Always in God’s Presence
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
Richard Rohr has long drawn comfort and wisdom from the writings of the young Jewish woman Etty Hillesum (1914–1943), believing her to be a voice of inspiration for our times. 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. 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. [1]
Etty Hillesum fully accepted the “cruciform nature 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’ 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]
A Quote from St Basil
“This is how you pray continually – not by offering prayers in words, but by joining yourself to God through your whole way of life, so that your life becomes one continuous and uninterrupted prayer.”
– St. Basil the Great, Early Church Father
To pray without ceasing is no easy task. And, if you only understand prayer as a verbal activity then it can seem even more difficult. Fortunately, prayer is the way one lives their life in a healthy, holy, and integrated way. I am still quite fragmented and compartmentalized, and I am working on that, but it is nonetheless refreshing to see that since the very early days of the Church, they had a more gracious and expanded sense of what it means to pray!
Click Image for John White's Original Vision For CO2's
