Can we live this?

When I want a dose of deep sanity, I open Etty Hillesum’s remarkable chronicle of her final years, as a young Jewish woman observing the destruction of life as she knew it in Amsterdam during World War II, An Interrupted Life.  Here are two short excerpts that could fill a day of reflection, and then some.

 

“Ultimately, we have just one moral duty: to reclaim large areas of peace in ourselves, more and more peace, and to reflect it toward others. And the more peace there is in us, the more peace there will also be in our troubled world.”

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“Sometimes my day is crammed full of people and talk and yet I have the feeling of living in utter peace and quiet. And the tree outside my window, in the evenings, is a greater experience than all those people put together.”

― Etty Hillesum