Dwelling Places

“Alas, there doesn’t seem to be much You Yourself can do about our circumstances, about our lives.”

-Etty Hillesum 

As a young girl, when I heard my first stories about WWII and the extermination camps, I was deeply troubled by God’s seeming inability (or unwillingness) to help the Jews. 

Deeply. Troubled.

It was like a small trauma to my young soul. I loved God, and I sensed He loved me. I knew who Jesus was, and I could sense His goodness as well…And I couldn’t make that match up with what happened to the people in those camps. 

I just couldn’t.

Round and round, round and round my young mind circled endlessly, trying to make it somehow okay that God did not intercede for his people.

And I couldn’t. 
I couldn’t make it okay.

Now I’m a woman grown, and I’m reading the writings of Etty Hillesum, a Dutch woman who wrestled with the same thoughts while in the middle of it.  (Yes, I’m reading this in the middle of a global pandemic. I can’t help the timing. It is what it is.)

By April of 1942, the Germans were rounding up Jews all over Holland and moving them to Amsterdam. From Amsterdam, Jews were transported to a transit camp in Westerbork, where, after a brief hold, they were shipped out by train to the extermination camps.

And Etty watched it all happen.

But Etty did more than watch and write. In a bitter twist of irony, the Nazis felt they needed Jews to deal with the Jews at Westerbork, so they created a “Jewish Council” and ordered the Council to implement their orders -- and Etty managed to get a job with the Council. Etty used her job to do what she could whenever she could, walking through the overcrowded hospital at Westerbork, satchel over her shoulder, leaning over patients, asking, “Can I do anything for you?” And we know that her presence made a difference – because other people wrote about Etty.

Etty writes about what she saw in that transit camp in heartbreaking detail. Not just about people sleeping three to a pallet, shaved heads, lack of food and the cruelty of the guards, but about toddlers playing near the body of their unconscious mother, and a young girl just assigned to an extermination-camp train whispering to Etty,

“Have you heard? I have to go…How hard it is to die…I can’t take it all in.”

BUT ALSO

Etty writes about her inner spiritual life. Even there. Even in Westerbork. Friends, Etty feels God’s presence in Westerbork.

Etty writes about tipping her head back to see the bright blue sky overhead at Westerbork, feeling God’s presence and weeping. She writes about the rainbow she saw after rain reduced the camp once again to mud, she writes about the purple lupines, and she writes often, and tenderly, about her certainty that she must help God.

Reading her words, Etty feels real to me. She draws me in. I reach out to Etty, across the expanse of years, my hand outstretched, Take my hand, Etty, I urge her, as if I can somehow pull her out of that hellish place. 

And Etty, with her tousled hair and large brown eyes, Etty, with a small patch of eczema on the hand with which she writes, Etty, who refused friends who wanted to save her from that place – 

Etty gazes back at me and wordlessly hands me a note she wrote to God:

“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.  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.”

I am dumbstruck. 
I look up from the note, but Etty is gone…

I’m in awe of that kind of love and tenderness for God, emanating from the middle of – how do you say what it was? There are no words horrible enough or awful enough to capture that period in our history.  But I’m also saddened to think of Etty, and others, waiting for a rescue that doesn’t come…and ultimately concluding that help isn’t coming, after all.

Working for the Jewish Council was no protection. Eventually Etty’s name was assigned to a body-packed box car on a Tuesday train bound for Auchwitz.  She died in a gas chamber there just three months later.

Help did arrive for Westerbork though. In April of 1945, help arrived when enough human beings fought together to safeguard the little piece of God in others.

--- 

Under our recent stay-at-home order, I had time to think about Etty. Time to think surprising thoughts like:

When people cry out, “Why doesn’t God come and save us?” do you think the angels wring their hands and cry, “Why don’t the humans go and save them?”

Time to think over Teresa of Ávila’s words: 

“Christ has no body now but yours. No hands, no feet on earth but yours… Yours are the hands, yours are the feet, yours are the eyes, you are his body. Christ has no body now on earth but yours.”

I think Teresa and Etty would understand each other. 
I think they were saying the same thing.

And while I do NOT – I repeat, NOT -- compare our difficulties with the pandemic NOW to the horror of what Etty and the others faced in that camp THEN…I have had time to think about the ways we experience the feeling that rescue is not coming in modern day.

Healings that do not seem to come — for ourselves or for loved ones.
Money that does not come.
Dreams that will not come to fruition, after all.

Some of us have had experiences where we felt help was not coming. 
Some of us will have them yet.

To those who have passed through this feeling, I can only say, talk to us, share your stories (when you’re ready). Tell us what you learned. We need to know.

For the rest of us
I’M THINKING

As we move through the months to come, when some are sick and some are without work, when many feel unsteady and uncertain…let us defend His dwelling place in ourselves and in others. Let’s be very, very kind, and let’s each do what little we can to help.

Let’s make sure that our brothers and sisters who are struggling don’t conclude help isn’t coming. 

Maybe it’s listening with compassion to someone’s pandemic story. (With no judging whether WE think what they went through was hard or not.) Maybe it’s helping someone financially. Maybe, depending on where we live, it’s wearing a mask a little while longer to protect our brothers and sisters. 

Because here’s the magic of it. When we (both individually and collectively) do what we can to help, we set God free, and our seemingly small human efforts become imbued with all that He is and all that He is capable of.  

So let’s help God.
Let’s defend His dwelling place in ourselves and others.
Let’s set God free.