In his theological account of Etty Hillesum's life, Etty Hillesum: A Life Transformed, the Rev. Canon Patrick Woodhouse writes of dramatic transformation. This transformation was not simply one of life circumstances, which took Hillesum from a bohemian community in Amsterdam to her death in Auschwitz; rather, according to Woodhouse, Hillesum's own letters and diaries speak to a spiritual transformation, by which , predictably, he also means a moral one. Woodhouse begins his book with these stark words:

Etty Hillesum did not emerge from adolescence a balanced young woman already well on her way to becoming a saintly figure. The early pages of her diary reveal an insecure, emotionally disturbed and sexually chaotic young woman with a turbulent inner life which she cannot understand and which from time to time pitches her into deep depression. (Woodhouse 2009).

Etty Hillesum was a Jewish Dutch woman whose diary spans the years 1941 – 1943, when she was twenty-seven to twenty-nine. Her diary winds its way from the artistic and intellectual world of Amsterdam to Westerbork detention camp, a staging ground before her deportation to Auschwitz, where Etty died. Of course hers is a world transformed, but the inner resources that she displayed—her profound spirituality, her capacity to look evil in the face—these capacities were evident very early in the diary, long before she became more deeply fascinated by the Bible, and indeed even while she was living what Woodhouse would characterize as an "emotionally disturbed and sexually chaotic" life. As Hillesum writes of her encounter with an SS occupier of her city who was harassing her fellow Jews:

To put it very crudely, which will probably cause pain to my fountain pen: if an SS man were to kick me to death, I shall nevertheless look into his face and wonder to myself, both in terrified amazement and out of human interest, My God, you poor fellow, what terrible things must have happened in your life to bring you to this pass? (Hillesum 2002).   

Of course it is a very different thing to imagine such equanimity in the face of death and violence and to actually perform it when it happens, but what struck me in reading her diaries and letters was the remarkable coherence of her life.  Her inner life, although turbulent and quixotic, is at the very same time, full of grace and goodness. 

And as for sexual chaos, Woodhouse is referring to the uncomfortable fact that saintly figure was very a sexual being. The early portions of the diaries reveal relationships which are questionable to be sure, with two much older men—one of whom was her mentor, and indeed the very source of much of her spiritual and intellectual awakening, Julius Spier.  

What to make of this relationship and Etty's love for this man? Spier was a student of Jung, a the dubious science of "psychochirology," the study of personality through the reading of hands. Spier's professional ethics were questionable to say the very least, as he concluded his counseling sessions with Etty and other female patients with physical sessions of "wrestling," ostensibly the embodied form of dialectic psychotherapy. Today we would be correct to name his practice as abusive. And yet whatever the ascription we give to this relationship, for Etty, it was indeed transformative, but not in the sense that Woodhouse and other moralists claim (former Archbishop Rowan Williams makes similar remarks about Etty's Christian conversion after Spier).

Yet what if the theological and the moral vision that Hillesum's diaries lay bare is not one of conversion from sin to sanctity, but speak instead to very real contradiction that exists at the heart of things, a contradiction that is brought into profound relief in the extremity of suffering that Hillesum witnessed in her short life? Read thus, one is rather struck not by Hillesum's conversion, but her determined coherence in thought and in engagement with others, including with God. This is a young woman who walks courageously through love and hate, life and death, good and evil.  Yet throughout this tortuous journey, she remains uncannily committed to abiding existence of of love, of life, and of goodness, which she seeks to uncover even in the most abject of circumstances. It is this sensibility which she displays long before her so called religious conversion. It is this that enables her to experience with Spier and her other sexual encounters genuine love and life and goodness for she carries with her an eros that flows naturally and graciously toward the other. She is not naïve as a lover—she is not chasing a primordial innocence—instead she finds in the erotic encounter (be it with a lover, with God or with the Jewish prisoners whom she serves) a possibility of growth and transcendence, in spite of the contradictory and vexed nature in which it is also immersed. 

This erotic orientation within the world is precisely the same posture that enables her to continue to love, even in the most extreme of circumstances. As Hillesum describes:

Whenever misfortune strikes, people have a natural instinct to lend a helping hand and to save what can be saved. Tonight I shall be helping to dress babies and to calm mothers—and that is all I can hope to do.  I could almost curse myself for that.  For we all know that we are yielding up our sick and defenseless brothers and sisters to hunger, heat, cold, exposure, and destruction, and yet we dress them and escort them to the bare cattle cars—and if they can't walk, we carry them on stretchers. What is going on, what mysteries are these, in what sort of fatal mechanism have we become enmeshed? The answer cannot be that we are all cowards. We're not that bad. We stand before a much deeper question (Hillesum 2002). 

Hillesum bears witness to her people's suffering, but this bearing witness is not only to the fateful march to the crematoria; it is also to the acts of resistance, even when the only resistance was the care given as Jews were forced to collude with the "fatal mechanism" in which they had tragically "become enmeshed." It is precisely here, within such small acts; ones in which the heart refuses to be colonized by the demonic forces all around, that God resides. In such witness, there is no shame; there is only love. Such is the moral vision that continues courageously and uncynically to dress babies and comfort mothers even on their last, lethal, and impossibly cruel journey. 

Such a view is an erotic love for the world. It is one that knows that even within this world's deep and terrible brokenness and its pain, there is still life; there is still joy. This is so because joy emerges from beyond the boundaries of the self, because it emanates from the Beloved who is Other. One cannot seek to possess the Beloved; one can only hold it for a moment and then, with gratitude and with love, allow it to return to its otherness. I would venture that this lesson was as much gained in the arms of Hillesum's lovers as it was in reading Dostoyevsky or Rilke or the gospels. 

As for Woodhouse and Williams, one ought not be surprised that male clerics get things so utterly wrong about a young woman's eros that they imagine that its turbulent chaos must be renounced in order to find God. What is rather more striking is how they fail to see how her precisely erotic love of the world, even in the midst of death and negation is, in fact, the very heart of the gospel.