The Roots of Christian Mysticism Session 23
Summary of Liz Watson's "Etty Hillesum" talk, The London Christian Meditation Centre, St Mark's, Clerkenwell, 16 May 2006

Background

Etty Hillesum feels very modern. She was born in 1914 in Holland and died in Auschwitz in 1943. She was a Dutch Jew. Her father was a classics teacher and her mother was Russian. She was passionate and chaotic. Traits of both father and mother can be seen in her clearly. She wanted to be a writer. She was a student and teacher of Russian. She had a brother who was a doctor and another who was a pianist. She definitely had an academic and intellectual bent. She had a degree in law and then looked at Slavonic languages and psychology. After university she lived in Amsterdam with others who were not Jews. She was a secular Jew. Her Jewishness was not particularly important to her. In the household there was an elderly widower and his son, a German cook, another man called Bernard and Maria who was a nurse. It was because her house mates were not Jewish that she managed for a while to escape detection and the restrictions that were placed on the Jews by the Nazis. She was a vibrant, outgoing person, interested in politics and literature. She had lots of lovers and led a sort of Bohemian existence. She was not the sort of person you would think of as a mystic. She didn’t go to church or synagogue.

In 1941 she started to write her diaries. They cover an 18 month period from March 1941 to October 1942. Her last diary she took with her to Auschwitz and it disappeared. We do though have letters that she wrote in Auschwitz. The title of her diaries “An Interrupted Life” is probably not how Etty would have thought of it. She saw life as a ripening (an image from Rilke). She never had any regrets. A better title might have been “A Ripening Life”. Her diaries are rather like a spiritual journal. Therefore there is very little detail of what is happening outside except where it affects her inner life.

Her Diaries

She makes an interesting start with these words:

Here goes then. This is a painful and well-nigh insuperable step for me: yielding up so much that has been suppressed to a blank sheet of lined paper. The thoughts in my head are sometimes so clear and sharp and my feelings so deep, but writing about them comes hard. The main difficulty, I think is a sense of shame. So many inhibitions, so much fear of letting go, of allowing things to pour out of me, and yet that is what I must do if I am ever to give my life a reasonable and satisfactory purpose. It is like the final, liberating scream that always sticks bashfully in your throat when you make love. I am accomplished in bed, just about seasoned enough I should think to be counted among the better lovers, and love does indeed suit me to perfection, and yet it remains a mere trifle, set apart from what is truly essential, and deep down something is still locked away. The rest of me is like that too. I am blessed enough intellectually to be able to fathom most subjects, to express myself clearly on most things; I seem to be a match for most of life’s problems, and yet deep down something like a tightly wound ball of twine binds me relentlessly, and at times I am nothing more or less than a miserable, frightened creature, despite the clarity with which I can express myself.

She was outwardly successful, articulate, in touch with her emotions, intelligent, capable and yet life was not satisfactory. She hadn’t worked out its meaning. She thought there must be more to life than this. She knew she had to write things down, she wanted to be a writer and yet found it difficult to write.

Her last diary entries were the following:

I think I can bear everything life and these times have in store for me. And when the turmoil becomes too great and I am completely at my wit’s end, then I still have my folded hands and bended knee…
What a strange story it really is, my story: the girl who could not kneel. Or its variation: the girl who learned to pray. That is my most intimate gesture, more intimate even than being with a man.

The soul has a different age from that recorded in the register of births and deaths…One can be born with a twelve-year-old soul. One can also be born with a thousand-year-old soul…A soul is forged out of fire and rock crystal. Something rigorous, hard in an Old Testament sense, but also as gentle as the gestures with which his tender fingertips sometimes stroked my eyelashes.

I have broken my body like bread and shared it among men. And why not, they are hungry and had gone without for so long.

We should be willing to act as a balm for all wounds.

This sentence is the very last diary entry. A comparison of the first and last entries shows the transformation that she underwent in this short two year period. The last entry shows her ability to deal with her turmoil. She had learnt how to pray and how to give herself for others.

The intervening period between the first and last entries
At first she talks about being suppressed and being relentlessly bound by a tightly wound ball of twine. There is a sense that there was a lot that she hadn’t allowed to come out. It was something to do with shame rather than guilt. It was something to do with what she was, the centre of herself:

“I’m still ashamed of myself, afraid to let myself go, to let things pour out of me; I am dreadfully inhibited, and that is because I have not yet learned to accept myself as I am.”

Later she has a dream. She did have a lot of illness in her life, a lot of which was neurotic. She contracted an eating disorder and then she dreamt that her closest friend could literally see through her and see what the disease was all about. She said that he could see through her to what she was really like, how materialistic she was and the horror of it!

She was attracted to God and yet resistant. This is an experience that many mystics talk about and it is also our experience of meditation. She wants to pour out everything in her but experiences the horror of it. What she begins to recognise is that she has to learn to see reality as it is and herself as she is and other people as they are and to accept. This is an active acceptance of how things are rather than a resignation. She talks about the courage that grows in her. She is able to make a space for it all within herself:

“There’s a really deep well inside me. And in it dwells God. Sometimes I am there, too. But more often stones and grit block the well, and God is buried beneath. Then He must be dug out again.”

She is trying to obtain a radical openness to God.

What are the stones, grit and blockages in herself?

1) Fantasy

She begins to recognise how much time she spends fantasising. How much energy it takes up that doesn’t go anywhere. She begins to recognise that she has to focus on the now.

2) Possessiveness

She wants to own an experience and write about it but she is unable to because by wanting to possess it she has squashed it. She ends up losing what she has loved so much. Once again it has taken up too much energy. She begins to see that on the one hand she was desperate to be at one with a man but she also wanted to be independent. She swung from one pole to another. Her greed is somehow connected with her eating disorder.

3) Ambition and self-importance

She so much wanted to be a writer but she didn’t regard her diaries as proper writing. She really wanted to write poems, novels and short stories. She began to see that what she wanted to write about were small everyday things but she was blocked by her desire to do something grander.

4) Not able to stand on her own two feet

She could see that she was moulding her behaviour in order to get people to react to her in a particular way. For example if she’s ill she keeps going because if she lets people know she’s ill she thinks they will ditch her. On the other hand she was capable of staying in her room and wallowing.

5) Indisciplined and lacking in self-control

She couldn’t get down to things. There was always an excuse. She had an exaggerated self-consciousness. She was always talking about materialism i.e. relying on anything which was external.

All these stones and grit she more and more clearly sees block her from being open to the source of life:

She is now able to get down to things as she gradually sheds her desires and attachments:

“With each minute that passes I shed more wishes and desires and attachments there are moments when I can see right through and the human heart, when I understand more and more and become calmer and calmer and am filled with a faith in God that has grown so quickly inside me that it frightened me at first but has now become inseparable from me. And now to work.”

How did she clear out the blockages?

She managed to do so very quickly. One of the most important people to her was Julius Spicer, teacher, mediator between her and God, inspiration and intimate attachment culminating finally in a physical relationship. Julius had a great ability to read a person’s soul through their palm prints. He had done some work with Jung and Jung had encouraged him to earn his living in this way. Apart from his immense influence on her she was also influenced by the bible especially the Psalms and the Gospel of Matthew, Rilke, Dostoevsky and Augustine. Her spiritual journal became part of the process of clearing out the grit.

Turning inwards was important to her. She decided she would turn inwards for half an hour every day:

She developed an ability to listen in to herself and then as a result to others. She realised that God was speaking to the God within her. She learnt to watch her thoughts and moods. She talks about tracing her appetites back to their hidden layer and trying to let go. She began to recognise the function of her depressions. When they come she knows she has gone wrong somewhere and then she can bring herself back to reality:

“Something in me is growing and every time I look inside something fresh has appeared and all I have to do is to accept it, to take it upon myself, to bear it forward, and to let it flourish.”

What is growing in her is prayer. A theme throughout her life is that the girl who couldn’t kneel is forced to kneel by some pulsating force. She said she felt she had to do this. It was given to her. This was not part of her Jewish culture. It was as though kneeling was what she was made for. Increasingly her diaries are written as addressed to God:

“Sometimes, when I least expect it, someone suddenly kneels down in some corner of my being. When I’m out walking or just talking to people. And that someone, the one who kneels down, is myself.”

A Growing Sense of God

She was not a theologian. She was not attempting to write systematically. She was writing down her experiences. How she experienced God at a point in time. She doesn’t try to define God. Herself, life and God are all of a piece. God just is.

She uses a wide range of words quite naturally of her growing sense of God-faithfulness, faith, beautiful, rich, intimate, joy, gratitude, mournful contentment, simplicity and silence. To begin with she talks in quite a limited way about God:

“God take me by Your hand. I shall follow You dutifully, and not resist too much”.

“Last night shortly before going to bed, I suddenly went down on my knees…Almost automatically. Forced to the ground by something stronger than myself. Some time ago I said to myself, “I am a kneeler in training.” I was still embarrassed by this act, as intimate as gestures of love that cannot be put into words…you need courage to put that into words”

For Etty it was an increasingly unshakeable reality, life was beautiful, meaningful and rich. If you can be present to that it really doesn’t matter what life in its externals throws at you:

Her belief was that God comes as a result of her experiences of words and awfulness. At one point she begins to say God is not accountable to us but we are to him:

“But one thing is becoming increasingly clear to me: that You cannot help us, that we must help You to help to help ourselves. And that is all we can manage these days and also all that really matters: that we safeguard that piece of you 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. Neither do I hold You responsible. You cannot help us, but we must help You and defend Your dwelling place inside us to the last.”

“And there are those who want to put their bodies in safekeeping but who are nothing more now than a shelter for a thousand bitter feelings. And they say, “I shan’t let them get me into their clutches. “ But they forget that no one is in their clutches who is in Your arms.”

She talked about petty fears and worries being motions of no confidence in God.

Themes in the Diaries

Attached as an appendix to these notes is a list of quotes relating to four of the main themes in the diaries:

Love and Sex

She began with a possessive attitude. With Spier it was different. Her love deepened and became more intense over time she began to recognise that there was more to a relationship than sex. Her relationship with God was the most intimate of all. Love is itself regardless of its object. Love is so much bigger than pouring it out on one person.

Beauty

She focuses on the beauty of nature. She has a great eye for detail.

Compassion

The way to compassion she realises is first to sort yourself out. She loves others because God is in them but eventually she is able to love others for themselves. Love has nothing to do with the conduct of her fellow man. She feels she has responsibility not to add to the hatred or bitterness of the world.

Creativity

She talks about a cloak around her soul. Her first attitude is one of mental masturbation but eventually what matters is serenity not creation. You can be creative by transforming your inner life. If she wants to write she has to wait to be given the words. There is a shift from “I” to “God”. She speaks about words giving contours to silence.