Dorothee Sölle would have been 80 today

The German radical and feminist theologian Dorothee Sölle would have been 80 today. I love her feistiness, her thinking and poetry. She also wrote several books on political and engaged spirituality, as did her husband Fulbert Steffensky. I didn't know that they were married when I read back to back Sölle's Die Hinreise and Steffensky's Feier des Lebens in the extraordinary year I spent in East Germany in 1989-90. Both books were formative for me at that time in my 20s. I began to understand that a true spirituality calls on poetic, artistic and cultural references as well as biblical and political ones.

Even today as I read through the titles of some of her meditational writings I am deeply moved, just the titles speak volumes to me of the possibilities of life and faith: revolutionary patience, learning to fly, do play with bread and roses, crazy for light, civil and disobedient, praise without lies, give me the gift of the tears of God and Learning to wish more precisely (»die revolutionäre geduld«, »fliegen lernen«, »spiel doch von brot und rosen«, »verrückt nach licht«, »zivil und ungehorsam«, »loben ohne lügen«, »Gib mir die gabe der tränen gott« und »Genauer wünschen lernen« aus »fliegen lernen«).

I shall remember her again on all Souls day.