I’ve been a little unwell recently – I had my wisdom teeth out, and then immediately caught Covid. February has been a write-off. I’d been joking that 2024 is my year of taking the easy option – just living a quiet life, not trying to do anything too adventurous or difficult – just cruising for a little bit. It was meant to be a year of rest and low expectations, but then I got sick for a month and now I’m antsy. When you can’t focus, can’t really think or work – I don’t like doing less than what I feel I’m capable of. I hate it. I have stuff to do.

During my convalescence, I’ve been reading Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison. If you’re not familiar, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a German theologian in the 30s and 40s. During the Second World War he was involved in resistance against the Nazi regime, arrested in 1943, and then executed just before the end of the war. He spent two years in prison: much of his correspondence from that time has survived, including poems and prayers and even reflections on the occasion of his godson’s baptism. In a letter dated 23 January 1944, he writes to a friend:

“If we survive all this we shall be able to see quite clearly that all has turned out for the best. The idea that we could have avoided many of life’s difficulties if we had taken things more quietly is one that cannot be taken seriously for a moment. As I look back on your past I am sure that everything has turned out for the best, and so we have every reason to hope that what is happening at the present can only be for the best too. To renounce a full life and all its joys in order to escape pain is neither Christian nor human.”

‘It’s all for the best’ is quite a sentiment to issue out of a Nazi prison. Bonhoeffer isn’t aware he’s going to be executed at this point, but he’s been in prison for eight months. He’s been subject to frequent, heavy air raids: in one letter he talks about the windows in the prison getting blown out by the bombing, and in another he says they’re not allowed out for exercise, as the prison wall has been partially destroyed. And the guy he’s writing to, by the way, has just been sent to the front – he’s been conscripted into the German army, and he’s off to fight the Allies. All of this against the backdrop of the Holocaust and the industrial slaughter of the Second World War – things are, objectively, very bad.

We can at least understand the idea of risking your safety for a good cause. Bonhoeffer’s imprisonment is in no small part owing to his outspoken opposition to Hitler’s policies, as well as actual resistance work training ministers in secret illegal seminaries. It’s easier to understand his logic on that front: it’s worth doing the right thing, even if it gets you into trouble. It’s not Christian – not human, Bonhoeffer says – to renounce difficulty to escape pain. So much for my year of taking the easy way out.

What’s interesting with this passage, then, is how Bonhoeffer wraps these two ideas around each other. They’re paired twice. It’s all for the best, he says. We couldn’t have done things differently. And then again: I’m sure it’s turned out for the best. We were driven down this road by our faith, by our humanity. ‘For the best’, as a concept, is here less about the material circumstances and more about the relationship between the individual and God. Bonhoeffer can die in prison and be at peace with that if he’s ended up on that road for the right reasons. For him, the question is more – have I been obedient? Have I been faithful? Have I followed the call, regardless of where it led me? He hasn’t shirked his calling, and as a consequence he’s ended up in prison, but he’s able to look at that and feel that he’s done okay. His focus is on his relationship with the divine, with the calling on his life, rather than on the material facts of where that calling has led him.

That framing actually folds back into how this passage understands rest. The language is all about activity and suffering – you can’t take seriously the idea of living a quiet life and avoiding difficulty, Bonhoeffer says. It would compromise your soul, your human dignity. It doesn’t sound like there’s a lot of room for rest in there. It actually sounds very close to that bourgeois faith critiqued by Johann Sebastian Metz, where moral worth is inextricably linked to labour, and where rest is recast as laziness and moral turpitude. But that’s not what Bonhoeffer is saying. He heard his call, and followed it. For him, that call involved active resistance, as well as connection to the July 20 plot to assassinate Hitler. But not everyone gets that call. Different people are called to different things – to conflicting things, sometimes, or to things that work against each other in their material consequences. Sometimes people are called to rest. If that’s the call, Bonhoeffer says, you follow. And things will turn out okay.