Sunday, December 30, 2012

The Kingdom of God is within You

From the diary of Etty Hillesum, p..44:
There is 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. 
I imagine that there are people who pray with their eyes turned heavenward. They seek God outside themselves. And there are those who bow their head and bury it in their hands.
This is from the book, An Interrupted Life and Letters from Westerbork, by Etty Hillesum, p.150. Etty Hillesum was a secular, assimilated Jew living in Amsterdam who died in Auswitch in 1943. The diary was written after the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, while the Nazis were persecuting the Jews and shipping them off to concentration camps. Etty had a degree in law and then studied Russian language and literature. On her own she read philosophy, psychology, especially, Carl Jung, and poetry, especially Rilke. She was a patient,  personal secretary, and physical intimate of the psychoanalyst Julius Spier, also a Jew. He introduced her to the gospels and the writings of St. Augustine. Etty had several opportunities to escape the Nazi persecution, Instead she insisted on serving her fellow Jews to the very end and chose to suffer the same fate as they. Her last letter was a postcard tossed from the window of the train as it left for the concentration camp.

Saturday, December 29, 2012

Life in the Ruins

From the diary of Etty Hillesum, p.40: 
Our house is a remarkable mixture of barbarism and culture. Spiritual riches lie within grasp, but they are left unused and unguarded, are carelessly scattered about. It is depressing, it is tragicomic, I don't know what kind of madhouse this really is, but I know that no human being can flourish here.
This is from the book, An Interrupted Life and Letters from Westerbork, by Etty Hillesum, p.150. Etty Hillesum was a secular, assimilated Jew living in Amsterdam who died in Auswitch in 1943. The diary was written after the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, while the Nazis were persecuting the Jews and shipping them off to concentration camps. Etty had a degree in law and then studied Russian language and literature. On her own she read philosophy, psychology, especially, Carl Jung, and poetry, especially Rilke. She was a patient,  personal secretary, and physical intimate of the psychoanalyst Julius Spier, also a Jew. He introduced her to the gospels and the writings of St. Augustine. Etty had several opportunities to escape the Nazi persecution, Instead she insisted on serving her fellow Jews to the very end and chose to suffer the same fate as they. Her last letter was a postcard tossed from the window of the train as it left for the concentration camp. It was found by a farmer.

Wednesday, December 26, 2012

What Is It in Human Beings that Makes Them Want to Destroy Others?

From  the diary of Etty Hillesum:

19 February, 1942
What is it in human beings that makes them want to destroy others? Jan asked bitterly. I said, "Human beings you say, but remember that you're one yourself." And strangely enough he seemed to acquiesce, grumpy, gruff old Jan. "The rottenness of others is in us, too," I continued to preach at him. "I see no other solution than to turn inward and to root out all the rottenness there. I no longer believe that we can change anything in the world until we have first changed ourselves. And that seems to me to be the only lesson to be learned from this war, that we must look into ourselves and nowhere else." And Jan, who so unexpectedly agreed with everything I said, was approachable and interested and no longer proffered any of his hard-boiled social theories. Instead, he said, 'Yes, it's too easy to turn your hatred loose on the outside, to live for nothing but the moment of revenge. We must try to do without that." We stood here in the cold waiting for the tram, Jan with his great purple chilblained hands and his toothache. Our professors are in prison, another of Jan's friends has been killed, and there are many other sorrows, but all we said to each other was, "It is too easy to feel vindictive."
This is from the book, An Interrupted Life and Letters from Westerbork, by Etty Hillesum, p.150. Etty Hillesum was a secular, assimilated Jew living in Amsterdam who died in Auswitch in 1943. The diary was written after the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, while the Nazis were persecuting the Jews and shipping them off to concentration camps. Etty had a degree in law and then studied Russian language and literature. On her own she read philosophy, psychology, especially, Carl Jung, and poetry, especially Rilke. She was a patient,  personal secretary, and physical intimate of the psychoanalyst Julius Spier, also a Jew. He introduced her to the gospels and the writings of St. Augustine. Etty had several opportunities to escape the Nazi persecution, Instead she insisted on serving her fellow Jews to the very end and chose to suffer the same fate as they. Her last letter was a postcard tossed from the window of the train as it left for the concentration camp.

Tuesday, December 18, 2012

Losing My Religion

Having been "taken" by the R.E.M. song. "Losing My Religion," at the Sandy Relief Concert, I felt compelled to cobble together a thought or two.

The Performance:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fiQQ6WatGJE

Some young people refer to going off to college as, "losing my religion."  They are eagerly looking forward to a life of sex, alcohol, partying, and no religion too.  Naturally, I had assumed that Michael Stipe's song must be about a young person shedding the religion that was imposed on them by their parents. But I could never get that from the lyrics. In fact, the lyrics never made any sense to me.

In Communion and Liberation, for the past few weeks, we been studying a teaching called, "Life as Vocation." Carron's general thesis is that, "The circumstances through which God has us pass are an essential and not a secondary factor of our vocation, of the mission to which he calls us." To be engaged with life demands self-awareness. And this self-awareness can only be gained by observing the self in action, in dealing with the circumstances of life.

One of the teachings of, "Life as Vocation," as well as the prior document that we studied, " was to look beyond the appearances of things, to look inside circumstances. The song, "Losing My Religion," has nothing to do with religion. Michael Stipe says that in Georgia, where he is from, the expression,  "losing my religion," is an expression that is synonymous with being at wit's end. In fact, I discovered, the song is about a crush on someone. And suddenly, the lyrics made perfect sense.  Having been "taken" by a crush, the singer's heart is in his throat, and all his insecurities are laid bare. We've all been there!

This crush was the circumstance in which the singer found himself. In wresting with his insecurities, he is on the very knife-edge of either dealing with this circumstance or not. His insecurities led me to think of Carron's teaching about the story in the gospel, of the blind man on the road near Jericho (Luke 18:35-43). Surely, as a blind man with no other choice but to spend his life as a beggar on the side of a road, his life must be full of insecurities. Surely, he must have lived on the knife-edge of survival. Surely, he knew what it means be at wit's end.  Or perhaps not.  Perhaps he had been at or beyond wit's end so many times that he had lost all insecurities and had nothing left to lose. Who knows? But Carron says:

Christ does not heal the man born blind and then take him out of reality for fear that he might lose what was given to him. No. Jesus launches that man into the fray, with that Presence that healed him in his eyes; He doesn't take him out of it. I mean: Christ generates an "I" that is capable of living reality, like the blind man who had the simplicity to recognize that before he couldn't see and now he can. His awareness was determined by what happened to him. With this self-awareness, he can face everyone, not because he is more powerful, but because of this simplicity in adhering to what happened to him. This is the power of self-awareness--and in someone random, not one of Jesus' disciples!--and all of the scholars among the Pharisees could do nothing with respect to an "I" that had this self-awareness.

The point is to be consistently engaged with life. It is only the circumstances of life that can teach us about ourselves. As per Giussani, "Maturity consists in the maturation of our self awareness."

 And so it is, that to find one's true religion, one must first lose it.