Dear friends in Christ,
How do we keep faith when the world feels like it is unraveling? Many of you, and many of my other friends, have been asking me this question recently.
Witnesses to the faith from the past help me in these circumstances. And so, today I am thinking of Etty Hillesum. Etty was a young Jewish woman who lived in Amsterdam in the 1940s during the Nazi occupation and died as one of the millions of victims of the Holocaust. Etty’s gift was writing, and from the day when Dutch Jews were first ordered to wear a yellow star up until the day she boarded a cattle car bound for Auschwitz, Etty dedicated herself to keeping a meticulous spiritual diary. Published four decades after her death, this book (entitled A Life Interrupted) is now a classic, one of the great moral documents of the last century.
For obvious reasons, during much of Etty’s life, God seemed totally absent to her. While few of us will endure the atrocities she did, perhaps we can still relate to this feeling of the absence of God from time to time. I suspect most of us know this feeling. What do we do in these moments?
This is what Etty wrote in one of her last journal entries on the train that would take her to the death camps: “Someone has to take responsibility for God in this situation. That is, someone has to behave as if God were real. Someone has to make God credible by the way that they meet life and death.” And so, Etty Hillesum – at first sight a very unlikely candidate for this dignity – attempted to do just that, to make God believable through her life and her death and in the unfailingly hopeful words she left behind.
“At this point,” Etty wrote in her diary, “I have seen everything and yet I remain prepared for anything. No matter what happens around me, I stand ready to bear witness unto death that life is beautiful and meaningful, and that the unspeakable evil we face is not God’s doing, but our own.”
In moments of great despair, this is the prayer she relied upon:
“It is hard to comprehend, O God, what those created in Your likeness do to each other in these disfigured days. But I will not shut myself away in my room, dear God; instead, I will look things straight in the face, even the worst crimes, and seek to discover some small glimmer of your love hiding amidst the monstrous wreckage caused by one man’s senseless hatred of another.”
Faith is not a way of escaping the world’s sorrow; it is the strength to stand within it, eyes open, heart awake, trusting that no shadow can quench the light of God.
May we, too, find such courage — to keep looking for God’s glimmers, even in the ruins.
Grace and peace,
Pastor Luther