Stages on the Way to Freedom
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Self-Discipline
If you set out to seek freedom, you must learn before all things
Mastery over sense and soul, lest your wayward desirings,
Lest your undisciplined members lead you now this way, now that
way.
Chaste be your mind and your body, and subject to you and obedient,
Serving solely to seek their appointed goal and objective.
None learns the secret of freedom save only by way of control
Action
Do and dare what is right, no swayed by the whim of the moment.
Bravely take hold of the real, not dallying now with what might be.
Not in the flight of ideas but only in action in freedom.
Make up your mind and come out into the tempest of living.
God’s command is enough and your faith in him to sustain you.
Then at last freedom will welcome your spirit amid great rejoicing.
Suffering
See what a transformation! These hands so active and powerful
Now are tied, and alone and fainting, you see where your work ends.
Yet you are confident still, and gladly commit what is rightful
Into a stronger hand, and say that you are contented.
You were free for a moment of bliss, then you yielded your freedom
Into the hand of God, that he might perfect it in glory.
Death
Come now, highest of feasts on the
way to freedom eternal,
Death, strike off the fetters,
break down the walls that oppress us,
Our bedazzled soul and our
ephemeral body,
That we may see at last the sight
which here was not vouchsafed us.
Freedom, we sought you long in
discipline, action, suffering.
Now as we die we see you and know
you at last, face to face.
I discovered this poem in college and it has provided a great deal of inspiration and encouragement since. (Okay, so his suffering was in prisons and concentration camps by a brutal Nazi regime but, suffering is suffering and we all have our own need to "yield our freedom into a stronger hand".) I hope it speaks to something in your experience as well.
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