I just finished reading a great book – The Other Face of Love – by Miriam Pollard, a Cistercian nun. This
is actually a sort of spiritual commentary on the “confessions” of Albert Speer
(1905-1981), official architect of Adolf Hitler, hence the subtitle of Pollard’s
book, Dialogues with the Prison
Experience of Albert Speer. Speer was for a part of World War II, Minister
of Armaments and War Production for the Third Reich.
He accepted moral responsibility at the Nuremberg
trials and was sentenced to 20 years in prison for his role in the
Nazi regime, principally for the use of forced labor. He served
his full sentence, most of it at Spandau
Prison in West Berlin.
In Pollard’s spiritual hermeneutics the prison experience of
Speer which started in 1945 was not simply a period of accepting punishment for the crime committed. Spiritually, it was
sheer serendipity: a time of redemption, re-creation, re-generation. Speer
wrote on January 28, 1962, three years before his liberation: “I am writing
this as a profession of faith: I believe in a divine providence; I also believe
in God’s wisdom and goodness; I trust in his ways, even though they may seem
matters of chance. It is not the mighty of the earth who determine the course
of history. They think they are the movers, and they are moved.”
I think Pollard’s insight in reading and revealing God’s mysterious
workings in the life of Speer is synthesized in these lines: “The best way of
knowing our own beauty is by knowing God, whose image we are, and knowing him
as mercy. This is the only way there: through knowledge of our own fragility
and guilt to the acknowledgement of our own true majesty. If we try to
short-circuit the awful part, the banality of our unresponsiveness, if we try
to shove it and go directly to the pure center of our identity in Christ, we don’t
make it. We’ve got this shadow in back of us, or moving in from the side and
threatening to smother the glory at any minute. We can’t go to the beauty of
ourselves without heading directly into that cloud (p. 63).
This is a perfect meditation book also during the Easter
season. Find out for yourselves why.
