writing in the dust

The last couple of weeks have been filled with goodbyes to dear friends. In the midst of the pain of that process, the temptation has been to downplay the costliness of it all and pretend it’s not so difficult. “Ah, it’s really not that bad,” I find myself saying, in so many words. “I’ll see you again in January.” (As one of the best theological discussions of “goodbye” — Les Murray’s poem “The Last Hellos” — puts it: “People can’t say goodbye any more. / They say last hellos.”)

But over the past several days I’ve been going back to a few passages from Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s prison letters, in which he talks extensively about what it means to say goodbye. And the really striking thing is that Bonhoeffer thinks it’s theologically essential to feel the sad weight of it — because by allowing ourselves to experience the weight of it, we acknowledge how important it is that we’re bodily present to one another; we acknowledge how important it is for friends to be together.

Without offering any more commentary, I’ll just let the passages speak for themselves:

• “Some people… find compensation [for a deep loss] in short-lived pleasures that offer readier satisfaction…. When we are forcibly separated for any considerable length of time from those we love, we simply cannot, as most can, get some cheap substitute through other people — I don’t mean because of moral considerations…. We have to suffer unspeakably from the separation, and feel the longing till it almost makes us ill.  That is the only way… in which we can preserve unimpaired our relationship with our loved ones.”
• “nothing can make up for the absence of someone we love.”
• “It is nonsense to say that God fills the gap; he doesn’t fill it, but on the contrary, he keeps it empty and so helps us to keep alive our former communion with each other, even at the cost of pain.”
• “It is only when one loves life and the earth [and I would add, other people] so much that without them everything seems to be over that one may believe in the resurrection and a new world.”
• “I’ve no sympathy with some wrong-headed attempts to explain away distress, because instead of being a comfort, they are the exact opposite…. I sometimes think that real comfort must break in just as unexpectedly as the distress.”
• “There is hardly anything that can make one happier than to feel that one counts for something with other people.  What matters here is not numbers, but intensity.  In the long run, human relationships are the most important thing in life…. God uses us in his dealings with others…. People are more important than anything else in life…. [W]hat is the finest book, or picture, or house, or estate, to me, compared to my wife, my parents, or my friend?”
• “nothing that is past is lost… God gathers up again with us our past, which belongs to us.  So when we are seized by a longing for the past — and this may happen when we least expect it — we may be sure that it is only one of the many ‘hours’ that God is always holding ready for us.”