I remember a conversation I had thirteen years ago in America with a young French priest. We simply asked ourselves the question of what we actually want to make of our lives. He said: I would like to become a saint (and I admit that he became one); it made a great impression on me at the time. Nevertheless, I opposed him and I said something like this: I would like to learn to believe. (…)
Later I realized, and I continue to realize to this day, that one learns to believe only in the midst of fully earthly life. When a person completely gives up the idea of making someone out of themselves – whether a saint or a converted sinner or a man of the church (the so-called clerical personality!), righteous or unrighteous, sick or healthy – and in this I see earthliness, that is, living through all assignments, problems, successes and failures, experiences and helplessness – then one completely surrenders into the arms of God, then one truly experiences not their own suffering, but God's suffering in the world, then one watches with Christ in Gethsemane, and I believe that in this is faith, in this is metanoia; thus one becomes a person, a Christian.
(Dietrich Bonhoeffer /1906–1945/, letter from Nazi prison, July 21, 1944;
quoted from the book Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Resistance and Surrender, Letters from Prison, Kalich 2023)
