3. The Day Alone

Bonhoeffer did not think that the individual’s life in the community should be entirely communal. He did not advocate an Orwellian deprivation of privacy or individual reflection. He recognised the need, both a human need and a need of service performed to God, for silence in an individual’s day; time alone, in “down-time”. This is foundational for the well-being of both individual and community:
Whoever cannot be alone should beware of community. Whoever cannot stand being in community should beware of being alone.¹

This duality was built into the pattern of the day in Finkenwalde. Green has pointed out the reverberation from one mode to the other:

The pattern of daily life for the college included worship, study of the Bible, meditation, prayer, lectures, sermon practice, meals and recreation. Some of these belonged to the ‘day together’, others to ‘the day alone’. Here we see the counterpoint of community and individual persons…²

This duality was designed to avoid the fantasies that so often accompany experiments in community living:
Community is not an escape route for those unable to cope with life on their own, or for those who desire to bury bad experiences of their past with help from the companionship of gracious people.³

Bonhoeffer condemns this, emphatically, as “wishful dreaming”:

Every human idealized image that is brought into the Christian community is a hindrance to genuine community and must be broken up so that genuine community can survive.⁴

Bonhoeffer condemns those who place a dream of Christian community before the reality, a reality which must be lived under the protection and judgement of the Word of God: “those who dream of this idealized community… [live] as if they have to create the Christian community, as if their visionary ideal binds the people together.”⁵ In actual fact, Christian community is God’s work and the task of his people is to be clear-eyed and realistic enough to recognise that fact and to get out of God’s way as he goes about building upon the foundation of every Christian community, Jesus Christ.

It is in this time spent alone, in personal prayer with the words of Scripture, that the Christian disciple discovers the hardest and most necessary task: intercessory prayer. And it is not just intercessory prayer for the community, or for those Christians with whom the individual agrees or likes. Bonhoeffer makes clear that prayer is for friends and enemies:

A Christian community either lives by the intercessory prayers of its members for one another, or the community will be destroyed. I can no longer condemn or hate other Christians for whom I pray, no matter how much trouble they cause me. In intercessory prayer the face that may have been strange and intolerable to me is transformed into the face of one for whom Christ died, the face of a pardoned sinner. That is a blessed discovery for the Christian who is beginning to offer intercessory prayer for others.⁶

1. Bonhoeffer, Life Together, p. 83. [↩]
2. Green, ‘Human sociality’ p, 125. [↩]
3. Kelly and Nelson, Cost of Moral Leadership, p. 165 [↩]
4. Bonhoeffer, Life Together, p. 36. [↩]
5. Bonhoeffer, Life Together, p. 36. [↩]
6. Bonhoeffer, Life Together, p. 90. [↩]