It’s the 75th anniversary of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s execution. I’ve been slowly reading ‘Life Together’ the past few weeks (cc @life_isolation), and I don’t think any book has struck me as deeply with the awareness of what I’ve taken for granted. 1/

On the first page, he says no Christian should ever expect to be able to live among other Christians; whenever we are able to be together is a gift of God. So it is right that we should long for Christian community, even though the very mark of Christian life is scatteredness. 2/

This has been a weighty thing to think about now that our churches can’t meet in person. It’s deepened my lament for this loss and made me think a lot about what can still be good in online worship. 3/

Bonhoeffer writes that even a letter from a friend or a visit to a prisoner is a valid token of community, the mediation of Christ’s presence to one another. The grim foreshadowing of his own fate notwithstanding... 4/

this is a helpful reminder on Maundy Thursday that gathering is for the encouragement of others (Heb. 10:25).

When ‘Life Together’ was written, he’d been teaching at an illegal seminary, living with the other priests; he’d clearly reflected on the precarity of the situation. 5/

@lmfabrycky has a very worthwhile essay our today about the other ways Bonhoeffer was shaped by small, unheralded structures of family and friendship. Are we valuing the structures we’re now missing appropriately? 6/ https://www.cardus.ca/comment/article/the-witness-of-the-weak-centres/

Bonhoeffer basically acknowledges this formation, writing that God *only* works in these sorts of ordinary structures. Seeking heightened zeal through overspiritualized experiences is poison to the daily bread of everyday life. 7/

As he’d later write to his friend Eberhard Bethge, “God is beyond [that is, transcendent and active] in the midst of our life.”

Right now, life seems painfully not-together. But most of us aren’t in isolation of the sort he was in when he wrote that letter. 8/

“Only he who gives thanks for little things receives the big things.” (LT again) Perhaps these hoped-for “big things” are in fact no different than the smaller gifts, simply more greatly esteemed as prayerful acknowledgement reveals the true grace of God that gave them. 9/

Reading this in quasi-isolation has made this hope far more practical for me. Online worship, for instance leaves much to be desired, but if it redirects us to what we’ve taken for granted in our embodied gathering, I want to think there can be some good in it. 10/10