Remembering Dorothee Soelle

Catholic New Times, April 11, 2004 by Maureen Bauer-McGahey

From the mystics, I have learned that our love for God is as important as God's love for us ... To embrace God means to embrace a process--a process of love, a process of going forward, a process of infusing everything. Only with our partnership, can that love become incarnate in our world today.--Dorothee Soelle

A year has passed since the death in Europe of pioneering Lutheran theologian Dorothee Soelle. Spring was her favourite time of year: she loved seeing life burst forth.

While I knew Dorothee Soelle only through her powerful writings, I mourn her loss as one feels after the loss of a close friend.

She expressed the hopes and dreams of women for justice towards the earth and its peoples. She took opportunities to sing whenever she could to celebrate the rhythm of life.

Soelle was a model of faith-inspired activism, a widely read writer on faith and action. While she held no official church office, the influence of her work spread widely to "the church outside the church."

Her family had been supporters of the Barmen Declaration in the late 1930s, which led some Germans to try to assassinate Hitler. She was terrified of the Concordat that Hitler signed with the Catholic Church in the south and the Lutherans in the north.

Soelle wrote that she had come to her faith independently, after a personal search for meaning in a nation heavily burdened by its past. "My faith comes from the German catastrophe, Auschwitz," she wrote. She saw the importance of collective remembering as key to liberation and the future.

Soelle was a religious thinker for whom Christian life, political commitment and theological study were inseparable. She was a vocal pacifist and demonstrated against the Vietnam War, the Cold War arms race and the exploitation of the earth and the developing world.

Her travels to Nicaragua and El Salvador led to her embrace of liberation theology, solidarity with the poor and the sanctuary movement. Activism was necessary.

Born in Cologne in 1929, she studied classical languages, philosophy and theology and became a professor at Union Theological Seminary in New York from 1975-1987. Eventually, she began to write on prayer and poetry.

She was not born into the church, and this distance, she wrote, "freed me to distinguish between the church from above and the church from below." When she understood what it meant to be a woman in a sexist society, she rejected patriarchy. "If God is only 'he,' then God is thought of as too small." She believed that any power unwilling to share itself with others was not working for good or wholeness. Quoting mystic Meister Eckhart, she wrote, "Therefore I ask God, to rid me of God."

We are not lacking in pictures of God, but in experiences of God. Exclusively masculine, authoritative language has locked God up so that we are incapable of identifying God with the secret of life. "In reality, God is present and recognizable at many places in our lives, but we lack the language to name God. We have been trained to trivialize everyday life instead of sanctifying it."

Feminist theology, for Soelle, is a "cry for bread" that feeds and connects faith to life experience. She was influenced by the Confessing Church of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his insistence on the "radical this-worldliness" of Christianity. She saw the powerlessness of God in the world and pursued Bonhoeffer's idea of our participation in that powerlessness.

This is the key to understanding Soelle's passion for peace activism and her other justice work.

During the Nazi period in Germany, everything depended on the behaviour of people working for the victims. Today, the preservation of the earth depends on our efforts to work for the earth. "God was small and weak. God was powerless because God had no friends. Where God has no friends, God's Spirit has no place to live, for God cannot act through us."

In The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance, Soelle develops the idea that resistance is deeply rooted in mysticism. Faith must be linked to political reality. Mystical experience is a profound experience of amazement and awe that happens to all of us. Even ordinary people experience mystical oneness, breakthrough and wholeness by their human experience of nature, eroticism, suffering, communion and joy. She illustrates her ideas through the lives of C.S. Lewis, Martin Buber, Thomas Muntzer, Thomas Merton and Dorothy Day.

Soelle sees globalization and individualism as having built the prison that most of humanity has chosen as home. The way to free ourselves is through ego-lessness, property-lessness and nonviolence. She provides mentors such as Leo Tolstoy and Dag Hammarskjold who freed themselves of these chains of modern life. Voluntary simplicity was lived by St. Francis of As sisi, John Woolman and Dorothy Day. Such people inspire us with their resistance to a definition of human success in terms of possessing material things. Others, like Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., challenge us to practise non-violence as a means of saluting the unity of all living things.