The Prisoner Who Found Light in Tegel

In April 1943, the Gestapo arrested Dietrich Bonhoeffer and locked him in Berlin's Tegel military prison. The cell was narrow, the blanket filthy, the guards hostile. For eighteen months, the German pastor lived under the shadow of execution, separated from his fiancée, his family, and the congregation he loved.

Yet those who visited Bonhoeffer in prison reported something astonishing. He was the one who comforted them. Fellow prisoners sought him out for counsel. Guards confided in him. He wrote letters brimming not with despair but with theological depth and quiet joy. In one letter to his friend Eberhard Bethge, he wrote that he had come to experience God not at the boundaries of life but at its center — not in weakness only, but in strength.

Bonhoeffer had learned what the psalmist knew: "The Lord is my light and my salvation — whom shall I fear?" When every external source of security had been stripped away — freedom, comfort, reputation, even hope of survival — he discovered that the One thing he had sought remained. The presence of God did not depend on the prison walls opening. It filled them.

Psalm 27 is not a prayer for people whose lives are going well. It is the song of someone surrounded, abandoned, and afraid — who looks up and finds that the light was never extinguished. Bonhoeffer sang that song from a prison cell. We can sing it from wherever we stand today.