Muggeridge on prayer

Malcom Muggeridge writes: He (Dietrich Boenhoffer) is then taken to Flossenburg where he is given the death sentence. After it has been delivered the prison doctor catches a glimpse of him through the half opened door of one of the huts, still in his prison clothes, and kneeling in fervent prayer to the Lord his God. 'The devotion and evident conviction of being heard that I saw in the prayer of this intensely captivating man', the doctor was subsequently to recall, 'moved me to the depths.' The next morning, naked under the scaffold in the sweet spring woods, Bonhoeffer kneels for the last time to pray. Five minutes later his life is ended.

As this happens, five years of the monstrous buffooneries of war are drawing to a close. Hitler's Reich that was to last for a thousand years will soon reach its ignominious and ruinous end; the liberators are moving in from the east and the west with bombs and tanks and guns and cigarettes and Spam; the air is thick with rhetoric and cant. Looking back now after twentyfour years, I ask myself where in that murky darkness any light shines. Not among the Nazis, certainly, nor among the liberators, who, as we know, were to liberate no one and nothing. The rhetoric and the cant have mercifully been forgotten; what lives on is the memory of a man who died, not on behalf of freedom or democracy or a steadily rising Gross National Product, not for any of the twentieth century's counterfeit hopes and desires, but on behalf of a cross on which another man died two thousand years before. As on that previous occasion, on Golgotha, so amidst the rubble and desolation of 'liberated' Europe, the only victor is the man who died, as the only hope for the future lies in his triumph over death. There never can be any other victory or any other hope. This is what I am trying, so inadequately, to say.