Etty Hillesum: A Commitment to Life
Why is there a war?… Because I and my neighbor and everyone else do not have enough love. Yet we could fight war and all its excrescences by releasing, each day, the love that is shackled inside us, and giving it a chance to live.
—Etty Hillesum, An Interrupted Life
Father Richard has long drawn comfort and wisdom from the writings of the young Jewish woman Etty Hillesum (1914–1943), believing her to be someone whose contemplative practice and mystical experience led to greater compassion and action in a hurting world. Shortly before her departure for internment at the Westerbork transit camp, Hillesum wrote in her journal:
One thing is becoming increasingly clear to me: that You cannot help us, that we must help You to help ourselves. And that is all we can manage these days and also all that really matters: that we safeguard that little piece of You, God, in ourselves. And perhaps in others as well….You cannot help us, but we must help You and defend Your dwelling place inside us to the last. [1]
Hillesum fully accepted the brokenness of reality and chose to love ever more consciously:
Something has crystallised. I have looked our destruction, our miserable end which has already begun in so many small ways in our daily life, straight in the eye and accepted it into my life, and my love of life has not been diminished. I am not bitter or rebellious, or in any way discouraged. I continue to grow from day to day, even with the likelihood of destruction staring me in the face. I shall no longer flirt with words, for words merely evoke misunderstandings: I have come to terms with life.…
By “coming to terms with life” I mean: the reality of death has become a definite part of my life; my life has, so to speak, been extended by death, by my looking death in the eye and accepting it, by accepting destruction as part of life and no longer wasting my energies on fear of death or the refusal to acknowledge its inevitability. It sounds paradoxical: by excluding death from our life we cannot live a full life, and by admitting death into our life we enlarge and enrich [life]. [2]
Reflecting on Jesus’s words in Matthew 6:34 not to worry about tomorrow, Hillesum writes:
We have to fight them daily … those many small worries about the morrow, for they sap our energies.… The things that have to be done must be done, and for the rest we must not allow ourselves to become infested with thousands of petty fears and worries, so many motions of no confidence in God.… Ultimately, we have just one moral duty: to reclaim large areas of peace in ourselves, more and more peace, and to reflect it towards others. And the more peace there is in us, the more peace there will also be in our troubled world. [3]
References:
[1] An Interrupted Life: The Diaries of Etty Hillesum, 1941–1943, trans. Arno Pomerans (Pantheon Books, 1984), 151.
[2] Hillesum, Interrupted Life, 131–132.
[3] Hillesum, Interrupted Life, 185.
Image credit and inspiration: John Mccann, untitled (detail), 2017, photo, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. The path of contemplation is lined with the great exemplar trees—those who have gone before—practicing contemplation and action in unique and interconnected ways.
Story from Our Community:
I’ve come to realize that one of my jobs is to be happy. It’s not to get more things or rearrange people or circumstances to make me happy. It’s not about being who someone else wants me to be. It’s just to be present: to give space and room to each moment because now is really all I have. To breathe and to realize that the only essential thing in the room with me is oxygen, the one thing I cannot see, touch or hear. To realize that whatever I want changed about the world begins with me.
—Cindy G.
