True love, which is the humane feeling for all life, is at the heart of all life. When we are able to see everything as love, then we are in the presence of a truly humane way of being.

This month, rather than my reflections, I offer you the reflections of a young Jewish woman (1914–1943), Etty Hillesum from:

“An Interrupted Life.”

If the term God does not sit easily with you, please use any term you feel does 🩷

Etty Hillesum:

“Why is there a war?…

Because I and my neighbour 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 give it a chance to live.”

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Shortly before her internment in the Westerbork transit camp she wrote:

“One thing is becoming increasingly clear to me: that You cannot help us, that we must 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…..You cannot help us, but we must help You and defend your dwelling place inside us to the last.”

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She fully accepted the brokenness of rest 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 anyway 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 at 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 it’s inevitable. 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.”

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Reflecting on the Nazarene’s words in Matthew 6:34 not to worry about tomorrow she writes:

“We have to fight them daily… these 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 the large areas of peace in ourselves, more and more peace, and reflect it towards others. And the more peace there is in us, the more peace there will also be in our troubled world.”

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Little Heading August

At dawn each day I raise my heart

to the skies

above my house

for a little while 

hanging motionless

waiting for the first light 

Then away it soars 

once more

Loving life  Life is loving