SPIRITUALITY OF THE HEART AND SPIRITUALITIES WITHOUT CHURCHES

SPIRITUALITY OF THE HEART AND

SPIRITUALITIES WITHOUT CHURCHES

Jean Richard, MSC

Right from the beginning, I would like to raise the question that I have in mind. Can our spirituality of the heart have some meaning or interest for the people who are far from the Churches? Is it able to be Gospel for them also? I will make the question more precise. The question is not to know whether we can bring back to the Church those who have distanced themselves from it. That was, I am sure, the concern of Fr. Chevalier in his time. But the question has changed since then. In our approach to the other great religions, for example, we no longer try to convert Jews or Muslims to Christianity. Rather, we want to put them in contact with the Gospel so that their religion, like our own, can benefit from it. Could not the same attitude, the same approach, also be applied to those who are far from any religion? Could we not present the Gospel to them, there where they are, without also insisting that they return to the Church? And for such a communication of the Gospel, could not the spirituality of the heart be the most appropriate means?

I will deal with this question in four steps. First I will show the meaning of the change brought about in the formulation of our spirituality by Fr. Cuskelly. Then I will call to mind two other theological turning points of the last century: spirituality without religion advocated by Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the spirituality without God that one finds in the writings of Paul Tillich. Finally, I will propose an example that illustrates rather well what could be a spirituality without Churches: the witness of Elly Hillesum.

I. A NEW HEART AND A NEW SPIRIT

The new formulation proposed by Fr. Cuskelly appeared as the title of his book: A New Heart and a New Spirit.¹ It is not just a new formulation better suited for today. It evidently contains an implicit reference to the prophets Jeremiah and Ezekiel who spoke of the New Covenant as an inner covenant. For Fr. Cuskelly, this is precisely the transformation made by Fr. Chevalier when he discovered and experienced devotion to the Sacred Heart. There is to be found the essence of his spirituality, the essence of the message that he left us and that we have to re-activate for our own time.

Let us begin, then, with the description that Cuskelly makes of the transformation that happened with Fr. Chevalier when he came into contact with devotion to the Sacred Heart. Cuskelly insists, first of all, on the "serious and severe" character of the spirituality Chevalier had lived up to that point, that of the French school of spirituality:

God was the God of Majesty, Creator and Lord of the universe. Towards God, man's first duty was the duty of religion (usually seen as part of the virtue of justice). Man was obliged to worship, to serve, to adore and to obey his sovereign Lord. Christ, in the writings of this school, was "the perfect Religious," the one who most perfectly adored, obeyed and served. SACRIFICE is the supreme act of religion and on Calvary Christ offered the sacrifice supreme.²

From this, one can understand the meaning that discovery of devotion to the Sacred Heart had for Fr. Chevalier. Cuskelly writes that "he did far more than find a new devotion or a set of pious practices... Revealed in the face of Christ he saw, at last, `the infinite tenderness for us of this God incarnate for our salvation'."³ Thus “it can be easily seen that for Fr. Chevalier, the particular vision and inspiration which came to him through discovering the Heart of Christ was a wonderful experience in his life. It was new, it was fresh, it was different.”⁴

This description of Cuskelly's, exact as it may be, also allows us to glimpse a rather specific interpretation. It presents the spiritual evolution of Fr. Chevalier as the transition from an old to a new covenant. Previously, he was under the domination of a severe law, an outer law that imposed itself on him as an ever more difficult obligation to meet. Now discovery of the Heart of Jesus changes the perspectives. God's demand is no longer that of an outer law, but that of love. It is no longer imposed from outside; it comes rather from inside, from the heart taken over by the love of Christ, through the inspiration of the Spirit. In summary, this passage from the old to the new covenant meant for Fr. Chevalier the transition from an outer covenant, under the aegis of the law and of justice, to an inner covenant, a covenant of the heart and of the spirit.

This is precisely the meaning of the commentary that one may read in the following chapter of Cuskelly's book. It is a question there of restating for our time the essence of Fr. Chevalier's discovery: his charism, his spirituality. To illustrate his point, Cuskelly calls to mind the difference between contract and covenant in the case of marriage. The contract of marriage is a juridical, external act which has no impact, which quickly falls apart, if it is not fulfilled interiorly by the contents of the covenant which is love and gift of self.⁵ The Church itself, however, is situated between contract and covenant. The Church is born of the New Covenant; it is the people of the covenant. But when the initial fervor cools off, it is the contractual, institutional aspect that takes over and dominates. In this case, the Church needs renewal, according to the meaning of the new and inner covenant.⁶This is the need Fr. Chevalier felt and the need we experience today.

It is precisely at this point that Fr. Cuskelly quotes the entire text of the two key passages from the Old Testament about the New Covenant, presented as an inner covenant.⁷ This is the text of Jeremiah 31, 31-34 which ends with this oracle: "I will put my law within them, and I will write it upon their hearts; and I will be their God and they shall be my people." Immediately following this, Cuskelly quotes again Ezekiel 36,26-28, which takes up the same idea and enriches it this time with the mention of the Spirit: "A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you. And l will take out of your flesh the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my spirit within you and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to observe my ordinances... and you shall be my people and I will be your God." The idea of the New Covenant as an inner covenant of the heart and of the spirit appears then in the Old Testament. It will not be fully realized, however, except in the person of Christ. In him, thanks to his Spirit, all those who belong to him may participate in it:

The New Covenant is realized in Christ.... In the depths of his human heart, a son of man rises above all contracts to live in love a delight in God's law, a perfect covenant-love. From that same heart, pierced on the Cross symbolized by the flowing water, he gives us his Spirit that we, too, might delight in being God's people and letting him be our God.⁸

There is no doubt that this is where the principle of interpretation that Fr. Cuskelly gives for the charism and spirituality of Fr. Chevalier is to be found. According to Cuskelly, while Jules Chevalier went from the severity of the contract⁹ to the joy of the covenant, a number today do the reverse, and allow the inner covenant to become lukewarm and old. As a result, the Church, today as in the time of Fr. Chevalier, has great need of spiritual renewal which should be inner renewal of heart and spirit:

And even for us, the new covenant can grow old; it can pass from covenant to contract. When we no longer delight in God's law, we can wonder if the contract is worth keeping. Carrying out duties, observing laws, keeping commandments, but without the Spirit and with a heart of stone - this is not living a covenant.

Where is the Church today? Behold the days have come when people are weary of rules and observances; when some do what they have to out of a sense of duty; when others appear in church for baptism, wedding and burial.¹⁰

On reading these lines, it seemed to me that Fr. Cuskelly was only interested in the people on the inside: people within the Community or, in a more general way, within the Church. At the Symposium I stated that this point of view was that of the insider, and that we should go beyond it to take into account those who are far from the Churches. But I must now retract what I said. In Cuskelly's last book, which was presented to us in the French translation at the end of the session, I was able to read the following at the beginning of the first chapter:

Once we talked a lot about those members of the Church who practised, who carried out their religious duties.... Those days are gone and now the Church can no longer consist of people who do their duty and carry out their religious practices. It will be made up of people who, in response to a clear vision of faith, gladly live their Christian life. Religion, for them does not consist in a number of practices to be performed. In the true sense of the word, "religion" binds them to God in a personal relationship, so that the whole of their lives is their response to the revelation they have received. They live a Christian spirituality Nothing else will do for the Church of the future.¹¹

It is obvious that Cuskelly proposes here a new understanding of the Church, as well as a new understanding of religion, which opens wide our horizons. The Church becomes a community of lived faith. As for religion, it becomes something within and is eventually identified with spirituality. What follows about Bonhoeffer does not pretend to go beyond, but merely to deepen, Cuskelly's vision.

II. SPIRITUALITY WITHOUT RELIGION

First, please allow me, by way of explanation, to make a comparison myself. A number of people remain outside of concert halls not because they left for some or the other reason. Rather, they never entered, simply because they have no musical interest (at least not for classical music). In the same way, I would say that a number today do not go to Church, not because they have left it but because they never really entered, because they are not interested in religion. They are quite simply strangers to the Church, just as they are, in a general fashion, strangers to religion itself. This is precisely the case that I am interested in here. In relation to all these people, who are more and more numerous in my country, I again ask: should we bring them to church, bring them to religion? Can they understand the Gospel there where they are? And, especially, can they live the Gospel there where they are without necessarily being brought to church and to religion under the inspiration of the Gospel heard and received?

This is precisely the question that Dietrich Bonhoeffer raised in his prison at Tegel (Berlin) and to which he gave an unequivocal answer, that of "Christianity without religion." He explains this first in a letter to his brother-in-law and friend Eberhard Bethge, dated April 30, 1944. Bonhoeffer first announces something that he has concluded, a sort of understanding that came from his contact with his companions in prison. It is "that we are headed into a totally irreligious era." That constitutes a tremendous questioning of Christianity as we have known it so far. All our Christian tradition rests on "the religious dimension a priori" ' of the human person, according to the expression of Ernst Troeltsch. In other words, our Christianity has always been based on the religious sense of human beings. Thus Bonhoeffer raises the question: "But if one day it becomes apparent that this a priori "premise" simply does not exist, but was a historical and temporary form of human self-expression, i e. if we reach the stage of being radically without religion..., what does that mean for Christianity'?"¹²

For Bonhoeffer, one thing at least is clear: that the end of religion does not mean the end of Christianity. He refers to St. Paul who in his time assured the survival of Christianity by separating it from the Mosaic law of the circumcision. In the same way, in our time, could not Christianity continue if it freed itself from the presupposition of religion: "The Pauline question whether circumcision [peritomè] is a condition of justification is today, I consider, the question whether religion is a condition of salvation. Freedom from circumcision is at the same time freedom from religion."¹³ In a subsequent letter, dated June 8, 1944, Bonhoeffer adds that "For Christ himself is being substituted one particular stage in the religiousness of man i.e. a human law." And he adds in the same letter that Christian beliefs "must be interpreted in such a way as not to make religion a precondition of faith."¹⁴

In all of this, Bonhoeffer refers to the Pauline doctrine of justification by faith: justification by the grace of God manifested in Christ, rather than by the works of the Law. And he extends this doctrine to the works of religion, to religious practices. Thus faith in Christ could exist without Christian religion, without the Church. In this way we reach directly those people we are concerned about here: all those people who do not go to church, who are far from religion. In this perspective opened up by Bonhoeffer, all these people can also be united to God and to Christ. They are not necessarily far from Christ and God because they are far from the Church and religion.

As can be seen, these thoughts of Bonhoeffer are rather radical. We note, however, that they are in the same line as the basic idea of Fr. Cuskelly. Cuskelly spoke in terms of Old and New Covenant, of exterior and inner covenant, of contract and covenant. But contract for him was exactly the same as the law. So we have but one step to take to reach Bonhoeffer. As is the case for the law, the contract can also represent religion in its exterior, juridical aspect. In the same way, in the thought of St. Paul, the covenant of the heart and of the spirit is nothing more than faith.¹⁵

One could interpret in the same way the words of Christ to the Samaritan woman: Believe me, woman, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem.... But the hour is coming, and is now here, when true worshipers will worship the Father in Spirit and truth; and indeed the Father seeks such people to worship him. God is Spirit, and those who worship him must worship in Spirit and truth (John 4,21-24). Here again, the distinction between external cult and adoration in spirit and in truth appears quite clearly. Places and cultic ceremonies are different (and often in opposition) from one religion to another. But above and beyond all these differences, true adorers of the Father find themselves united in heart and spirit.

Here again two clarifications are necessary. First, one should not understand the preceding as an argument in favor of irreligion, as if everything that happened in the churches no longer had any meaning. Of course, the presence and action of God is not limited to the churches; of course, God's reign becomes reality everywhere, as if in secret, when justice is done and love is to be found. Within the churches, this divine action diffused everywhere in the world is explicitly recognized, named and praised. And that is not without value, on the contrary.

In the light of Bonhoeffer, let us clarify another point from the thought of Fr. Cuskelly. In what way should we understand his idea of an inner covenant? Bonhoeffer excludes interiority (the German innerlichkeit) just as much as the metaphysics of two superimposed worlds: "How do we speak of God without religion, i.e. without the temporally-influenced presuppositions of metaphysics, inwardness, and so on?"¹⁶ What is rejected here is obviously the idea of a salvation conceived as an escape from the world: either in the hereafter, in the life after death, in the interiority of the conscience (salvation of the soul). Bonhoeffer believes in a salvation that happens in the heart of the world, precisely where the Kingdom of God is supposed to come. And I am convinced that this is also the thought of Fr. Cuskelly. It is at the heart of the world that we are called upon to be witnesses of God's love. More precisely, we are called upon to show God's love already present in the heart of the world. When we speak of the interiority of the heart and of the spirit, we should understand it here in the sense of the immanence of God, through his Spirit, in the heart of our world and our life. Once again, Bonhoeffer expresses this best when he writes: "God is the beyond in the midst of our life."¹⁷

III. SPIRITUALITY WITHOUT GOD

Let us go now to another theological turning point of the last century. The theological thought of Paul Tillich takes its root in the Pauline doctrine of justification by faith. But Tillich understands it in a more radical way than Bonhoeffer. It is not just the works of religion, religious practices, which can disappear without eliminating faith; it is also true for religious beliefs. Our time is characterized by the wavering of religious beliefs, by the doubt that touches all of them. None of them are spared, not even the most basic. But the heart of faith is not thereby called into question. Tillich holds that faith subsists in the depth of the heart even if all beliefs have disappeared. The unbeliever then can be justified (saved) by the faith that inspires him, much like the sinner, deprived of justice which comes from good acts, can be saved by faith:

I managed to reconcile the doctrine of justification with radical historical criticism by developing an interpretation of the idea of justification that has been of the greatest importance to me, both personally and professionally. I applied the doctrine of justification to the sphere of human thought. Not only human acts but human thinking as well stand under the divine No. No one, not even a believer or a Church, can boast of possessing the truth, just as no one can boast of possessing love. Orthodoxy is intellectual pharisaism. The justification of the doubter corresponds to the justification of the sinner.¹⁸

Tillich refers to his article of 1924 on "Justification and doubt." There he explains what lie means by religious doubt. It is a radical doubt which touches not only religious beliefs but more profoundly still the meaning of truth and the meaning of life. It is thus a question of radical disbelief. There still remains, however, some part of faith. The unbeliever of whom we are speaking is not a frivolous person who just goes along with events without any reflection. He is a thinking, demanding person who clearly sees the weaknesses of traditional beliefs and who assumes a very critical stance in their regard. However, precisely because of his deep critical sense, this person can not remain peacefully in total relativism. It is from a demanding criterion of truth and meaning, from an absolute need, that he criticizes all beliefs, every given certitude. Tillich prefers then to speak of doubt rather than disbelief, because doubt implies a feeling of discomfort, of dissatisfaction:

The one who doubts in a fully religious sense of the word is the one who, with the loss of the religious immediacy, has lost God, truth and the meaning of life; or a person who finds himself at any point along the way of this loss. And yet, he can not remain in this situation of loss because he is influenced by the need to find meaning, truth and God. The doubter is then the one whom the law of truth has taken hold of roughly with all its force and the one who is headed for despair because he can not fulfill this law. The doubter is thus in the situation of one who despairs for his salvation, except that for him the tragedy is not the condemning judgment of God but the abyss of the absence of meaning.¹⁹

Here is another characteristic or another important category for "spiritual people without Churches" of whom we speak. They are not just non-practicants, people who do not go to church, people without religion. A good number of them are true unbelievers, true atheists. What attitude should we have in relation to them? Our first reaction would probably be to take out of our apologetic baggage a few old, or new, proofs of the existence of God. We would soon find out, however, that this is a dead end street, because the unbeliever we are speaking of does not even accept the premises of our arguments. His radical doubt goes that far. We could suppose that if he does not accept such evident realities it is because of a lack of good will, a lack of a correct attitude. But Tillich warns us that that would be the wrong road to follow, a complete misunderstanding of the situation of the one who is in doubt:

To try to push radical doubt back into the sphere of ethics and to consider it an attempt to escape from God is totally wrong. That would be to attempt to take from doubt its quality of seriousness. Doubt, however, is as serious in the theoretical sphere as the uncertainty about salvation is in the practical sphere. Doubt is a struggle to find a place in the unconditional meaning of life, in unconditional truth. It is a combat that should be continued until the end, without leading to despair or to compromise.²⁰

How can we respond adequately to this situation? What message can we give to the unbeliever, to the one for whom life has lost all meaning? This is the question to which Tillich tried to respond in the most famous of his works, The courage to be.²¹ The first condition for an adequate approach consists in recognizing the situation of the unbeliever with all the radical qualities of his doubting. One misses the point and goes nowhere, if one makes belief a prerequisite, if one first tries to have the individual overcome his disbelief. That is something that he can not honestly do:

The answer must accept, as its precondition, the statc of meaninglessness. It is not an answer if it demands the removal of this state; for that is just what cannot be done. He who is in the grip of doubt and meaninglessness cannot liberate himself from this grip; but he asks for an answer which is valid within and not outside the situation of his despair.²²

It is then within this situation of doubt, disbelief and lack of meaning that one must find an element of authentic faith. The courage to be constitutes this principle of faith. The courage to be enfolds the anguish of life without eliminating it - whether it be the anguish of death, the anguish of guilt or the anguish of lack of meaning that is in question here. This courage to be is itself an authentic expression of faith, inasmuch as it is based on and rooted in that power of being which is given with life itself:

Faith is the state of being grasped by the power of being-itself. The courage to be is an expression of faith and what "faith" means must be understood through the courage to be. We have defined courage as the self-affirmation of being in spite of nonbeing. The power of this self-affirmation is the power of being which is effective in every act of courage. Faith is the experience of this power.²³

The faith which makes the courage of despair possible is the acceptance of the power of being, even in the grip of nonbeing. Even in the despair about meaning being affirms itself through us. The act of accepting meaninglessness is in itself a meaningful act. It is an act of faith.²⁴

It is a question here, however, of faith in its most simple and most radical expression. One could also speak here of naked faith: absolute faith, stripped of all precise content, of every particular belief. "The faith which creates the courage to take them into itself, writes Tillich, has no special content. It is simply faith, undirected, absolute.²⁵ It is a question then of an experience, of a force, of a power of life that allows one to take up and carry anguish in all its forms. It is not belief in an exterior power which could save us from evil. It has been said, this belief in the omnipotence of the God of heaven disappeared in the abyss of doubt and lack of meaning. There remains, however, the experience of a transcendent power, in the very inner part of one's self, an experience which is precisely that of pure faith, without belief:

Of course, in the state of despair there is nobody and nothing that accepts. But there is the power of acceptance itself which is experienced. Meaninglessness, as long as it is experienced, includes an experience of the "power of acceptance." To accept this power of acceptance consciously is the religious answer of absolute faith, of a faith which has been deprived by doubt of any concrete content, which nevertheless is faith and the source of the most paradoxical manifestation of the courage to be.²⁶

All of this is not without a relationship with what we said about passing from the Old to the New Covenant, from an exterior to an inner covenant. The exterior covenant is the one where faith is expressed through belief in an all-powerful Father who can free us from all evil. The inner covenant itself puts the accent on the presence of divine power within us, at the source of our being, of our vital force. Obviously, the ideal situation is that were inner faith is expressed in belief in the God of heaven. But when this belief disappears in the turmoil of doubt, everything is not then lost. The essential remains, faith remains as the experience of life-giving power which allows us to keep going no matter what. The spirituality best adapted to the situation described here will, then, be the one that best allows us to comfort, give life to, make more conscious, this inner experience of a transcendent, vital power. I believe that this is exactly the spirituality of the heart of which we are speaking here.

The teaching of Fr. Cuskelly adds, however, an important element to the idea of courage of Tillich. It is that of love which comes to perfect the idea of a simple power of being. It is a question then of the power of love which can triumph over all adverse and hostile forces. At the source of being and of life, one does not just experience a transcendent power, but also that of a love which is stronger than anything. It becomes possible then to communicate a spirituality of the heart even to nonbelievers, without trying to convert them to any sort of belief, simply by having them see the love present in the heart of the world, the love which is revealed in the goodness of the world, the love present in the heart of humanity which appears in each act of generosity that takes place around us.

IV THE TESTIMONY OF ETTY HILLESUM

I would like to propose now a concrete example that represents very well the category of persons in whom I have been interested in this presentation. Etty Hillesum was a young Jewish girl from Holland deported to Auschwitz where she died in November, 1943, at the age of 29. Her diary permits us to accompany her during the last two years of her life when she experienced a rather unusual spiritual journey. Etty presents herself as a very emancipated woman. She was brought up without religion and for the rest of her life she remained on the margin of organized religion. She is, then, the ideal candidate to represent the type of non-religious person who could be attracted by a spirituality of the heart.

To understand correctly the meaning of Etty's witness, we have to begin down below: not with faith in God but with faith in life, in the goodness of life, in the basic goodness of the world. Here is what she wrote on July 11, 1942, at the heart of the Nazi persecution. Note in this text the clear reference to the Sermon on the Mount:

I never worry about tomorrow. I know, for example, that I will soon have to leave this house for a destination that I do not have the slightest idea about. And finances are very bad. But I never worry about myself. I know that "something" will come up. When one projects into the future one's concern for a lot of things to come, one prevents them from developing organically. I have within me tremendous confidence. It is not the certitude of seeing my exterior life turn out good for me, but that of continuing to accept life and of finding it good, even in the worst of moments.²⁷

Etty presents, then, a perfect model of interiority. It is not the interiority that Bonhoeffer rails against, that of escape from the world. With Etty, interiority faces the exterior world directly. It is the moral force - perhaps one should say the spiritual force - that triumphs over all exterior abuses:

In me, everything goes from the inside to the outside and not vice versa. Generally, the most menacing measures - and there are many of them at this time - are broken up on my inner certainty and my trust. Filtered this way in me, they lose the worst of their threatening character.²⁸

A bit further on in her diary, she reflects on the humiliation she was forced to suffer from a fellow citizen who was not Jewish. He asked her if she, a Jew, really had the right to buy a tube of toothpaste in the store. What she wrote reminds us of St. Paul who glorified God's power present in his human weakness:

Another one of these idealists ready to help the occupying force purge society of its Jewish elements. Let everybody have their little pleasures in life. But the shock of these little encounters with the outside world is a little hard to take. Inside, I haven't the slightest interest in arguing with one persecutor or another, and I will never make the effort to do so. They have a perfect right to see my sadness and vulnerability as a disarmed victim. I have no need to put on a good front in the eyes of the outside world. I have my inner strength and that is enough. The rest is without importance.²⁹

Another passage along the same lines makes us think this time of Zen Buddhism in relation to the "Calm Self." It is as if this type of non-religious mysticism gave us a glimpse of the spiritual base common to all religions:

I am in a rather rare mood. Is it really me who is writing here with so much peace and maturity? And will people be able to understand me if I say that I am strangely happy, not with an exaggerated or forced happiness, but just happy, because I feel tenderness and confidence growing in me from day to day? Because the troubling, threatening, crushing events which attack me do not produce in me any effect of astonishment. Because I continue to see my life and live it in all the clarity and evidence of its twists and turns. Because nothing upsets my way of thinking and feeling. Because I am capable of putting up with everything and of taking on everything. Because the consciousness of all the good that has existed in life, in my life, far from being suppressed by all the rest, grows a bit deeper in me each day. I barely dare to keep writing. It is strange, you could say that I am almost going too far in my detachment from all those things that cause most people to enter a mindless state.³⁰

I come now to the crucial point, the presence of God in the heart of Etty Hillesum, the name of God on Etty's lips. Even here, and especially here, one should remember that with her everything goes from the inner world towards the outer world and, consequently, from subjective experience to objective conceptuality. In the religious domain, one could also say that with her everything goes from faith towards belief, rather than in the opposite direction. Thus it is not sufficient to affirm that she discovers God in the deepest part of herself. If we accept to follow her process to its conclusion, one has to admit that with her "God" is the expression (the representation or the objectification) of the deepest layer, of the transcendent dimension of her being.

She wrote on July 14, 1942: "When I pray, I never pray for myself, always for others, or rather I carry on an extravagant, childish, or terribly serious dialogue with what is deepest in me and which for want of a better word I call God."³¹ A bit later, on September 17, 1942, one can read in the same line: "It is perhaps the most perfect expression of my feeling about life: I gather myself within myself. And this `myself,' this deepest and richest layer in me where I gather myself, I call 'God'."³² One can then easily agree with the comment of her Dutch editor, J. G. Gaarlandt, who insists that Etty's notion of God is outside of the norm, outside of tradition and therefore a universal notion:

With Etty's pen, the name of God seems to be devoid of all tradition; centuries of Judaism and Christianity seem to have left no trace. I am inclined to think that believers will immediately recognize this faith "without antecedents," but that non-believers will not have much difficulty accepting it and even understanding It.33

The spirituality - one could also say the mystique - of Etty Hillesum responds quite well to the idea of a spirituality of the heart because of its immanent character: it is in the deepest part of herself that she discovers God. There is more, however. One also finds with Etty the symbolism of the heart, and it is found precisely there where she expresses the compassionate love that she feels for her companions in suffering. Her letters from the camp at Westerbork were first published in Dutch under the title: The Thinking Heart of the Barracks.³⁴ That is exactly the expression by which Etty defines herself in her diary on September 15, 1942: "It is beautiful and good to live in your world [my God], despite what we human beings inflict on each other. The Thinking Heart of the Barracks."³⁵ In another diary entry, the following day, she explains this by using the symbolism of the soul:

Often, while going around the camp amidst the cries and the squabbles of the overly-zealous members of the Jewish Council, I think: Ah! Just let me be a little piece of your soul. I would like to be the refugee barracks for the better part of you, that part that is certainly present in each of you. I do not have much to do, I just want to be there. Of this body, then, let me be the soul. And with each one of these people I found a gesture, a look which greatly surpassed their usual level and of which they undoubtedly were little conscious. And I felt that I was the guardian of this.³⁶

This same image of the "thinking heart of the barracks" comes back at the end of the diary in a context of suffering and compassion. In the face of so much suffering, "I often felt an infinite tenderness, writes Etty, and I remained awake, allowing to pass before my eyes the events and the always too numerous impressions of a day that was too long, and I said to myself: `Would that I were the thinking heart of these barracks' I would still like to be that. I would like to be the `thinking heart' of the entire concentration camp."³⁷In the last entry of the diary, that of October 13, 1942, the content of this symbolism is best expressed in a great impetus of compassion which takes on religious, almost sacramental, connotations. Here are a few extracts:

Since last night, from my bed, I took in a little of the infinite suffering which, disseminated in the entire world, waits for souls to accept it. I am storing up a bit of this suffering in provision for winter....

When I suffer for the weak, doesn't that mean that I am in fact suffering for the weakness I feel within me?

I broke my body like bread and I shared it among the human beings. And why not? Because they were hungry and had gone for a long time without....

I would like to be a balm poured out on so many wounds. ³⁸

The name of God comes up again with Etty in this context of the symbolism of the heart, but it is a question this time of "bringing God up to date in the heart of others." We are still in the context of human suffering. To bring up the presence of God in a suffering heart, is to open up there the way of liberation and peace, as Etty herself had experienced. In Christian language, we would say that it is a question of opening the way of the cross so as to arrive at the resurrection. One touches here the heart of the Gospel. But Etty warns us that it is not enough to preach the Good News of the coming of God in us. One should help God make it a reality:

How great is the inner distress of your earthly creatures, my God. I thank you for having had come to me so many people with their distress. They are speaking to me calmly, without noticing it, and then all of a sudden their distress pierces in its nudity. And I have before me a little human derelict, hopeless and not knowing how to go on living. That is where my problems begin. It is not enough to preach about you, my God, to bring you up to date in the heart of others. One has to open up in the other person the way that leads to you, my God, and to do that you really have to know the human soul.... And I thank you for having given me the gift of being able to read the hearts of others. People are sometimes for me houses with open doors. I go in, I wander around the hallways and the rooms. In each house the layout is a little different, but they are all similar and one should be able to make out of each one a shrine for you, my God. And I promise you, I promise you, my God, I will look for a place and a roof for you in the greatest number of houses I can. ³⁹

By that one sees that the distance is not so great as it might first seem between the person of Etty Hillesum and that of the Missionary of the Sacred Heart as conceived by Fr. Chevalier in his time. The mission is essentially the same: that of bringing God to birth again in the human heart, that of making sons and daughters of God, in renewing the covenant between God and humankind. The interpretation of Fr. Cuskelly, based on the idea of the inner covenant, permits us to go from one view to the other. Of course, there is between the two all the difference created by secularization, by the retreat of religion. One notes it very clearly in the harmony and the dissonance between the two expressions: "to be the Heart of God on earth" and "to be the thinking heart of the barracks!" On first view, there is there all the difference between the transcendence of the sacred and the immanence of the profane. Yet, in Etty's diary, the heart signifies what is deepest and most divine in man and woman, that which in them goes beyond the human: in other words, transcendence at the very heart of the immanent.

Etty Hillesum speaks to those who are near her the non-religious language that is common to them and to her. One would be led to believe that it is a question of the lesser of two evils, of a language of substitution that one is obliged to use when the language of religion is not understood. It is possible, however, that this "vernacular" language to speak of God has today quite a different meaning, quite a different relevance. At the same time as Etty, in the same struggle, Bonhoeffer said in his prison that we had to "reconstitute an Arcani disciplina [a science of mysteries] by which the mysteries of Christian faith would be protected from profanation."⁴⁰ He himself, then, recommended the greatest discretion in relation to religious language. In the long letter he wrote to his godson for his baptism, he makes reference to another dimension of the problem. It is that the Word of God has been so dulled by the Churches that it has lost much of its meaning, of its deep, penetrating sense. "This is why, he says, that ancient words should fade out." And yet, all hope is not lost because "a day will come when people will be called on anew to proclaim the Word of God in such a way that the world will be transformed and renewed."⁴¹

Is it not possible to think that this prophecy of Bonhoeffer began to be realized already in Etty Hillesum's diary? The name of God emerges from it with a renewed meaning, in the extremely painful context of the holocaust. Yes, God with nothing added: without Christ, without the Church, without the sacraments, etc. But when God's name once again takes on meaning and life in this way, it is all of religion that is given life and youth. "God" thus finds full meaning in the human heart which has taken on the suffering of the world to transform it into the seed of life.