People go to God always when poverty crushes them,
calling for help, asking for happiness and bread,
for salvation from illness, guilt, and death.
Christians, pagans, everyone in this,
everyone is the same.
People go to God when the hour of need crushes him,
he is poor, he is humiliated, has no shelter and bread,
he is surrounded by sin, he is crushed by the weakness of death.
Christians stand by God in his suffering.
To all people, God goes when poverty crushes,
giving bodies and souls abundantly his bread,
for Christians, pagans die by the cross death
and gives forgiveness to both.
(Dietrich Bonhoeffer /1906–1945/,
poem from Nazi prison, summer 1944; translated by Václav Renč;
quoted from the book Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Resistance and Surrender, Letters from Prison. Kalich 2023)
