Lighting The Dark

an Advent calendar for tender times

✨ Welcome and thank you for joining me on this journey to find glimpses of light in dark times. If this is your first email, you can read an introduction to the project here and find links to catch up with any posts you’ve missed at the end of this email.

We are now in the third week of Advent, burning a candle for joy alongside the first two candles for hope and peace. Joy is the theme of this week’s sharings. ✨

As our third Advent candle burns and we approach the intense darkness of the winter solstice, I want to share some of the luminous writings of Etty Hillesum (1914 – 1943), a young woman with an astonishing ability to find transcendental joy amid absolute horror. 

Etty was born into a non-practicing Jewish family in the Netherlands in 1914. At 18, she moved to Amsterdam to begin a law degree and her life looked full of promise. But as anti-Semitic measures ramped up after the German occupation of Holland, Etty’s freedoms began to disappear. The noose tightened around Dutch Jews when they were obliged to wear the yellow Star of David in 1942. At that point Etty took on a job at the Jewish Council, and in 1943 she volunteered to accompany the first group of Jews that were sent to Westerbork transit camp, a staging location on the route to concentration camps elsewhere.

When the scale of suffering led many to abandon their faith, Etty developed a fiercely personal relationship with God, largely free from any religious dogma. Hers was a God of love and her devotion to him meant loving every suffering person she encountered, even including the camp guards. She practised a seemingly selfless devotion to others, and in doing so found deep meaning, and even joy, in the most unimaginably awful environment. "Isn’t it almost godless to keep having such faith in God in times like these? And isn’t it frivolous to go on finding life so beautiful?” she wrote in a letter in 1942.

On 5 July 1943, Etty’s personnel status at Westerbork was revoked and she became a camp internee, along with her father, mother, and brother. On September 7, the family were all put on transport to Auschwitz, where they were murdered less than three months later.

It is from Etty’s diaries and letters that we find evidence of her astounding intellectual and spiritual life. Here are a few fragments of her writing.

There are moments when I can see right through life and the human heart, when I understand more and more and become calmer and calmer, and am filled with a faith in God that has grown so quickly inside me that it frightened me at first but has now become inseparable from me.

If God does not help me to go on, then I shall have to help God. — The surface of the earth is gradually turning into one great prison camp, and soon there will be nobody left outside. … I don't fool myself about the real state of affairs, and I've even dropped the pretense that I'm out to help others. I shall merely try to help God as best I can, and if I succeed in doing that, then I shall be of use to others as well. But I mustn't have heroic illusions about that either.

Tonight for the first time I lay in the dark with burning eyes as scene after scene of human suffering passed before me. I shall promise You one thing, God, just one very small thing: I shall never burden my today with cares about my tomorrow, although that takes some practice. Each day is sufficient unto itself. I shall try to help You, God, to stop my strength ebbing away, though I cannot vouch for it in advance. But 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, 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.

The sky is full of birds, the purple lupins stand up so regally and peacefully, two little old women have sat down on the box for a chat, the sun is shining on my face — and right before our eyes, mass murder. The whole thing is simply beyond comprehension.

“The whole thing is simply beyond comprehension.” I know that is how many so people are feeling at the end of 2023.

It seems that we are all in some kind of spiritual training this Advent to be able to hold both the joy and the sorrow of the world with integrity. In Etty Hillesum, I think we can find an extraordinary teacher. Allow me to share just two more fragments from her radiant writing.

You must be able to bear your sorrow; even if it seems to crush you, you will be able to stand up again, for human beings are so strong, and your sorrow must become an integral part of yourself, part of your body and your soul, you mustn’t run away from it, but bear it like an adult.  Do not relieve your feelings through hatred, do not seek to be avenged….  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. But if you do not clear a decent shelter for your sorrow, and instead reserve most of the space inside you for hatred and thoughts of revenge – from which new sorrows will be born for others – then sorrow will never cease in this world and will multiply.  And if you have given sorrow the space its gentle origins demand, then you may truly say: life is beautiful and so rich.  So beautiful and so rich that it makes you want to believe in God.

Does that mean I am never sad, that I never rebel, always acquiesce, and love life no matter what the circumstances?  No, far from it.  I believe that I know and share the many sorrows and sad circumstances that a human being can experience, but I do not cling to them, I do not prolong such moments of agony.  They pass through me, like life itself, as a broad, eternal stream, they become part of that stream, and life continues.  And as a result all my strength is preserved, does not become tagged on to futile sorrow or rebelliousness.

I find life beautiful, and I feel free.  The sky within me is as wide as the one stretching above my head.  Life is hard, but that is no bad thing….I am a happy person and I hold life dear indeed.

Blessings to you on the longest night of the year. Tomorrow the light begins to return so let’s keep our candles for hope, peace and joy burning bright tonight.

Sophie ✨

Lighting The Dark is an online Advent Calendar compiled by Sophie Howarth. If you would like to invite family and friends to join you in receiving it, the sign-up link is here.

If you have just arrived, welcome and thank you for sharing in the mystery and possibility of Advent with me. You can find an introduction to the project on December 1 and catch up with posts sent on December 2, December 3, December 4, December 5, December 6, December 7, December 8, December 9, December 10, December 11, December 12, December 13, December 14, December 15, December 16, December 17, December 18, December 19 and December 20.