Recent talks:
1. Anxiety
Audio & Notes
2. Peter’s Nightmare
Audio & Notes
3. Eco Sunday 2013
Notes
4. Paul’s so-called ‘Conversion’
Audio & Notes
5. Easter Resurrection
Notes
For other talks click here
The Reality of Death
by Etty Hillesum
From An Interrupted Life: the Journal of a Young Jewish
Woman, 1941-1943
Etty Hillesum was a young Jewish Dutch woman
who (like Ann Frank) wrote a diary that she
thought no-one would ever read; who eventually
went to the gas chambers like so many. She faced
death and was able to see it as I believe Jesus saw
it.
She says, “The reality of death has become a
definite part of my life; my life has, so to speak,
been extended by death, by looking death in the
eye and accepting it, by accepting destruction as
part of life and no longer wasting my energies on
fear of death or the refusal to acknowledge its
inevitability. It sounds paradoxical: by excluding
death from our life, we cannot live a full life, and
by admitting death into our life we can enlarge
and enrich it.”
Being a Jew, she was not a card-carrying Christian,
yet she understood the mystery of death and
resurrection without using this language.
What I am Reading:
The Impatience of a Parson
by HRL Sheppard
Women at the Well
by Kathleen Fisher
A Theology of Work
by Darrell Cosden