‘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’.

Etty Hillesum

As right-wing populism and totalitarianism seem to retain their attraction for so many people, it is painful to reread the life and writings of the Dutch Jewish thinker Etty Hillesum. Etty Hillesum’s life has been described as living in hell, and yet through her searching for a solid ground of existence she found experiences of the ‘divine presence’ and this discovery she shares in her diaries and letters. It’s been said that Hillesum inspires us to see that glimpse of heaven in our personal experience, so enabling us to hold onto our humanity in any man-made hell and resist it through an attunement to ‘the flow of presence.’

Brought up in a dysfunctional family Hillesum sought healing through a form of therapy, and through reading and analysing her inner world, passing through personal chaos and distress, only to be engulfed by the Nazi genocide sweeping through Europe. She was imprisoned in the Westerbork concentration camp in the Netherlands, and from there sent to die in Auschwitz aged twenty-nine.

Her diary records a move from analysis to self-analysis to an inner conversation with God encountered as a transcendent Presence immanent in the very centre of her being. The God she experienced helped her cling to a faith in the goodness of humanity, saying no to violence, and opening her to beauty and hope.

‘I am ready for everything, for anywhere eon this earth, wherever God may send me, and I am ready to bear witness in any situation and unto death that life is beautiful and meaningful and it is not God’s fault that things are as they are at present, but our own. We have been granted every opportunity to enter every paradise, but we still have to learn to handle the opportunities … am filled with a faith in God that has gown so quickly inside me that it frightened me at first but has now become inseparable from me.’

Initially working with Julius Spier, who had trained with Carl Jung, (Spier then moved to an unorthodox therapy practice involving palmistry and wrestling!), and he and Etty Hillesum also became lovers. He encouraged Hillesum to keep a diary. It was by opening herself to her inner world that Hillesum encountered a presence that she symbolized as “God”. She wrote: ‘I hold a silly, naïve, or deadly serious dialogue with what is deepest inside me, which for the sake of convenience I call God.’

She also experienced God through his creation and his creatures. Echoing Jung and copying this passage three times, Hillesum wrote:

‘I know people for whom the encounter with the strange power within themselves was such an overwhelming experience that they called it “God”. So experienced, “God” too is a theory in the most literal sense, a way of looking at the world, an image which the limited human mind creates in order to express an unfathomable and ineffable experience. The experience alone is real, not to be disputed; but the image can be soiled or broken to pieces.’

Confronted by the helplessness around her as the genocide increased, Hillesum was equally convinced of God’s helplessness, and decided to help him:

‘I shall try to help You, God, to stop my strength ebbing away … all that really matters: that we safeguard that little piece of You, God, in ourselves. And perhaps in others too…. We must help You and defend Your dwelling place inside us to the last.’

The reality of the gift at our feet – a corncockle wild flower

Quoting a monk on Mount Athos, David Bentley Hart writes:

‘… contemplative prayer is the art of seeing reality as it truly is; and if one has not yet acquired the ability to see God in all things, one should not imagine that one will be able to see God in himself.’

For Hart, contemplative prayer is nothing to do with special practices or techniques – he even calls it an extremely simple thing. Rather it is about encouraging certain ways of thinking:

‘It often consists of little more than cultivating certain habits of thought, certain ways of seeing reality, certain acts of openness to a grace that one cannot presume but that has already been granted, in some very substantial measure, in the mere givenness of existence. It is, above all else, the practice of allowing that existential wonder that usually comes to us only in evanescent instants to become instead a constant inclination of the mind and will, a stable condition of the soul rather than a passing mood.’

This is an interesting act of reframing the very way of looking at the world – with wonder to the fore and an open expectant feel to what we may see and experience. Hart also says that furthering this into a deeper place is about entering the depths of the self – where the gaze is inward and not outward, and focused on the depth of our: ‘own “heart,” and here the final state that one seeks is nothing less than a union of love and knowledge with God.’

It is inevitable that the search for the experience of God involves the search for the experience of what Thomas Merton would have called the true self and what Carl Jung called the Self (capital “S”). Indeed, Hart quotes (amongst others) Symeon the New Theologian: ‘he who is beyond the heavens is found in the depths of the heart’. Here’s the paradoxical mystery that seeking for the experience of God involves both the most outward of realities and the most inward.

Hart warns us against the seduction of our apparent mastery of technology over nature as a sign of some larger mastery over reality – as if we now in the 21^st century are vastly superior to earlier ages or the “less” advanced. Mistaking technology as wisdom means that our thinking and being is closed to the “real” reality – we have forgotten the vital things of life, including the self-evident mystery of existence: ‘that manifests itself not as a thing among other things, but as the silent event of being itself.’

Experience of God begins in our ordinary experiences of the world, and we are pushed to seek the highest truth by the way that the transcendent shows itself within the immanent. When we wonder about our life and the mystery of being, or the beauty of the natural world or the love we can feel for another that is a partial encounter with a divine reality.

Opening ourselves and letting go of much of our crowded and clouded thinking means that we are awake and can see that:

‘… the truth shines in and through and beyond the world of ordinary experience … that nature is in its every aspect the gift of the supernatural … that God is that absolute reality’

A reality in which we live and move and have our being.

David Bentley Hart

In 2022, David Bentley Hart, theologian and philosopher who identifies with the Eastern Orthodox tradition, shared briefly about an ‘indescribable’ past experience of his own on Mount Athos.

‘I was in this state of spiritual despair, and I also had an encounter. …So I understand both the difficulty of explaining it and the impossibility of forgetting it, at once, and how it can change your life. But it doesn’t come as a set of instructions. It sure as hell didn’t turn me into a saint but did actually make me realize that the spiritual dimension of reality is reality.’

Recognizing from an early age ‘a profound sense of some mystery lying beyond nature’, he describes himself as being an ‘irreligious Christian’ by which he means:

 ‘…the faith of someone -myself, that is – who has little or no natural aptitude for religious sentiment, enthusiasm, devotion, or ritual observance. … I have come to accept that I am a thoroughly secular man who happens to believe that Jesus of Nazareth rose from the dead.’

For Hart, the personality of Jesus as presented in the Gospels reveals the character of God. This is Jesus whose central concern is for the most abject, the poorest, and most wretched. Hart says, it is this strange and uncanny Jesus who has captured his imagination and continues to do so. And it is the Bible that allows for personal revelation of this. To open ourselves to experience of God requires liberating ourselves from all the cultural and personal baggage, and all that obscures our remembering and wakefulness to what Hart calls ‘the mystery of being.’

‘God, according to all the great spiritual traditions, cannot be comprehended by the finite mind but can nevertheless be known in an intimate encounter with his presence – one that requires considerable discipline of the mind and will to achieve, but one also implicit in all ordinary experience (if only one is attentive enough to notice).’

Hart says our suspicion about trusting our personal experience is part of the contemporary scepticism of anything that can’t be proved by science, yet we can hold onto an inner subjective certainty – such as ‘this is what I feel’ ‘this is what happened to me’. Our direct experience of reality has to be taken into account: it’s something we come to rely on. For example:

‘… if one feels a firm conviction that one has entered into real communion with the presence of God when praying, those who dismiss such convictions as emotional delusions have no rational arguments on their side. Knowledge of any reality is to be sought out in terms appropriate to the kind of reality it is.’

In our search for experience of God:

‘… one is seeking an ever deeper communion with a reality that at once exceeds and underlies all other experiences…. One is placed in the presence of God in every moment, and can find him even in the depths of the mind’s own act of seeking.’

Thomas Merton was clear that God cannot be reduced to an ‘object’ that we can possess. God as ‘infinite’ has no limits and so can’t be defined, in the sense that the word define means to place limits. God as the Beyond is beyond all beings. Merton writes:

‘There is ‘no such thing’ as God, because God is neither a “What” nor a “thing”, but a pure “Who”. He is the “Thou” before whom our inmost “I” springs into awareness and love. … beyond our natural being we have a higher being “in Christ” which makes us as if we were not and as if He alone were in us.’

So, whilst God cannot be found among the creatures God made, the creatures cannot be separated from their creator. Merton turns to Meister Eckhart where he reflects how God contains a denial of denials. Thus, God is denial: God is “not this” and “not that”; akin to  “neti, neti” in the Upanishads. William Shannon helps us understand:

‘And yet, God is at the same time a denial of denials; that is, God is a denial that God is “not this” and “not that”, namely all creatures that are, find their being and identity in God. To put this seeming paradox in other words: God is transcendent, which means that God is not “this” and not “that”; at the same time God is immanent, which means that God is in all creatures as the source and ground of their being.’

Talking about God we can only use human language to describe our experience, and use these descriptions as symbols or metaphors. Yet the Reality of God outstrips any language we might try to use. I like this description from Merton that our concepts of God are as tiny matches lit to try and look at the sun:

‘As soon as we light these small matches which are our concepts: “intelligence”, “love”, “power”, the tremendous reality of God Who infinitely exceeds all concepts suddenly bears down upon us like a dark storm and blows out all their flames.’

To be with God involves going beyond concepts and images and turning off the lights of reason and imagination and for Merton entering the darkness where it is love that makes contact with God, as God responds to our longings. Merton again: ‘The heart only is capable of knowing God.’ And he quotes a saying of Allah attributed to Muhammad: ‘my earth and heaven cannot contain me. But the heart of my believing servant contains me.’

Through Jesus, God has revealed that God is love – not something God has but rather the divine life – is. And so there is a circulation of Love that constitutes the divine Reality – a circulation that encompasses the entire universe.

Thomas Merton

In Merton’s writings we have many insights into his lifetime of seeking God, and the changes to his perceptions of what that seeking meant. It was his perception of what it means ‘to know God’ that changed and became purified.

In the early years Merton showed a great interest on the role of human reason in coming to know God, and that to accept God’s existence was intellectually acceptable. The word ‘aseitas’ in the book by Etienne Gilson – a book that awakened the seeking of God in Merton, leapt out at him. This is Merton’s definition of what aseitas means:

‘… the power of a being to exist absolutely in virtue of itself, not as caused by itself, but as requiring no cause, no other justification for its existence except that its very nature is to exist. There can be only one such Being: that is God.’

In other words, God exists whether you or I believe in him or not! Taking on this God of reason released Merton from what he had long thought, which is that God is a mere projection of people’s fears and desires and ideals. God was real. Moving to the monastery Merton continued with this scholasticism, and the idea of ‘the reasonableness of Christian faith in God’, but soon there emerges a different emphasis in his journals which is on a more simple, existential approach to the reality of God. As William Shannon writes:

‘… it was not proving the existence of God that mattered so much as experiencing God’s presence … he sought a God to whom his heart could respond…. All his life Merton remained faithful to this intuition. In talking about God we have to rely on experience and we must not be afraid to trust that experience.’

Merton is up for relationship with God who is experienced as present, and who calls for a response. This is the God of revelation who speaks to people perhaps through the Scriptures, meditative reading, and events. Merton’s God, is one involved in a personal relationship, and so this is also the God of the mystic.

William Shannon writes how Merton understood the true God as ‘One who is present’ – through the Scripture and through the Name, but also how Merton was drawn to the theology of the Face. In a letter to Abdul Aziz – a Sufi friend Merton describes his prayer life as:

‘centred on attention to the presence of God … it is not “thinking about” anything but a direct seeking of the Face of the Invisible which cannot be found unless we become lost in Him who is invisible.’

Merton in a journal had written twenty years earlier how his one desire was for solitude and ‘to disappear into God, to be submerged in His peace, to be lost in the secret of his Face.’

Shannon notes that Merton’s thinking moves consistently towards nondualism and a holistic understanding of reality where God is the centre of that reality: ‘that center Who is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.’

This searching for the true God is part of our nature and all of God’s creation – the ‘hidden Ground of Love’ – the One from whom we all come, all are sustained and in whom we all live. And Merton reminds us God cannot be explained: ‘His presence cannot be verified, as we would verify a laboratory experiment.’

Icon of Christ the Holy Wisdom of God

How do we come to realize the true God within us? This is the product of a creative act that comes from within – from the infinite. For Neville Symington this realization of the true God lays:

‘a foundation in the personality of respect for the Self. I have spelt “Self” here with a capital letter because it is the THAT. I am IT … THAThood is my nature, it is my being – the THAT demands respect. The THAT in me is the THAT in you and demands respect.’

Here conscience and symbolism are two aspects of the true God. Conscience is the subjective evidence of the Absolute aspect of our being. The true God invites us to follow our conscience, and this contrasts with the false god where the associated terms are words like “driven”, “obligated” or “compelled”. Conscience is rather a free act and is respecting the Absolute which we all share. In this way following conscience then benefits others – not just ourselves. Similarly, if we say “No” to the promptings of our conscience then we harm ourselves and others.

Symington also links the idea of symbolism to the true God where we can begin to understand how things that are inner – going on inside our psyche/spirit – become played outside of us – in other words projected. There is something interpersonal going on where the outer represents the inner. There can be a creativity and playful spontaneity in our use of symbolism. The false god destroys the inner and symbolism, but the true God is its creator.

Symington offers an interesting dilemma around the difficulty of realizing the idea of absolute Truth

‘A psychotherapist was presenting his work with a patient to a committee that was trying to assess his work. In discussing his work, it was clear that he considered suicide as an evil to be avoided. The chairman of the committee said to him, in a laid-back tone: “But don’t you think this patient was free to commit suicide if he wanted to?”’

Symington reasons that under a false-god morality the only answer would be to say that God forbids suicide as he does murder. For the person who says they don’t believe in God then the only arbiter of truth becomes subjective feelings.

“If I want to kill myself or indeed anyone else then why shouldn’t I?  I can do entirely as I please. I can destroy my own mind if I want to, it is my business.’

Symington sees that this outlook is very pervasive in the contemporary especially Western world and he calls it: ‘The degenerate child of the Judeo-Christian God’. It is based in narcissism, and a relativism, and at times even a collapse of values. It can be seen that conscience here is lacking, and so the person who acts violently towards themselves is lacking respect for the Self, and through their actions causing harm to others. The action is destructive and not creative – for ‘a truly creative thought is closely related to conscience’.

The world tends to split into a very fundamentalist type of solution on the one hand and on the other hand a form of chaos, but from these two opposing views a different type of understanding is possible. This arises from reflective thought, experience and holy wisdom where God is accessed through a creative act, and where how we are in the world is guided by a conscience that tries not to harm.

There is faith in ‘an intentional something that originates from within each living being’.

John Ruysbroeck

The true God is often largely overshadowed by the false god and so requires deep and sustained reflection. Traces of the true God is found in all religions – in Judaism, Christianity and Islam. For Neville Symington it is the wise people who wrote the Upanishads in the East who showed:

‘the first and deepest understanding of …the true God. “God” is not a term that is ever used by these seers. They use the following terms: “the THAT”, “the Absolute”, or just “Reality” …. Through contemplative thought these seers came to understand the absolute character of reality. They also understood that reality is contingent.’

So immediately there is a problem how can something be both absolute and subject to chance and so change? The only solution is that our minds are not capable of grasping this conceptually. Instead of struggling with the need to clearly define and say ‘this is it’ and be rid of uncertainty – which makes us anxious – there can be a recognition and an acceptance of our limitations.

‘What we need to acknowledge is that the human mind meets here a limitation rather than trying to deny the Absoluteness or the contingency or changeability of Reality.’

So how is the Absoluteness of the true God grasped? Symington sees it as through rational reflection, through mental discipline and virtue and ultimately that it is a personal act of insight. This therefore seems as if it could also include a personal revelation such as is found in Judeo-Christian-Islamic faith. The breakthrough to the realization of the Absoluteness of God is an inner experience – not one of being called from ‘outside’. Symington writes: ‘it is my own being understood as Absolute’.

This is surely similar to John’s gospel where we are assured that we will know the Spirit of truth ‘because he abides with you, and he will be in you’ [chapter 14: 17] and Christ’s promise that he and the Father will come to make their home with us [v 23]. The leap required, and perhaps this is the difficulty for our Western dualistic thinking, is to both realize the Absoluteness of Being and that we are also part of it.

Thomas Merton describes this as the awakening of the true self when our own subjectivity is united to the subjectivity of God: this is the true God. Merton, like Symington, Christian mystics, and Eastern seers, sees how futile it is to try to grasp God as an object which we can understand and seize.

‘We must transcend ourselves as well as our analogies, and in seeking to know God we must forget the usual subject-object relationship which characterizes our ordinary acts of knowing. Instead we know him in so far as we become aware of ourselves as known through and through by him. We “possess” him in proportion as we realize ourselves to be possessed by him in the in most depths of our being…. the realization that our very being is penetrated with his knowledge and love for us.’

Merton quotes the medieval mystic John of Ruysbroek that in contemplation the unity of God shines a simple light which shows itself to be darkness into which we are enveloped and lost – plunged into nothingness and nakedness but: ‘..overwhelmed by the activity of God’s immense love …becomes one spirit with God.’

Neville Symington

The false god is not arrived at through thought and reflection. Neville Symington (earlier priest, and later psychoanalyst) comments on the way that the false god is often found in a moment of ecstasy:  Allah was revealed to Mohammed in an ecstatic trance, and, he cites how in the Old Testament Moses leads the people out to meet God amongst peals of thunder and lightening flashes, a dense cloud and a trumpet blast. [Exodus 19: 16-19]. Paul’s Damascene conversion and indeed Pentecost fall into this same category where he sees thought as crushed under the force of the experience.

Symington sees this as a false god that has emerged in the narcissistic part of a person where a wound has occurred, and the god arises, having sustained an infinite insult and takes over the personality:

‘…it deceives the believer into trusting his dictates – the presence of this god …is intrinsically antagonistic to thought…. There is no option than to capitulate in total submission… the action and speech of a person dominated by such a system is false …what is said does not represent the thought of the person. It is a pretend person, something standing for a person that could be there but is not. …this is the false god that exists in individuals governed by narcissism; it is also the god that rules all religious observances of a primitive and superstitious kind.’

Symington sees that this false god is not just to do with religion, it can be found in institutions, and certainly in for example the psychoanalytic community. And I would add often in politics where you can see the ‘blind’ following of someone narcissistic who has set themselves up as god [sadly rather too many of them currently]. The follower appears to be thinking, but rather they have embodied the thoughts of a god as a substitute for their own thinking and creativity. They are also then in a submissive identification with the god. Whilst the identification means the person takes on the ideas of the god and embodies them – the actual messages are often distorted.

The false god embodiment crushes the creativity of the follower – but there can be rebellion. I’m thinking here of people ‘brought up’ in strict evangelical circles, where the punishing false god controls all spontaneity: there is intense submission in childhood and then sometimes a rebellion which can take place when the person is trying to break free from the narcissistic bondage. The rage towards the false god is the projected hatred of being submissive. In truth the person hates having been submissive, but the hatred gets pushed out onto the false god or onto the institution that cultivated it.

‘True liberation requires realization that the enslaving principle is the inner submissive act and total liberation requires an understanding that the enslaving principle is one element in the narcissistic structure.’

The false god is self-damaging and destroys the inner life, and so destroys symbolism – it all becomes very ‘concrete’. The false god demands, and persuades, as the false god says: ‘Do it my way.” Naturally, we are all to different degrees narcissistic – it’s a question of acknowledging and recognizing it!

i thank You God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any–lifted from the no
of all nothing–human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

e.e. cummings

‘The grace of Easter is a great silence, an immense tranquillity and a clean taste in your soul … The Easter vision  … is a discovery of order above all order – a discovery of God and of all things in HIM.’

Thomas Merton