This excerpt is also from the letter to Maria from Tegel Prison, August 20, 1943
Bonhoeffer had spent a post-doctoral year in New York at Union Theological Seminary in 1929-1930. During Christmas vacation he and a friend went to Cuba for Christmas.
. . .
The sun has always captured my imagination and reminded me often enough that humanity was taken from the earth and a human being is not made of air and thoughts.
That feeling has gone so far that once, when I went to Cuba for Christmas, to preach there—coming out of the ice of North America into the blooming tropical vegetation, I almost succumbed to the Sun Cult. I really almost didn’t know what I should preach. It was a real crisis. Something like that attacks me every summer when I begin to feel the sun.
The sun for me is not some great astronomical object, but something like a living power that I love and also fear. I find it so cowardly to hide behind rationalistic explanations as a way of overlooking this reality. Do you understand?
And so patience and joy and thankfulness and calm assurance and forgiveness must always vanquish all resistance anew. And really to recognize, and experience, and believe what it says in the Psalms,
“God is our Sun and Shield”
—that is a moment of greater grace and a wisdom you don’t find every day.
