Bishop Rowan Williams on Etty Hillesum

um bishop rowan thank you very very much for agreeing to have this conversation on etti hillison with me it's a great honor and a privilege to be able to hear what you have to say about this great woman who

i will ask you to tell us a little bit about her but also perhaps for the sake of our viewers to say that it was your mentioning of her in your talks on prayer a series of six talks i think you gave on prayer some years ago and one of the ladies you mentioned uh in those talks was Etty Hillesum and that sent laureen my wife and myself on a quest to find out more about we read the diaries to which you refer and uh and we're immensely grateful to you for having talked about her in those talks but what we would really like to do now is hear from you uh something you talked about her in the context of prayer and what i would like you to talk about now is first of all to tell us something about who she is and then to say how you think her message has a particular relevance and a helpfulness in our current predicament

thank you so much Reza thank you for the opportunity to speak about somebody who's important to me Etty Hillesum was

n the Netherlands in the late: 1930

she's in the the holding camps westerbock um in the Netherlands she's surrounded by people in huge confusion and distress of all ages and backgrounds she also has to confront the reality of the German soldiers who are guarding the place so what she says is this is a place where it's very hard to see the hand of god but that means if i truly trust god i must be in part the answer to that question i must take responsibility for god's presence and god's faithfulness and god's love being visible and that strange phrase which uses taking responsibility for god i mean on the surface it's the most bizarre phrases how could we possibly but i think we can understand what she's saying but in situations of pain and terror a person of faith is called to step out and to be there on behalf of god their presence their love their faithfulness has given me to the hands of god to be a sign for others and that is a really really remarkable insight i think about the life of faith and she she comes back to that more than once her own presence in the camp her own engagement with others is quite clearly formed by this and there's another very deeply moving passage where he describes confronting one of the camp guards and thinking that here is a confused frightened young man who has been caught up in unimaginable evil and pushed to the forefront of the action of evil how do i respond and she says i have to try and see the frightened young man behind the uniform i have to extend some kind of understanding some kind of empathy to this person who is as much a prisoner as i am

and in some contexts people might say oh but you know that's a sentimental or a invasive thing this this man is representing evil has to be existed i don't think that petty Harrison believed we we had to be sentimental about this she simply says it is a fact that the person who does evil when the person himself is evil are both caught up in a kind of prison and part of the role of the person who suffers especially as a person of faith is to bring into that terrible situation of imprisonment something that is different something that is new so sorry it's a long answer but something about her life something about the character and those two really central features of how she responds to the unimaginably terrible crisis she faced the last words in her journals unforgettably are as they move off towards Auschwitz on the train we left the camp singing and that still causes the hair to stand up on the neck i think she knows the terror she's going into but she is determined that for that moment she will take responsibility for another reality another truth being visible

reminding us of that yes i i remember she wrote this on a card i think didn't she uh

yes and um can we just go back bishop rowan to um the beginning of what you said and and the the affair that she had with her teacher um was this the person who also gave her some kind of psychotherapy was he a psychologist that's right yes um looking at the story we would now quite rightly i think identify this as importantly an abusive relationship somebody who exploited his position um by exploiting a patient sexually um and yet of course she refuses to see herself as a victim and it's it's a difficult it's a difficult aspect of her life i think i would be easier if she if he protested more about it but i i seem to remember that she actually has some passages in which she expresses the the profundity and the totality of her love for this human being in a way that made me think perhaps this was a foretaste of the love that she would be able to transfer as it were to the source of all love she certainly was completely overwhelmed by this his passion and maybe we can look at that and say yes objectively there can be no doubt this was an abusive relationship and yet perhaps one thing that she grew into is the sense that there are certain kinds of passion and certain kinds of self-given which are appropriate only to god only to the almighty and i would have been intrigued to know what five years later she might have sent looking back on this relationship so nothing to justify nothing i think to absolve this particular teacher and yet yet something is discovered in that for for her by her and she she makes of that abusive difficult and deeply deeply ambiguous relationship something that can be the ground forecasters who said something else i don't know it's these are difficult territories aren't they yes if i could go back to another thing that you said about uh need to actually physically move your prayer um could one see a relationship between that overwhelming need to physically prostrate to god and a commensurate strength in her ability not to kneel to the nazis come on see your relationship then i think this is absolutely crucial as i i think this is this is the heart of how faith works in times of terror and depression and violence matters the the recognition of the sovereignty of god for so many people throughout the centuries has been a recognition that no other power has that claim upon you and so as all our traditions say in one way or another our sense of absolute obligation to and surrender to god is the source of our deepest freedom so when saint augustine speaks of our service as a kind of royal position um

whom to serve is to reign that's that's such a powerful way of saying the claim of human power upon us is never totally never complete and what the love and obedience of god gives to us is that space that no one else can occupy

now one of the people that petty Hillesum met in westerbock was another of the great figures of the century um Etty stein and who had been a professional philosopher in Germany and a very very creative very remarkable sophisticated intellectual again from a jewish background she had decided to everyone's surprise after the first world war to become a roman catholic and then to become an enclosed carmelite nun she wrote many wonderful works on the life of prayer she had been sent by her religious order to the Netherlands from Germany to escape arrest by the nazis but they caught up with her the convent in the Netherlands and the story goes that when she was summoned to the parlor to meet the military officers they greeted her as usual with the salute hitler and she replied laudato Jesus christens may Jesus Christ be praised as if to say that's my that is the sovereignty to which i answer

that's absolutely wonderful um

would it be fair to say that it's only in one's submission to what etti called a power that is higher and greater than the Nazi party to that supreme authority is that the only way we could have access to the psychological strength the strength of character that eti manifested at such a young age early 20s twenties

is that the only way or would anti say that that there are strong people who can resist the nazis with their willpower with this or that or would she say that no you need god

i think she would say this is something you can't do with your own willpower

whether you name it and speak of it with the fullness that it was my faith might do you you will still implicitly be believing that there is something if you like something sacred something protected within you which can't be touched there are people called supposedly secular convictions who in effect believe something like that but i think the christian the Muslim the jew the Buddhist would want to say fine but what you're talking about is what we mean by that sacred core of reality which is the divine image and the divine presence and action within us but if you don't have that conviction that there is something completely immune to attack and defeat something which is simply true whatever the world says i think it is impossible in the long run and the danger of a completely secular society is to line up the danger of a society where people have lost the sense that there is some sacred space ruin everyone something holy inaccessible unchangeable held in the hand of god and again i remember the conversation in south Africa about 30 years ago with a very celebrated leader of the church in south Africa who had been subject to a great deal of persecution imprisonment harassment and um i recall after our conversation saying to him i just want to thank you for for being the person you are because you are so important an example for many of us hard words to say but you have to save him sometimes and he shrugged his shoulders and he said well you know there comes a point where you realize that they can't touch you

and what he meant was they can't touch you they can't touch that sacred core which is held in the hand of god and that's what gave him the courage to do what he did

wonderful well thank you very very much i think that that's a great note on which to conclude this short conversation um and uh i think you've given us a lot of fruitful thought and it will help many of us to go back to the diaries and to read them and hopefully to bring into our our present struggles in the face of this crisis this global crisis derives some uh inspiration from activists fearlessness in the face not just of death which is always there but of this encroaching evil that is full of unknown pain and suffering and she she transcended and she helped others to transcend it through her love of god so thank you very much bishop Rowan deeply great thank you