‘An interrupted Life’ – Jewish Memorial named after Etty Hillesum’s Diary. It’s in Deventer in The Netherlands
One of the powerful effects of Etty Hillesum’s dialogue with God is that her connectedness to others and to creation seemed to develop in independence from all the outer circumstances and breakdown in society: a society that she remained firmly part of.
‘… a hint of eternity steals through my smallest daily activities and perceptions. I am not alone in my tiredness or sickness or fears, but at one with millions of others from many centuries, and it is all part of life, and yet life is beautiful and meaningful too. It is meaningful even in its meaninglessness, provided one makes room in one’s life for everything, and accepts life as one indivisible whole, for then one becomes whole in oneself.’
Through her writing and dialogue with God, Hillesum was determined to spiritually survive the dehumanisation and degradation of the Nazi genocide. She attunes herself to the flow of life choosing to bear witness to beauty amid the senseless brutality.
The phrase ‘flow of Presence’ implies an orienting force in the soul towards what is good and truthful about authentic human existence. Fully aware of what was happening in the concentration camps, Hillesum responded with deep insight and consciousness that seems to have held the horrors in some sort of balance with her insistence that, despite the apparent reality, life is good. Practicing meditation, Hillesum, with divine help, reorientated herself to a life committed to helping those along side her. Her interior meditation of the Presence – God – led to the appreciation of life and to living in spiritual opposition to the Nazi regime.
‘Against every new outrage and every fresh horror, we shall put up one more piece of love and goodness, drawing strength from within ourselves.’
Aware of how easily she could succumb to the sadness and disorder, Hillesum persisted in trying to recapture reality through the flow of presence:
‘When I simply “live for the day”, things start to go wrong with me sooner or later. At such times the meaning of life escapes me. I must not lose touch with the “undercurrent.” The highest and best I can hope for is that of “being at rest in oneself”. There is nothing else. If I go in search of it outside of myself, let go of myself, of my soul as it were, then I am lost, unhappy no longer in a position to grasp the meaning of things.’
She writes of the need for balance, and how when in the midst of chaos, there appears within her a countermovement that re-established her equilibrium – writing of ‘opening her inner floodgates’ and attuning herself to the flow of Presence.
‘Yes, we carry everything within us, God and Heaven and Hell and Earth and Life and Death and all of history. The externals are simply so many props; everything we need is within us. And we have to take everything that comes …’
Towards the end she wrote about being alone with God:
‘God and I have been left behind alone, and there is no one else left to help me … it doesn’t make me feel impoverished at all, rather quite rich and peaceful: God and I have been left behind all alone’.