{"id":7806,"date":"2023-07-02T10:11:35","date_gmt":"2023-07-02T14:11:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/?p=7806"},"modified":"2023-07-02T14:15:31","modified_gmt":"2023-07-02T18:15:31","slug":"etty-hillesum-and-god","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/?p=7806","title":{"rendered":"Etty Hillesum and “God”"},"content":{"rendered":"

I have been reading the Letters and Diary of Etty Hillesum<\/a>. \u00a0She was a Dutch Jew, and began writing a journal at the suggestion of Julius Spier, who was her teacher, therapist, and lover. \u00a0She died in Auschwitz in November 1943. \u00a0I came across this passage written on December 21, 1941:<\/p>\n

From Etty<\/a>, p197<\/p>\n

Great confidence, truly great confidence, has very slowly been maturing in me of late.\u00a0 <\/span>Feeling safe and secure in Your hands, oh God.\u00a0 <\/span>I am no longer cut off quite so often from that deep undercurrent within me.\u00a0 <\/span>And when I feel fervent and elated, then it is neither forced nor wayward but based on the certainty of that undercurrent.\u00a0 <\/span>Nor do I still keep bumping into the sharp corners of the day.<\/p>\n

Much as one should not set about studying a person with rigidly fixed ideas, so one should also not do that with a book, a day, a meal, or anything else.\u00a0 <\/span>If I begin this Sunday by remembering the last one and believing that this one is going to be another glorious Sunday just like it, then the day is bound to go wrong.\u00a0 <\/span>I should be doing it an injustice, fixing it with my own preconceived ideas.\u00a0 <\/span>I wouldn\u2019t be giving it a chance to develop along its own lines.\u00a0 <\/span>I am very slowly beginning to accept that, and as a result I am becoming freer and freer, learning not to inhibit the growth of anything, be it a person, or a day, or a book, or God Himself, or myself.\u00a0 <\/span>Inhibition must be distinguished carefully from creative intervention.\u00a0 <\/span>From the struggle to express oneself.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The process she’s describing sounds a lot like my attempts to follow Tosha Silver’s program<\/a> and my difficulty in letting go<\/a>.<\/p>\n

From Wikipedia<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Hillesum addressed God repeatedly in her diaries, regarding him not as a saviour, but as a power one must nurture inside of oneself: “Alas, there doesn’t seem to be much You Yourself can do about our circumstances, about our lives. Neither do I hold You responsible. You cannot help us, but we must help You and defend Your dwelling place inside us to the last.”<\/sup><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

My biggest difficulty is not understanding “God” as a power inside of myself, but instead seeing “God” as a capricious, malicious, and willful omnipotent being, who pays no attention to me. I am restricted by a belief I described in 1996<\/a>:<\/p>\n

But mostly my experience of the universe is that it\u2019s at best unhelpful, at worst malicious, that it\u2019s set me some hard and difficult assignment, refused to give me help with it or even make it clear what the assignment is, it has some expectation of me that I keep failing to fulfill, it\u2019s just waiting to punish me badly for every mistake and sneer at my attempts to do something \u201cgood\u201d, to make something \u201cbeautiful\u201d.\u00a0 Well, I see that I\u2019m not describing the Universe at all, but my childhood experience of Mom & Dad<\/a>, where I kept failing to satisfy their expectation, and got no help or guidance at all, just sneers and invalidation when I ran into trouble.\u00a0 I can\u2019t believe that the Universe is like this.\u00a0 Surely the One who made daffodils<\/a> is capable of more compassion and support than that.\u00a0 It seems like I\u2019ve got so entirely caught in the world conditioned by my parents that I\u2019ve completely lost my sense of some bigger wider universe, where compassion and support and abundance are available, and especially support for being one\u2019s \u201cbig self\u201d, living one\u2019s big life, really using and living out of one\u2019s creative power and strength.\u00a0 I see how afraid I am of being punished and abandoned if I dare to live out of my real power.\u00a0 Gosh that makes me mad!\u00a0 Something showed up in my dream \u2014 I am being restricted by my parents\u2019 \u201cpost-hypnotic\u201d suggestion to live the kind of life that would have made them comfortable, not the kind of life my soul is capable of.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have been reading the Letters and Diary of Etty Hillesum. \u00a0She was a Dutch Jew, and began writing a journal at the suggestion of Julius Spier, who was her teacher, therapist, and lover. \u00a0She died in Auschwitz in November … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7806","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-present-day","category-spirit"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7806","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7806"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7806\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7806"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7806"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7806"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}