My friend is reading “Bonhoeffer” by Eric Metaxas and sent me this quote from Deitrich Bonhoeffer wrote after attending a church in Paris:
“On Sunday afternoon I attended an extremely festive high mass in Sacre Coeur. The people in the church were almost exclusively from Montmartre; prostitutes and their men went to mass, submitted to all the ceremonies; it was an enormously impressive picture, and once again one could see quite clearly how close, precisely through their fate and guilt, these most heavily burdened people are to the heart of the gospel. I have long thought that the Tauentzienstrasse [Berlin’s red-light district] would be an extremely fruitful field for church work. It’s much easier for me to imagine a praying murderer, a praying prostitute, than a vain person praying. Nothing is so at odds with prayer as vanity.”
I’ll be honest, I’m not one to cry, but reading that almost made me cry. If you could see what’s happening here at Verve, and knew our dreams for the future, you’d understand why.
