Right now I want to stay with my father and go where he goes. If he stays in Germany, I’ll try to go to school there, though he never knows if he might get transferred someplace else. I guess we’ve become pretty good friends in the last few years, and neither of us is quite ready to split up for nine months of the year.

What your father said about God being like a father is making more sense to me all the time. Sometimes I pull some pretty bone-headed moves, and my dad has to get after me. I always feel pretty stupid and sorry afterwards. But most of the time I want to please him and do what he says and be with him. And he is always completely understanding and forgiving. If God is like that, then that is the kind of God I could believe in.

Matthew

37 Fateful Decisions

37

Fateful Decisions

After leaving Lebenshaus, Bonhoeffer and his small band of men split up temporarily, some returning to their homes, others seeking shelter elsewhere until a new seminary could be established.

While Baron Heinrich von Dortmann was engaged with his men harvesting late fall crops of potatoes and sugar beets, and while Marion and her household staff tried to forget the ugly desecration of their home, and while the baron’s daughter and the son of the assistant American ambassador exchanged correspondence, the Gestapo proved to be busier than Dortmann’s young pastor friend had anticipated. Apparently authorities kept closer tabs on the members of the Finkenwalde community than Bonhoeffer realized. In November a series of arrests were made of many of its former participants, although its leader managed to avoid imprisonment. That same month, Bonhoeffer’s book on discipleship, entitled Nachfolge, was published. The following month, in December, he established two “collective pastorates” northeast of the Dortmann estate in the little rural villages of Köslin and Groβ-Schlönwitz, through which he hoped to continue training young clergymen. For a time these disguised seminaries seemed to elude the eyes of the Gestapo.

It was not until February of the following year that Dortmann saw Bonhoeffer again.

Without warning one stormy day in the middle of the month, he drove into Lebenshaus alone, apparently in good health, though clearly weighed down by a burden of some kind.

“It is good to see you again, my friend,” he said after he and the baron had greeted one another. “We miss you at our meetings.”

“Once you are well established, I will rejoin your community as time permits.”

“I’m afraid there will be no community, Heinrich. We are little more than a seminary on the run now. The peaceful days of Finkenwalde are gone forever. We remain but one step ahead of the Gestapo at every turn. You heard of the arrests?”

“Yes. How did you avoid their net?”

“The grace of God, and not being where they thought I was.”