A Spirituality of Balance
...ically. Forced to the ground by something stronger than myself...I was still embarrassed by this act." (74) And later: "You need courage to put it into words. The courage to speak God’s name." (74) Over time, Etty did begin to speak. And she recorded many of her prayers in her diary. "God, take me by the hand," (63) she says. As the world around Etty disintegrates, prayer becomes her refuge. "The threat grows ever greater...I draw prayer round me like a dark protective wall, withdraw inside it...and then step outside again, calmer and stronger and more collected again." (133) "I feel safe in God's arms," she wrote. (176) Why does she feel safe? "Somewhere," she said, "there is something inside me that will never desert me again." (153) She called it a feeling of indestructible resistance within. And finally, with greater clarity, she wrote: “I repose in myself. And that part of myself, that deepest and richest part in which I repose, is what I call ‘God’.” (204) Etty's religion, Etty's God, does not sound very much like "Baruch ata Adonai"--the God of Israel. It all sounds highly personal, mystical, focused on the self, and cut off from external reality. As she wrote in July of 1942: "My life is increasingly an inner one and the outer setting matters less and less." But Etty was not cut off from the world. When she wrote these words she had a "protected" job working as a typist for the Jewish Council that organized deportations to the east. The next time we hear of her, she has voluntarily given up her job in order to join a group of deported Jews. She goes to Westerbork, a transit camp and the last stop before Auschwitz, to work in the hospital there. Somehow, her discovery of God has made her turn towards people. She so terribly loved people because in every human being she loved that “something” of God. She sought God everywhere in them and often she did find that “something” of God. “When we pray, we gradually begin to see that the spiritual life demands that we give our lives over to God.” (Downey 12) Rolheiser believes that spiritual maturity lies in the simple capacity to admire--to admire beauty, admire talent, and admire youth, without trying to possess them. “Whatever the expression, everyone is ultimately talking about the same thing—an unquenchable fire, restlessness, a longing…a congenital all-embracing ache that lies at the center of human experience and is the ultimate for that drives everything else” (Rolheiser 4). It takes years, and lots of restless sadness, to come to understand that. Real joy lies in being able to admire a thing or another, in focusing attention away from self, and in being able to enjoy the beauty and giftedness of others and nature without trying to possess them. That is easily said and very hard to do. Our congenital metaphysics militates against it. Soul and the body resist it. We want to possess what is beautiful, press it against ourselves and make it our own. The heart wants to capture, possess, and control what attracts it. That is the way we are built. And it is the reason, too, why we often find it so painful to experience beauty. Rather than filling us with joy, the experience of beauty often makes us sad and restless. Beauty attracts us, even stuns us sometimes, but, too often, leaves us with a bittersweet feeling. The experience of beauty, more often than not, leaves us restless and sad, incapable of joyful admiration. Etty articulated this very well: Whenever I saw a beautiful flower…I longed to…press it to my heart...I was too sensual…too greedy. I yearned physically for all I thought was beautiful, wanted to own it. Hence the painful longing that could never be satisfied, the pining for something I thought unattainable, which I called my creative urge. I believe it was this powerful emotion that made me think that I was born to produce great works. It all suddenly changed, God alone knows by what inner process, but it is different now. I realized it…when I recalled my short walk around the Skating Club...It was dusk, soft hues in the sky, mysterious silhouettes of houses, trees alive with light through the tracery of their branches, in short, enchanting…But that night…I reacted quite differently. I felt that God's world was beautiful despite everything, but its beauty now filled me with joy. I was just as deeply moved by that mysterious, still landscape in the dusk as I might have been before, but somehow I no longer wanted to own it. I went home invigorated and got to work. And the scenery stayed with me, in the background as a cloak about my soul…(14-15) To admire someone attractive or something beautiful without trying to possess, that is the real task, not just of aesthetics but, especially, of spirituality. When the rich young man comes up to Jesus and asks, "What good thing shall I do, that I have eternal life?” Jesus gently corrects his verb. (Matthew 19:16) He tells him: " If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell thou that hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven; and come, and follow me." (Matthew 19:21) But, as we know, the story has an unhappy ending. The young man goes away sad, unable to do what Jesus asked of him. “Spirituality is, ultimately, about what we do with that desire” (Rolheiser 5) Etty learned to stand before beauty without trying, like the rich young man, to possess it, to close our hands over it. She attained balance as she became content with just receiving it, admiring it, blessing it; her restlessness and sadness through God turned into joy. From Etty’s final diary entries, it would appear that she transcended her situation and attained peace of soul through her relationship with God. Etty presumably did not have the benefit of the disciples’ experience of Christ to show her how to ready her soul for death. However, death surrounded her every day in “more arrests, more terror, concentration camps, the arbitrary dragging off of fathers, sisters, brothers.” (Hillesum 29) It may be too much of an exaggeration to say that Etty experienced Spier’s death in the same way that the apostles experienced the death of Christ. And yet, Etty did experience this “dying while yet alive” in the gradual annihilation of her entire community. As her friends...