Etty Hillesum was Jewish and she lived in Amsterdam. In March,1941, at the age of 27, she began a journal. Within its pages she reveals an inner life astonishing in its depth. She was a woman of intense passions, discerning intellect and a capacity to feel that sometimes threatened to overwhelm her. She would record in the morning a sense of drowning despair and later in the same day return to pour out feelings of radiance and peace. Etty Hillesum had a very strong drive to find meaning and purpose in life, which grew even stronger as the terror of the Holocaust drew near. She sensed that she needed some discipline to help her tolerate her feelings. She decided that she would begin every day by meditating, by turning inward for half an hour to listen. She knew that it would be difficult for her but she was motivated by her intention: "to turn [her] innermost being into a vast empty plain, with none of that treacherous undergrowth to impede the view."[1]
Her early journal reads as a chronicle of her efforts to center her life. A few months after she penned her intention to meditate daily, she observed that she was often writing about pains in her body. With radical honesty she confronted herself. "Don't delude yourself Etty," she wrote, "it's not really your body, it's your ravaged little soul that afflicts you. I still lack a basic tune; a steady undercurrent; the inner source that feeds me keeps drying up."[2]
It is painfully understandable why. She watched her world shrink as yellow stars were issued, streets and shops were closed to Jews and friends received orders to report to work camps. But despite that horror, her wisdom and presence grew ever more luminous. She refused to believe that people are evil but rather insisted that evil can live in people, just like God. Everything depends on how we respond to that which we find in ourselves. Where we find rottenness, we must root it out. And where we find God we must protect God. "And that is all that we can manage these days," she wrote, "and also all that really matters: that we safeguard that little piece of You, God, in ourselves. And perhaps in others as well. Alas, there doesn't seem to be much You Yourself can do about our circumstances, about our lives. . . You cannot help us, but we must help You and defend Your dwelling place inside us to the last."[3]
As her world constricted, her devotional life and her faith grew stronger. So too did her ability to accept all that she found in each moment of Life. This isn't to say all her demons disappeared, but even in her moments of despair, she insisted that life is meaningful. "I often see visions of poisonous green smoke; I am with the hungry, with the ill-treated and the dying, every day," she wrote, "but I am also with the jasmine and with that piece of sky beyond my window; there is room for everything in a single life. For belief in God and for a miserable end . . .What I feel is not hopelessness, far from it. I have lived this life a thousand times over already, and I have died a thousand deaths. Am I blase then? No. It is a question of living life from minute to minute and taking suffering into the bargain."[4]
Her convictions seem an echo across the ages. The Buddha taught that we must release our hold on the past and the future and dwell in this moment. Only by "looking deeply at life as it is in the very here and now" might we dwell in "stability and freedom."[5] I have been simultaneously drawn to and repelled from this cornerstone of Buddhist teaching. Of course it makes sense that we can live only in this moment. But my thoughts and feelings about the past and future are sometimes so strong they seem like they are this moment. Plus, when I really surrender to them my obsessive thoughts can even seem productive, like a pathway to insight!
As I investigate this puzzle it seems to me that it hints at paradoxical truths. We have unbounded freedom and our freedom has limits. I think our human challenge is to claim and use well that freedom which is a gift of our birthright without attempting to control that which lies forever and rightfully outside our reach. In my life this struggle manifests in anxiety. Its intensity ebbs and flows, but it's usually with me, even just a little. I have discovered that my anxiety is largely existential and is driven by worry about the future. I worry that I will die before I am sated with life. I worry that I will die before I have a chance to partner and raise children. My anxiety serves me by compelling me to carefully reflect on my choices - I regularly ask myself if a particular decision will contribute to my sense that my life is meaningful. But I also know that my anxiety can actually undermine my ability to live into the future for which I long. Sometimes it gives me bad information and tells me that I just need to work harder, do better, be better and then I can be satisfied with my life, then I will have lived a life worth living. I know it doesn't work like that.
Of this Etty Hillesum has reminded me. When she realized that the day when she would be taken into custody was fast upon her she wrote, "I know I am going to have to leave here very soon, and I haven't the faintest idea where I'll end up or how I shall earn my living, but I know that something will turn up. If [I] burden the future with [my] worries, it cannot grow organically. I am filled with confidence, not that I shall succeed in worldly things, but that even when things go badly for me I shall still find life good and worth living."[6] Thich Nhat Hahn, in his commentary on the Sutra puts it a little differently. "The best way of preparing for the future," he writes, "is to take good care of the present . . .then the future will be made up of the present."[7] This makes sense to me. If I give in to my anxiety about the future I will walk into anxiety. If I surrender my anxiety and open my heart to the fullness and wonder of Life, I will walk into fullness and wonder.
I think this challenge, this struggle to embrace and claim our freedom while acknowledging its limits is both individual and collective. Etty Hillesum and countless others imprisoned and violated have demonstrated that our human freedom to think, feel and believe as we are moved is virtually boundless. But our freedom to act and exercise influence has clear limits outlined by both the religious and secular traditions we have inherited.
On this anniversary of our nation's independence, it is fitting to reflect on our national practice of freedom. This country was built upon its proclamation. It is enshrined in our founding documents and protected by the government created in our name. I know that I am indebted to those who articulated the freedom I so dearly cherish. I am indebted to and aspire to count myself among those who challenge our government to make good on its promises. I am indebted to countless men and women who have fought to extend and defend those promises. But as a grateful citizen I feel compelled to suggest that we as a nation are forgetting who and whose we are, we are violating the limits of our own freedom.
I do not believe we were free to launch a war upon Iraq. I do not believe we are free to continue consuming the world's finite resources at a rate for exceeding most of the rest of the globe's inhabitants. Nor, do I believe, are we free to continue polluting the lands, waters and skies in order to maintain our standard of living. You may well disagree with my concerns, but our ability to live into our nation's promise depends upon our willingness to engage in discourse and dissent. "True patriotism," writes Anita Doyle, Director of the Jeanette Rankin Peace Center, "is not blind patriotism, as true love is not blind love. We have not only rights but also responsibilities as citizens in a democracy. Those responsibilities include remaining informed about what is being done in our name, and speaking truth to power when conscience demands."[8] I think those responsibilities include paying attention to what we do and don't say in the name of freedom.
These days those who express dissent or critique our government's policies run the risk of being maligned as unpatriotic. The author Barbara Kingsolver has received her share of hate mail accusing her of treason and sedition. It is not contempt, she writes, but "love for [her] homeland that obliges [her] to participate in the discussion of preserving its integrity." The real cause for concern, she continues, are not those who dissent but those who opt out, who give in to cynicism, who "won't or can't fathom the honest depths of love and grief."[9]
I can understand the temptation. Showing up for our lives can be, at moments, devastatingly painful. Sometimes it is impossible to unravel the "immensity and fear" of which Rilke speaks. I had to fight with myself not to cover my eyes during segments of Michael Moore's film Fahrenheit 9/11. In it he depicts footage of the war in Iraq that much of our media determined it best we not see. In doing so he reveals the inhumanity of war without glossing over the tender humanity of those whose lives are bent and broken in the battles. The beautiful and the terrible are often bound up together. There are times when we fall short of our ideals and disappoint each other and ourselves. But let us not seek to escape our sorrows. The sages teach us rather to let them in and encounter them with as much gentleness and compassion as we can find. Etty Hillesum calls it having the courage "to feel empty and discouraged."[10] And it must be followed by having the courage to release. "I do not cling [to such moments of agony]," she writes. "They pass through me, like life itself, as a broad eternal stream, they become part of that stream, and life continues."[11]
I don't claim to have this down. I have discovered, though, like the Buddhist practitioners of the sutras and like Etty Hillesum in her meditation practice, that we can find help in prayer. Prayer is the practice of paying attention. It is the practice of surrendering to that which called us into being and affirming our interdependence with that source and with all of life. It is the practice of remembering who and whose we are. It is the practice of expressing gratitude and nourishing our hope and faith. As a novice in the practice I still struggle to show up to prayer. But my experience tells me that it has the power to break my heart open ever wider all the time. Prayer can awaken me to fullness and presence and help me tolerate the depth of my feelings. Etty Hillesum's journals and letters from the Westerbork work camp are inspiring testimony to this power.
For support and guidance she often turned to the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. In fact, a volume of his was one of the few things she took with her to the work camp. Hillesum wanted to become the poet of the camp, the "the one who experiences life there, even there, and is able to sing about it."[12] Rilke sang of the paradox: each night you are left "your life, with its immensity and fear, so that, now bounded, now immeasurable, it is alternately stone in you and star."[13]
Hillesum found her song in the labor camp as she watched, week after week, her compatriots sealed into freight trains bound for concentration camps in Poland: "The sky is full of birds," she wrote, "the purple lupins stand up so regally and peacefully, two little old women have sat down on the box for a chat, the sun is shining on my face - and right before our eyes, mass murder." Hillesum died on November 30, 1943 in Auschwitz. The last bit of writing that survives from her is a postcard she flung from the train. The farmers who found it mailed it to her friends. "In the end," she wrote, "the departure came without warning . . . We left the camp singing."[14]
I don't know how you grow a soul that brilliant. But I think it begins when we practice showing up for our lives and paying attention, to all they bring, even the things we'd really rather not see. I think it is nourished by daily spiritual practice. I think it is sustained by communion with the source of life itself. I think it radiates out when we dare to act in ways both small and large. I think it shines when we refuse to succumb to cynicism and despair, when we insist that life is a gift, not just mine and yours, but all of ours, as wide as we can imagine and then further still. I think it is reflected in the words of the poets who faithfully remind us:
"Don't say, don't say there is no water. That fountain is there among its scalloped green and gray stones, it is still there with its quiet song and strange power to spring in us, up and out through the rock."[15] For all of us, all of our days, may it be so, and Amen.
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