choose life

Elizabeth writes in her Little Blog of Résistance, that way of being in the world which Dorothee Soelle witnessed in a life lived as a religious activist whose Christianity meant being a peacemaker in face of war, being a witness of humanity in the face of exploitation and coercion, being a witness of courage in the face of the banality of the corporate culture. She defined resistance as the refusal to become "habituated to death, something that is one of the spiritual foundations of the culture of the First World.""

The culture of the First World that she refers to in "The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance" is identified in her other writings as the corporate culture that seeks to turn every person, every part of God's creation and every product of humanity into an object for exchange, something to be bought and sold. It is the dominant culture of "power over" that perpetuates the ancient systems of patriarchy, racism, and classism with a new violence, the violence that sees persons as the walking dead, as objects to be manipulated.

This week as we experience the murder of children and hear the crime excused by the leaders of the "free world" we see the face of the culture of death. When I read and re-read Soelle, I know that Christianity lives in hearts of faithful witnesses in spite of betrayal by so many leaders of the Church who have embraced death so that they could bask in light of the Powers and Principalities of this Era. But as the Rabbi observed, they have had their reward.

Dorothee Soelle died last spring. Here she is remembered.

Christian Century, May 17, 2003

Dorothee Soelle, a German Protestant theologian who died on April 27 at the age of 73, was a controversial figure in her own church but attracted a large following by combining Christian mysticism and radical political commitment.

The author of 30 books, Soelle never held a full professorship at a German university. Some attributed that to her support of left-wing political causes, such as opposition to the Vietnam War. But from 1975 to 1987 she spent six months each year as professor of systematic theology at Union Theological Seminary in New York.

"She was and remains the political conscience of Protestantism," said Maria Jepsen, the Lutheran bishop of Hamburg, where Soelle lived, reported the German Protestant news agency. A popular speaker in Europe, Soelle displayed radicalism and themes in her early works that prefigured later developments in feminist theology.

"She was genuinely and deeply rooted in the spiritual tradition of the Christian church and intensely engaged in the struggle for justice," said Konrad Raiser, general secretary of the World Council of Churches. Soelle developed a massive following during the post-World War II student revolt in West Germany. With Fulbert Steffensky, a Benedictine monk she later married, she founded in 1968 the Politisches Nachtgebet in Cologne--late-evening prayers linking spirituality and politics in churches that became full to overflowing.