SOF Sift A column in which Network members think out loud about SOF and their own quest.
From Ann Eggboro, Warrington 30th November: Etty Hillesum Etty Hillesum was born on 15th January 1914 and died on 30th November 1943, aged 29. 67 years ago Etty was murdered and her body thrown away by people caught up in the horrific systematic atrocity we call the holocaust. Etty died at Auschwitz. Her spirit, though, lives on in a remarkable document – her letters and diaries 1941-1943, which was published unabridged in 2002. Simply called Etty it is a ‘must read’ book for anyone interested in human spirituality. Described as ‘the most spiritually significant document of our age’ it is, for Rowan Williams, ‘a Confessions of St Augustine for our own day’. Her diary displays her quest to find harmony between the outer world of real life in all its forms (joys, suffering and death) and conflicts and the inner life of reflective solitude. It records the transformation of a woman with a deep eroticism and vast intellect from someone with an atheist streak which meant she could not pray or say the name of God into a woman who did both all the time. Her prayers and her God are unconventional. She was a secular Jew, with no attachment to a synagogue and stood at the point where humanism, Judaism and Christianity meet. For Etty, the word ‘God’ is ‘only a metaphor after all’, one which signposts ‘an approach to our greatest and most continuous inner adventure,’ (and which points to the deepest and best in oneself and others. In response to her situation in the concentration camps she offered love and acceptance rather than bitterness and hatred. Above all, she celebrates the beauty of life, inclusive of suffering and death. She teaches us to die by living. As such, she exemplifies what Don Cupitt has called ‘solar living’ and for Etty, as for Cupitt, God and life are two sides of the same coin. Should you read the book of her life, her Letters and Diaries, as I would strongly recommend, it may well become the book of your life too.