Much More Unites

The week before Christmas in a taxi in Bradford: the driver tells me of a previous ‘fare’ who told him that her birthday was Christmas day. The Muslim cab driver rejoiced with her on having a birthday on such an important day and added how wonderful it would be for her to go to church and thank God for her own birth and the birth of Jesus the same day.

The passenger replied that she did not go to church. The driver commented, “I was so shocked that I almost stopped the car and asked her to get out.” Today we do not have to travel as far as Bonhoeffer did to enrich our experience of God.

Is God Single-mindedly Open-minded?

At times I am anxious that almost every ‘brand’ of Christianity seems to have staked a claim to the Bonhoeffer legacy, and then I read: “Christmas is not a celebration for the individual but for everyone together … God’s kingdom is the whole world” (Bonhoeffer Works Vol. 9 p511).

Presumably it would have been easier for DB to say that sort of thing in a society which was in effect religiously monochrome. However, given time, maybe we Christians will find ways of sharing, for example, the Eid festivities of Muslims and they of Christmas.

Mean Mentality

I read that Harrods, one of Britain’s most expensive stores, is one of the meanest when it comes to the percentage it passes on to Charities from the charity cards it sells.

Christmas 1940: Bonhoeffer, who was banned from circulating his writing, sent personal letters to over a hundred former students, many of whom were at the Russian Front. The Christmas card he enclosed was that of Altdorfer’s Holy Family in a Ruined House, an image in sharp contrast to the traditional sentimentality of the season.