BRAVERY

My last roses continue to bloom as the days grow darker and colder.  One of the things I love best about the fall is all the colours and the stillness as nature takes time to rest.

When I went to bed last night the first three miners had been rescued.  After 69 days underground in the humid darkness these brave men are being brought to the surface in a specially-made steel cage.  Their families had been praying faithfully and waited anxiously for their loved ones to be reunited to them.  I cannot imagine how those miners endured being in that torture chamber but I believe that their faith in God's presence with them helped them. It was a miracle that they had been found and also that they would be able to communicate with their loved ones in the days to come.  They were told the rescue would take months.

In the meantime they would face death together.

This reminded me of how in the past i had read about a young woman who faced death and indeed did die in the concentration camp of Auschwitz.  Her name is Etty  Hillsman.   She would be sent to Auschwitz in a packed railway car sitting on a rucksack with her mother and father and brother.  She scribbled a few words on a postcard and released it out a crack not knowing if it would ever be found or reach the person it was addressed to.  The words that she wrote before her journey there and her words that have been saved from her writings are truly inspiring   She had during the years previous kept a diary not knowing what her fate would be in the uncertain times as a Jew living in the harsh and fearful world of the Third Reich.  She wanted with all her being not to hate as she saw it as a soul sickness.  She was a Jew living in Holland in 1941.  In the fall of 1940 the first series of laws were passed designed to set Jews apart.  All Jewish-owed enterprises were to be registered as were all Dutch Jews.  This caused poverty to become the first stage to their distruction.  She would see her favorite professors arrested or harassed into excile or suicide.

She has to face the reality of death and decides not to waste her energies fearing or denying or evading it.  This is how she discovers freedom even though there is great desolation all around her.  She was pressed by friends to go into hiding but refused.

  These were published in English in 1984 as "An Interrupted Life".  The words she wrote were a therapeutic tool that changed her life from one of playfulness to one of prayerfulness,  to find strength for herself and for the other lives she impacted. 

"Slowly but inexorably while the world around her was falling to pieces, Etty moved into a state of grace.  She had been at odds with organized religion bu through inspirational literature and spiritual practices she would experience "the inward tug of God"  This was before she was sent to Auschwitz and when she was sent there her faith strengthened her and she was able to feel God's presence even there.

 She lived out the belief that is true to my heart that religion is a tool that can help us live with compassion; aware of our humanness but also aware of our need for holiness.
Etty had struggled with depression and mood swings that would cause her to experience writer's block.

Although she had in her past used the word God she thought it was primitive and primordial, "a makeshift construction".  I feel that way too but one uses the words that express the mystery of life in a term that people can identify in some way.  We all may view God in different ways and in different forms but there is an energy that fills the emptiness and feeds the soul that nothing else can do. 

Etty wrote: "I try to look things straight in the face, even the worst crimes, and to discover the small, naked human being amide the wreckage caused by man's senseless deeds. . . . .I am no fanciful visionary, God. .
I try to face up to your world, God, not to escape from reality into beautiful dreams."

This woman of sharp intelligence and irreverence whose greatest desire was to touch the world through her writing.  She had experience relationships and viewed sexuality with matter-of-fact humour.  She was not searching for God but for freedom in her life as a woman who could make her own choices.  She hoped to be one of a group she called emancipated women.

She learned in one of her relationships with a Jewish divorced man, father of two daughter, a successful business man as  he tried to help others find courage in the face of suffering and he viewed his gifts as a sacred trust.  She was able to turn, with difficulty, from a critical, rational atheist, to one who believed and it was her faith in the end that gave her the courage to live.

This is a picture from the T.V.  showing them surrounding the 32nd miner being rescued from the mine in Chile.
{I am writing this very quickly after a late start because I know Sandra will look on her computer as soon as she gets to work and I want to have this posted.}