Moment of Oneness, October 14, 2026 - Prepared by Rosemary Smead

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Esther “Etty” Hillesum  

1/15/1914 – 11/30/1943

OPENING  PRAYER

Beloved Holy One, we humbly ask you to nurture Your Light in our hearts as we navigate our troubled world. We give thanks for the precious words of your mystic, Esther “Etty” Hillesum, who taught us by her breathtaking courage during one of the world’s darkest times. We yearn to choose daily the path of nonviolence by disarming ourselves of all vestiges of hate we see around us. As we remember and learn from her, grant us the spiritual energy to touch with your Love as many persons as we can every day of our lives. Like Etty, we deeply desire to share love, calmness, joy, and peace, and appreciate the depth of her life-giving words and astounding adherence to an attitude of hope.  Make it so.    

VIDEO 1 STOP video at 2:30  Etty Hillesum’s Walk with God: Faith Amidst Fear          https://youtu.be/uD9_KiwKuxI?si=HWYzQEMDVJBTQgGg

REFLECTION 1 

One of the most confounding concepts we wrestle with is that of evil and hatred in the world, which attempts to end the joy we experience as an innocent child. The 20th Century Holocaust smacks us in the face as an example of the lowest form of hate-spewing evil human behavior.  Today, we open our hearts to the written voice of Dutch Jewish mystic, Esther Hillesum, whose example reveals her journey from a confused, depressed and anxious Law School graduate in World War II Amsterdam to a mystical and activist young woman experiencing the Shoah (Holocaust). She wrote and modeled how she dove down to her core to commune with God, how to think about, speak, write, behave, and love those who exemplified the vilest hatred on earth.  We peek at her extant writing preserved in an 11-notebook diary aptly entitled, “The Heaven Within Me,” and 73 discovered letters. Her writing began as an assignment by Jungian psychiatrist, Julius Spier, as her existential priority work on her personal journey to clarify her thoughts and manage depression. It quickly became the vehicle used by Holy Mystery to draw Etty entwined into a mystical relationship with her Beloved within.  Raised in a secular Jewish home, with a mother and brothers who experienced severe depression, Etty thus “discovered” her Beloved in her deepest heart, from reading and prayer.  Her writing revealed prayers, beliefs, thinking processes, quotes, and teaching, as she experienced life in an extraordinary manner. Etty’s Russian born mother, Rebecca Bernstein, inspired Etty to study the grand Russian literature which was often steeped in Christian orthodox monastic practices. So although she was not raised Christian, Etty nurtured the value and power of contemplative spirituality through to her spiritual awakening in her 20s. Her intense interior life revealed an immensely brilliant understanding of the meaning of life, no matter the century or circumstance. Unique and defining to her spirituality is the idea that we are called to “help God,” as God works through our lives.    (Photo below of her parents and brothers)

VIDEO 2    Etty and Julius Spier      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-b_IZ_0CXeE 

PRAYER 2    To Etty

Etty, your spirituality shakes us to our knees today as we grapple with how  you fostered a mystical relationship with the Holy One within, while the world raged outside. Alongside the greatest saints we have as examples, you taught us that we must re-arrange our idea of where and how to communicate with God, that is, in our very heart. You spoke directly to God within, then wrote your intimate conversation in your diary, schooling us with immersion in masterful learning experiences. As we pass through layers of stages of our life, we are able to unlock the deeper meaning you teach us. The state of our world today trembles with hatred seen and unseen.  Guide us to work for the well-being of our earthly family, with complete awareness of the Holy One’s mission for all to be One.  So be it.

POEM 1  Etty Hillesum,  a poem by Sarah Rossiter

There’s no containing what we call God, 

force-field of agape love, 

nameless, wild, omnipresent within the seed, 

the star, the sparrow,

galaxies and grains of sand, limitless without exception, 

mystery beyond our knowing, and in all sons

and daughters. 

In those who show us how to live, stripped of self to flower

forth, the desert blooms, the spark that ignites the Dali Lama, 

Desmond Tutu, Rumi, Etty Hillesum singing, and yes,

singing, on the train to the camps.

REFLECTION 2

Etty, a recent University Law School graduate, entered therapy with Jewish Jungian Psychotherapist Julius Spier. He enjoined her to write a diary of her emotional confusion and mental lack of clarity, as she was caught up in the political firestorm of Jewish world in WW II Europe. Within a few months, this diary writing became a transformational, astounding experience. After the Nazi capture of the Netherlands, she began thinking of how she could help her people, and took a Social Worker position with the “Jewish Council” in Amsterdam. Quickly realizing the Council was a Nazi ploy to have the Jewish people work against their own, she resigned, but not before effecting the escape of many Jewish families. Etty and her family were then imprisoned at Westerbork Camp, awaiting the inevitable train to Auschwitz. During this time, her mystic center drew her inward to contemplation, and outward to serve as loving balm to those who suffered around her. We read in her diary that she met another mystic we have studied, Carmelite nun St. Sr. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, Edith Stein, in Westerbork Camp. One of the most impressive lessons is Etty’s indomitable spirit, zest for life, which never dims, even under the most desperate of emotionally and physically challenging existential circumstances.

DIARY MESSAGE QUOTES:  Pause between each to reflect

VIDEO 3     An Inner Life    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XmcNqIRi7_k 

PRAYER  3    by Etty 

You have made me so rich, oh God,

please let me share out Your beauty with open hands.

My life has become an uninterrupted dialogue with You, oh God,

one great dialogue.

Sometimes when I stand in some corner of the camp,

my feet planted on Your earth,

my eyes raised toward Your Heavens,

tears run down my face,

tears of deep emotion and gratitude.

At night, too, when I lie in bed and rest in You, oh God,

tears of gratitude run down my face, and that is my prayer.” E.H.

A DISTILLATION OF THOUGHTS FROM ETTY’S DIARY               

 

“Peace does not begin when circumstances improve. It begins within the human heart — and when we tend it with care, it quietly transcends us and touches others.  There is a deep well of peace within the human soul, that we may enter at any time.”

“One thing is becoming increasingly clear to me: that You cannot help us, that we must help You to 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, Loving 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. (EH. An Interrupted Life).

Why is there a war?… Because I and my neighbor 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 giving it a chance to live. You have made me so rich, oh God, please let me share out Your beauty with open hands. 

The human spirit operates on a timeline that no earthly tyranny can ever touch.  

(Page 25   An Interrupted Life)

There are people, I suppose, who pray with their eyes raised to heaven. They look for God outside themselves. There are others who bend their head and hide it in their hands, I think these are looking for God within themselves.

Father Richard Rohr said of Etty Hillesum: “What creates such altruistic and loving person? Such freedom and generosity of spirit are almost unimaginable to me.” 

In 2013, Pope Benedict XVI pronounced her a woman “transfigured by faith,” so filled with “love and inner peace” that despite knowing she’d die in the Holocaust, she was able to declare, ‘I live in constant intimacy with God.’

LAST MESSAGE FROM ETTY: 

On 7 September 1943, a freight train with 987 Jews aboard departed from the Westerbork Transit Camp in the east Netherlands to the Auschwitz Concentration Camp in occupied Poland. Sitting on her backpack in an overcrowded railway car, twenty-nine-year-old Etty Hillesum wrote this postcard to her friend Christine who lived in Deventer. It read: ‘The Lord is my high tower. In the end the departure came without warning. We have left the camp singing…’    Then she threw the card from the train – her last sign of life. It was retrieved by a farmer, and it now resides in the Jewish Holocaust Museum, Amsterdam. 

PRAYER  4   by Etty Hillesum

"It' s sometimes hard to conceive and admit, my God, all that Your earthly creatures are inflicting on each other in these unchained times. But I don't shut myself away, my God, I continue to look everything in the face, I don't run away from anything, I try to understand and dissect the worst exactions, I always try to find the trace of man in his nakedness, his fragility. Buried among the monstrous ruins of his absurd acts... I look deep into Your world, my God, I don't flee from reality to take refuge in beautiful dreams. yet - I mean, there's room for beautiful dreams next to the cruelest reality - and I persist in praising your Creation, my God, in spite of everything! So be it. "

POEM 2   An Iris for Etty by Brian  Volck  The Christian Century

The suddenness took you by surprise, not 

that you didn’t know the day would come when, 

forced to board an eastbound train, you would join 

the many already immolated, 

mere smoke and ash under gray Polish skies.

You had, after all, refused to escape, 

remained resolute as you witnessed 

your people’s collective catastrophe 

and—taking full measure of their despair— 

became the ‘thinking heart of the barracks’.

ETTY PRAYS:

God take me by Your hand, I shall follow You faithfully, and not resist too much,

Shall evade none of the tempests life has in store for me, I shall try to face it as best I can. 

I sometimes think I long for the seclusion of a nunnery. But I know I must seek you amongst people, out in the world. And that is what I shall do…

I vow to live my life out there to the full. 

CLOSING VIDEO SONG     Write Everyday Down by Ashish & Joseph https://youtu.be/OGdkW0OSyHs?si=xDRWqVRlHYcgzUhf   

Check playback speed to be 1.7

REFERENCES AND RESOURCES

Etty Hillesum House website: https://ettyhillesumhuis.nl/en/etty-hillesum/

Modern Mystics School: https://school.spiritualwanderlust.org/the-modern-mystics-school

If you have a major crush on the contemplative life, check out:  spiritualwanderlust.org

Coetsier, M. G. S. (2008). Etty Hillesum and the flow of presence: A Voegelinian analysis. University of Missouri Press.

Days Press, 365, & Elise Verhoeven, M. (2026). 365 Days with Etty Hillesum: Inner freedom, love in the midst of darkness, and the courage to remain human. Independently published.

Dear, J. (2025). Universal love: Surrendering to the God of peace. Orbis books. 

Dear, J. (2017, August 3). Etty Hillesum’s inner journey. National Catholic Reporter. https://www.ncronline.org/blogs/road-peace/etty-hillesums-inner-journey

Etty Hillesum. (1983). An interrupted life. Pantheon.

Etty Hillesum. (1996). An interrupted life the diaries, 1941-1943 ; and, letters from Westerbork. Henry Holt.

Etty Hillesum. (2009). Etty Hillesum. Modern Spiritual Masters.

Etty Hillesum conference (03. (2019). The lasting significance of Etty Hillesum’s writings: Proceedings of the third international Etty Hillesum conference at Middelburg, September 2018. Amsterdam University Press.

Gubar, S. (2006). Falling for Etty Hillesum. Common Knowledge, 12(2), 279–301. https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754x-2005-007

Hirschfeld, G. (1988). Nazi rule and Dutch collaboration. Berg Publishers.

Klaas A.D. Smelik. (2025). The lasting significance of Etty Hillesum’s writings. Taylor & Francis.

Klaas A.D. Smelik, Meins G.S. Coetsier, & Wiersma, J. (2017). The ethics and religious philosophy of Etty Hillesum. BRILL.

Klaas Smelik, van den Brandt, R., & Coetsier, M. G. S. (2010). Spirituality in the writings of Etty Hillesum proceedings of the Etty Hillesum conference at Ghent University, November 2008. BRILL.

Smelik, K. A. D., Van Oord, G., & Netherlands. (2025). Reading Etty Hillesum in context: writings, life, and influences of a visionary author. Routledge, Chapman & Hall, Incorporated.

Wolfe, P. S. (2022, January 31). Holocaust remembrance: Etty Hillesum’s story in her own words. Patrick S Wolfe. https://patrickswolfe.com/2022/01/30/holocaust-remembrance-etty-hillesums-story-in-her-own-words/

Woodhouse, P. (2009). Etty Hillesum: A life transformed. A&C Black.