Learning to sail on the open sea. Bonhoeffer on resilience

Abstract

On 13 November 1928, a young vicar delivered a lecture entitled “The Tragedy of the Prophetic and Its Lasting Meaning” to the German Congregation in Barcelona, Spain. As he solemnly declared to his expatriate, bourgeois congregation, “The rug – or let us say the bourgeois parquet floor – has been ruthlessly pulled out from under our feet, and we must now search for a bit of earth on which to stand. We have been utterly and completely shipwrecked and are now horrified to see just how utterly at sea many of us are.” As the vicar candidly observed, the rapid social changes, economic turmoil and ideological battles which followed World War I had eroded and undermined the spiritual, ethical and political foundations of German society. The resulting loss of solid earth on which to stand left his countrymen feeling like they were shipwrecked in a stormy sea, with nothing left to cling to, and with no hope of rescue in sight.