comes to tell us that all our ideas are wrong, and that what we take to be evil and dark is really good and light because it comes from God. Our eyes are at fault, that is all. God is in the manger, wealth in poverty, light in darkness, succor in abandonment. No evil can befall us; whatever men may do to us, they cannot but serve the God who is secretly revealed as love and rules the world and our lives.
Letter to fiancée Maria von Wedemeyer
from prison, December 13, 1943
A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse,
and a branch shall grow out of his roots.
The spirit of the Lord shall rest on him,
the spirit of wisdom and understanding,
the spirit of counsel and might,
the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord.
His delight shall be in the fear of the Lord.
He shall not judge by what his eyes see,
or decide by what his ears hear;
but with righteousness he shall judge the poor.
Isaiah 11:1–4a
Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. God Is in the Manger : Reflections on Advent and Christmas. Louisville, Presbyterian Publishing Corporation, 2012.
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