At this time in European history, which is our own time in which we live now, we witness once more a huge resurgence in refugee migration. People are on the move, fleeing their homelands and the life which they led to seek in desperation a new life, away from the despairing uncertainties and dangers which they had come to experience on a daily basis. As Etty Hillesum tells us from her own time and circumstances of the previous century, such a fundamental uprooting of one’s very being is for so many not a matter of choice. The choice, however, is still there, in the form in which each individual chooses to cope with such change. Etty made the choice not to see herself as a victim of circumstances. But she went further. She chose to embrace those circumstances, to discover in them the opportunities for personal transformation which they also offered to her. Let Etty tell her own story:
“People often get worked up when I say it doesn't really matter whether I go or somebody else does, the main thing is that so many thousands have to go. It is not as if I want to fall into the arms of destruction with a resigned smile - far from it. I am only bowing to the inevitable, and even as I do so I am sustained by the certain knowledge that ultimately they cannot rob us of anything that matters. I certainly do not want to go out of some sort of masochism, to be torn away from what has been the basis of my existence these last few years. but I don't think I would feel happy if I were exempted from what so many others have to suffer. They keep telling me that someone like me has a duty to go into hiding because I have so many things to do in life, so much to give. But I know that whatever I may have to give to others, I can give it no matter where I am, here in the circle of my friends or over there, in a concentration camp. And it is sheer arrogance to think oneself too good to share the fate of the masses. And if God Himself should feel that I still have a great deal to do, well then, I shall do it after I have suffered what all the others have to suffer. And whether or not I am a valuable human being will become clear only from my behaviour in more arduous circumstances. And if I should not survive, how I die will show me who I really am.”
Through her time with the palmist and spiritual teacher Julius Spier (see link below) and her writing of her diary, Etty had come to use and understand her gifts – both with people and with words. In the end, far from trying to get away from the Westerbork concentration camp, this led to her actually to wanting to go there – wanting to be at the forefront of life where people were hurting and where she could use her skills to relieve some of that pain – and tell the story of their fate. It was a twofold vocation fundamental to her identity, and in defining that identity she clearly saw, not only who she was, but who she could become.
Please see my post: The Piece of Heaven outside my Window
The painting In the Whirlwind by Jacek Malczewski symbolizes the plight of refugees (Polish, in this case) who flee their homeland, perhaps never to return.
Many of the posts which you may read here are about mystics. We tend for convenience to label these mystics according to when they lived. There are the mystics of the Ancient World, such as Pythagoras, and Pythia, the Delphic oracle, who was believed to be possessed by the god Apollo when she uttered her mysterious pronouncements. There are the mystics of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Hildegard von Bingen, Hadewijch of Brabant, Teresa of Avila and Julian of Norwich are four such mystics whose remarkable visions and insights seem at times to penetrate to the very heart of greater mysteries. And there are the contemporary mystics of our own times, such as Kahlil Gibran, Etty Hillesum and Rabindranath Tagore, whose writings offer profound insights into the human condition, and so touch us all.
We can name all these names, and we collectively call them mystics, but is it possible to find some defining thread of meaning and experience that would allow us actually to say what a mystic is? Perhaps if this were possible, it might bring us a step closer , not just to understanding them, but to experience in some way the things which they experienced, to share with them these remarkable insights which go deeper than our own everyday experiences.
One thing is very clear, even from this brief list of names: mysticism is gender-blind. Both men and women were and are regarded as mystics of equal stature. Even in a church whose hierarchy was and is essentially male-dominated, the mystics of the Middle Ages often were women who moved in a man’s world, and still made their mark on history. I think of Hildegard, who in contemporary accounts was described as being small and slight of stature, but who nevertheless negotiated her way through a world dominated by the bishops who were her superiors to gain respect and recognition for her visions and insights.
But if gender is irrelevant to mystic experience, what qualities tie such mystics together? What line binds Pythia to Hildegard, so remote in time from each other? What links the Lebanese Gibran to the Bengali Tagore, who might have been separated by their different cultures, but who nevertheless were each other’s contemporaries? We might say the obvious, and name their devotion to their beliefs. All mystics were on a quest, and this quest took the form of a need, even a passionate desire, to have a contact in some form with a deeper aspect of their faith. For a mystic, doctrine was not enough. A mystic desired something more, something beyond the borders that others had erected around their particular faith. A mystic was – and is – seeking a direct experience of the Divine.
Such a path cannot be trodden by careful route planning, by wondering what we are going to do next, by thinking carefully about the thoughts that might or might not guide us. Such thoughts are only distractions. A mystic does not walk a path. A mystic is the path, and total trust and surrender are the companions along the way. Every movement is a movement made in love, and every gesture is a gesture of love, of love for the inexpressible Divine.
When Julian of Norwich said that ‘all shall be well’, I do not believe that it was an expression of hope. I feel that she made the statement out of total certainty. She knew with every fibre of her being that it would be so, even though the end of her journey was not yet in sight.
Photo: sculpture Teresa of Avila by Fr. Lawrence Lew
This is my second post about Etty Hillesum, the young Jewish woman who kept a diary during the second World War. Her writing – and her whole being – made an indelible impression on myself and many others.
Her diaries were no war-journals: rather, they express a love and compassion above and beyond the most difficult circumstances in which she found herself. Her appeal to live to the full, not because of circumstances, but rather in spite of them, and to seek for the love within, still resonates for us today.
The link to my first post, "The Piece Of Heaven Outside My Window" , an introduction to Etty and her circumstances, can be found here and on my sidebar.
In one of Etty Hillesum's letters from Westerbork camp she writes: "As long as we make sure that, despite everything, God will nevertheless be safe with us."
What a remarkable thing to say - God will nevertheless be safe with us. How to understand this? And was this a farewell letter? Was she preparing herself for a definitive farewell when she wrote this to one of her friends in Amsterdam? She asks for a warm dress, and she speaks about well-filled backpacks. At the same time she prepares bottles with milk and tomato juice for the babies who will make the journey to their unknown fate. And here we read: "One mother says, almost apologizing: 'My baby seldom cries, but now, it is almost as if he feels what is going to happen." The cries of the infants swell, filling all the dark corners and cracks of the eerily-lit blockhouse. It is hardly endurable. And a name wells up in me: Herod."
These heartbreaking and dramatic moments remind her of the infanticide in Bethlehem, and of the words of Jeremiah: "In Rama a voice was heard, a loud wailing and lamentation. Rachel cried for her children and did not wish to be consoled."
She writes, in the midst of thousands of desperate companions in adversity, letters which reveal her own grief about the suffering of others, and of what people do to each other. She herself searches for a peaceful little haven, for some silence. Exhausted because of her work in the camp infirmary, or, during long nights, of helping those who are destined to go on the transport the following day, she tries to find some solace in her writings, sitting on whatever is available to sit on: a wheelbarrow, an iron bed, an upturned bucket - anything.
On one of those nights she writes: "I know that those who hate do have their profound reasons for this hatred. But why would we keep on choosing the easiest and cheapest option? When my experience here is how every atom of hate, added to the world, makes this world more barren than it already is. And I therefore mean, maybe childish but persistent, that this earth would only become more inhabitable through the love, of which the Jew Paul writes in his first letter to the city of Corinth."
Not only in her relatively 'safe' room in her house looking out over the square in Amsterdam, even in the hell of Westerbork, she maintains her stance "..to be without hatred or bitterness.." - even towards her persecutors and executioners.
It is love that keeps her going. She talks with God, calling it 'one long dialogue'; she rests in God, tears of gratefulness are her prayer, lying in her small triple bunk. In one of her letters we read: "When, after a long and difficult process, one permeates into these primal sources in oneself, and which I now wish to call God, then we renew ourselves through this source... I want to bend down on my knees, but I will ensure that my strength will not explode in boundlessness."
And in her diary she continues: “I can't stop writing, not even here in Westerbork; I would want to search for that one redeeming word, that one redeeming formula...
“Why did you not make me a poet, God?
“You made me a poet, and I shall patiently wait for the words to grow inside of me, words that can testify to all that I feel which I need to testify about, my God: that it is good and beautiful to live in your world, despite what we people do to one another."
Still at home in Amsterdam, July 1942, she writes: "I will promise you one thing, God, a small thing it is: I will not hang my worries for the near future as weights on today; but that takes practice. Every day now is enough in itself. I shall help you, God, that you do not give up on me, but I cannot guarantee anything. But this becomes more clear to me: that you cannot help us, but that we need to help you, and by doing so, we help ourselves. And this is the only thing that we can save and also the only thing that matters: a piece of you in us, God. And maybe we can also work together to reveal you in the wounded hearts of others."
In the care of Etty, God indeed was safe.
I have hesitated a long time before deciding to write about the woman who has been an inspiration to me for over three decades: a woman who found God by looking deep into herself. This statement could so easily sound like an evangelical calling, but such an association could not be further from the essence of the person to whom I am referring. For whatever she might have discovered, it was not religion in the context that most of us would recognise it. For her, religion merely meant one's own personal relationship with God, and seeing that God in everyone. The woman was Etty Hillesum, a young Dutch Jewish woman who, in the heart of the Holocaust, manifested a world of beauty and reverence.
'Become who you are', was the lesson received by Etty Hillesum from her spiritual teacher, the palmist Julius Spier. And during the extreme conditions of the Second World War, that is what she strived to do. She remained true to herself, and through her example she has become a guiding light for many to this day. Her diary and letters bear witness to her spiritual awakening. She gradually learned to recognise a certainty in herself, a specific something that could never be taken away from her, a something that in a way made her invulnerable. In that part of her soul she recognised God.
The writing of her diary had a meditative effect upon her spirit. She ventured ever deeper into herself, eventually to discover God in the depths of her soul: "..and here is perhaps the most perfect expression of my life's feeling: I rest in myself. And that 'myself', that deepest and richest part of me in which I rest, I call 'God'."
On the day that Julius Spier died, on the very day that the Gestapo would come to take him away, Etty wrote: "You have allowed me to speak the name of God. You have been the intermediary between God and myself, and now you, my teacher, are gone, and with you my direct path to God. It is good that this happens, that is what I feel."
Etty believed that many people do not handle suffering in the way in which they perhaps need to. "People draw back from feeling suffering, and therefore become further entangled in fear and self-pity: suffering is not beneath human dignity. One can suffer either with or without dignity. What I mean is: most Westerners don't understand the art of suffering, and in its place put a thousand fears. This is no longer living, what most people do: fear, resignation, bitterness, hate, despair. My God, it is all so easily understood. But when this life is taken from them, then not so much is taken away from them? One accepts death as a part of life, including the worst form of death. And do we not live a whole life each day, and does it really make a difference if we live one day shorter or longer? I am with the hungry, with the mistreated, with the dying, every day, but I am also with the jasmin and with the piece of heaven outside my window. There is a place for everything in life. For a belief in God and for a terrible destruction."
Westerbork
The further the diary progresses, the more Etty's life is coloured by the resolution to place herself in the service of others. During the course of the diary she prepares herself more and more to go to the Westerbork concentration camp when her summons arrives, rather than choosing to go into hiding. In the first instance she did not seek to evade what she considered to be her fate and the collective fate of her people; secondly she wanted to go with the others to be a support for them. The last words in her diary underscore this: "One would wish to be a bandage on many wounds."
Etty Hillesum wrote her diary during a time of a great explosion of hatred and aggression, and in just such a time, as her only weapon, she chose love: "All catastrophes emanate from ourselves. In our inner selves we must free ourselves from everything, from every immutable possibility. From every cliché, from every tie that binds, we must have the courage to let everything go, every norm and every foothold. We must dare to make the great spring into the cosmos, dare to risk, and then, then, is life so endlessly rich and overflowing, even in its deepest suffering."
Survivors from the Westerbork camp confirm that for many in those dark days Etty was both a support and a mental shield, a shining example through the light of her personality.
On 7 September 1943 Etty Hillesum, together with her entire family, was set upon a train to Poland. A Red Cross notice reported that she had died on 30 November of that same year in Auschwitz, age 29.
You are welcome to read my second post about Etty Hillesum's life and insights here:
God will Nevertheless be Safe with Us
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