Etty Hillesum - Matthew 6: 25-34

Les écrits d'Etty Hillesum. Journaux et lettres 1941-1943 (The writings of Etty Hillesum. Diaries and letters 1941-1943. Complete edition). Paris: Seuil, 2008, 1081 p.

Sunday morning prayer [July 12, 1942].
These are frightening times, my God. Last night for the first time I lay awake in the dark, my eyes burning, images of human suffering flashing before me. I will promise you one thing, my God, oh, a trifle: I will keep from hanging on to the present day, like so many weights, the anxieties that the future inspires in me; but that takes some training. For the moment, each day has its own punishment. I will help you, my God, not to extinguish you in me, but I cannot guarantee anything in advance. One thing is becoming clearer to me: it is not you who can help us, but we who can help you - and in doing so, we help ourselves. This is all we can save in this time and it is also the only thing that counts: a little of you in us, God. Perhaps we can also help to bring you to light in the martyred hearts of others. Yes, my God, you seem to have little ability to change a situation that is finally inseparable from this life. I am not asking you to account for this, it is up to you on the contrary to call us to account, one day. It is becoming more and more clear to me, almost with every beat of my heart, that you cannot help us, but that it is up to us to help you and to defend to the end the house that shelters you in us. There are people - would you believe it? - who at the last moment try to put vacuum cleaners, forks and silver spoons in a safe place, instead of protecting you, my God. And there are people who try to protect their own body, which is now only the receptacle of a thousand anxieties and a thousand hatreds. They say: "I will not fall into their clutches!" They forget that one is never under the clutches of anyone as long as one is in your arms. This conversation with you, my God, is beginning to give me back some peace. I will have many more with you in the near future, keeping you from running away from me. You will no doubt also experience times of dearth in me, God, when my trust will no longer feed you so richly, but believe me, I will continue to work for you, remain faithful to you, and not drive you from my pen.

I do not lack strength to face the great suffering, the heroic suffering, my God, I rather fear the thousand small daily worries that sometimes assail you like a biting vermin. Finally, I scratch my head a little and say to myself every day: today has been provided for, the protective walls of a welcoming home still wrap your shoulders like a familiar, long-worn garment; you have enough food for today and the white sheets and warm blankets of your bed await you for one more night, so you have no excuse for wasting even the smallest atom of energy on these small material worries. Make good use of every minute of this day, make it a fruitful day, another strong stone in the foundation on which the days of misery and anguish that lie ahead will be built. –

Behind the house, the rains and storms of the last few days have ravaged the jasmine, its white flowers floating scattered in the mud of the black puddles on the flat roof of the garage. But somewhere inside me that jasmine continues to bloom, as exuberant, as tender as before. And it spreads its fragrance around your home, my God, you see how I take care of you. I don't only offer you my tears and my sad presentiments, on this windy and grey Sunday morning I even bring you a fragrant jasmine. And I will offer you all the flowers I meet on my way, my God, and they are legion, believe me. I want to make your stay as pleasant as possible. And to take a random example: if I were locked up in a narrow cell and I saw a cloud passing beyond my bars, I would bring you that cloud, my God, if I had the strength. I can't guarantee anything in advance, but intentions are the best in the world, you see.

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July 21 [1942]. Thursday evening, 9 o'clock
This afternoon, during the long drive from the office to the house, as the worries wanted to assail me again and did not seem to end, I suddenly said to myself: "You who claim to believe in God, be a little logical, surrender to his will and trust him. Then you have no right to worry about tomorrow."

And as I took a few steps with him along the dock - and I thank you, God, that I can still do that, when I would only spend five minutes a day with him, those few moments would still be the reward for a whole day of hard work - I heard him say, "Oh these worries we all have!" I resumed, "Let's be logical, if we trust God, we have to trust him all the way." -

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[Wednesday] July 22 [1942], 8 a.m.
My God, give me strength, not only spiritual strength, but also physical strength. I want to confess to you, in a moment of weakness: if I have to leave this house, I won't know what to do. But I don't want to waste a single day worrying about it. Take these worries away from me, because if I had to carry them on top of everything else, life would be impossible! I am very tired this morning, in all my body, and I hardly have the courage to face the work of the day. I don't believe much in this work; if it were to be prolonged I would end up, I believe, totally amorphous and discouraged. However, I am grateful to you for having torn me away from the peace of this office to throw me into the middle of the suffering and worries of this time. It would not be difficult to have a romance with you in the protected atmosphere of an office, but what counts is to take you, intact, everywhere with me and to remain faithful to you against all odds, as I have always promised you. When I walk through the streets like this, your world gives me a lot to think about - no, think is not the word, I try to penetrate things with a new meaning. I often have the impression that I can look at our whole era with my eyes, like a phase of history whose ins and outs I can discern and which I can "fit into its place" in the great whole. And I am especially grateful that I feel neither resentment nor hatred, but that I feel a great acquiescence which is something other than resignation, and a form of understanding of our time, strange as it may seem! We must know how to understand this time as we understand people; after all, it is we who make the time. It is what it is, it is up to us to understand it as such, in spite of the fright that its spectacle sometimes inspires us.

I follow a clean inner path, increasingly simple, increasingly bare, but nevertheless paved with kindness and trust. –

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[Tuesday,] Sept. 22. [1942]
I would like to live like the lilies of the field. If we understood this time well, this is what it could teach us: to live like a lily of the field.

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[Thursday] September 24 [1942].
Last Days Enrichment: the birds of the air and the lilies of the field, and Matthew 6:33: "Seek ye first the kingdom and the righteousness of God; and all these things shall be added unto you." -

And tomorrow I will meet Ru Cohen at the "Café de Paris" - on the Adama van Scheltema square I saw people in nightgowns and slippers - it's getting so cold already - we even took someone who was in the last stage of cancer, and last night a Jewish man was shot on Van Baerle Street, which is just around the corner from my street, as he tried to escape. Many people are being shot all over the world, as I write this, next to my Indian pink cyclamen, by the light of my metal desk lamp. As I write, my left hand rests on the small open Bible, my head hurts, my stomach hurts, but in my heart there is still the sunshine of the summer days on the moor and the field of yellow lupines that stretched to the delousing shed.

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[Tuesday,] September 29 [1942]
You used to say, "This is a sin against the spirit, it will have to be paid for. Every sin against the spirit must be paid for sooner or later." I also believe that every "sin" against human charity must be paid for, in the man himself and in the outside world. –

Again, I note for my own use: Matthew 6:34: "Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will take care of itself. To each day there is enough trouble." -

Every day, we have to eliminate them like fleas, the thousand little worries that inspire us for the days to come and that eat away at our creative forces. We mentally take a whole series of measures for the following days - and nothing, but nothing at all, happens as planned. One day is enough. You have to do what you have to do, and for the rest, you must not let yourself be contaminated by the innumerable little anxieties, the thousand little worries that are so many motions of censure towards God. Everything will work out in the end for my residence permit in Amsterdam and for my ration coupons, there's no point in tormenting myself for the moment, I'd better get on with a Russian theme. Our only moral obligation is to clear vast clearings of peace within ourselves and to spread them from one to the next, until this peace radiates out to others. And the more peace there is in people, the more peace there will be in this world in turmoil.

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[Wednesday,] September 30 [1942].
It seems to me that I discern little by little with a growing clearness the gaping abysses where the creative forces of a being and its joy of living vanish. These are the cracks that open up in our psyche and swallow up everything. Every day has its own punishment. The worst sufferings of the man, they are those which he fears. And then there is the matter, it is always it which draws the spirit to it, and not the opposite. "You live too much by the spirit." And why, Osias? Because my body didn't give in to your feverish hands at once? Man is definitely a strange creature. What things I would like to write! Somewhere deep inside of me: a workshop where Titans are remaking the world. One day, at the end of my strength, I wrote: why does it have to be in my little head, under my skull, that the world waits to be cleared up? I still think so sometimes, in a fit of almost satanic presumption. I know where this comes from: all my creative forces - I thank you, my God, for having given me so many - are intact and unaltered in me. I manage every time to extract them from the clutches of daily anxieties and worries, I know how to free my creative forces little by little from material contingencies, from the representation of hunger, cold and perils. For the great obstacle is always the representation and not the reality. Reality, one takes on with all the suffering, all the difficulties attached to it - one takes it on: one hoists it on one's shoulders and it is by carrying it that one increases one's endurance. But the representation of suffering (which is not the real "suffering », for this is fruitful and can make life precious to you), one must break it. And by breaking these representations that imprison life behind their gates, one releases in oneself the real life with all its forces, and one becomes able to bear the real suffering, in one's own life and in that of humanity. –

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Letter to Christine Van Nooten. Before July 31, 1943. (excerpt)
An unforgettable friend - whose peaceful end still fills me with gratitude every day - taught me in time this great lesson from Matthew, 6: "Do not worry about tomorrow: tomorrow will worry about itself. To each day there is enough trouble." This is the only attitude that allows you to face life here. So it is with a certain peace of mind that I lay my many earthly worries at God's feet every evening. They are often very trivial worries, for example when I wonder how to manage to do the laundry for the whole family, etc. The real, great worries have to be dealt with by God. The real, big worries have totally ceased to be worries - they have become a Destiny to which one is now welded.

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