Etty Hillesum, a young Jewish woman who died in Auschwitz in 1943 learned this "secret" in the midst of great suffering.
Surrender as Ego-Dissolution: Admitting powerlessness is the first step in dismantling the ego's transmutation process.
Acceptance: By accepting that one cannot control everything, the "personal" drama ceases, allowing the individual to experience "universal" pain without becoming addicted to the suffering.
As Etty recounted, I now realize, God, how much You have given me. So much that was beautiful and so much that was hard to bear. Yet whenever I showed myself ready to bear it, the hard was directly transformed into the beautiful."For the most painful suffering is the suffering we reject and what really hurts is not so much suffering itself as the fear of suffering.
As the Jewish situation in Amsterdam worsened, Etty developed a more intimate, loving relationship with God. We witness in her journals a transition from her speaking of God in the third person to an I-Thou encounter: “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.”
I had a liberating thought that surfaced in me like a hesitant, tender young blade of grass thrusting its way through a wilderness of weeds: if there were only one decent German, then he should be cherished despite that whole barbaric gang, and because of that one decent German it is wrong to pour hatred over an entire people.
Give your sorrow all the space and shelter in yourself that is its due, for if everyone bears his grief honestly and courageously, the sorrow that now fills the world will abate.
Richard Rohr's Meditation on Suffering
“By trying to handle all suffering through willpower denial, medication, or even therapy, we have forgotten something that should be obvious:
We do not handle suffering; suffering handles us–in deep and mysterious ways that become the very matrix of life and especially new life.
Only suffering and certain kinds of awe lead us into genuinely new experiences.all the rest is merely the confirmation of old experience.”
The 28th Rule of Love
By Shams of Tabriz
The past is an interpretation. The future is an illusion. The world does not move through time as if it were a straight line, proceeding from the past to the future. Instead, time moves through and within us, in endless spirals. Eternity does not mean infinite time, but simply timelessness. If you want to experience eternal illumination, put the past and the future out of your mind and remain within the present moment
thank you for this reflection Peter. this is another of Etty’s beautiful quotes that I love: “ultimately, we have just one moral duty; to reclaim large areas of peace in ourselves, more and more peace, and to reflect it towards others. and the more peace there is in us, the more peace there will be in our troubled world. “ 🌍❤️✌️
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