Light and Dark in Spring

Unitarian Fellowship Service, May 6, 2007
Edgecomb, Maine

rev. 6/17/07

Remembering Etty Hillesum
”An Interrupted Life & Letters from Westerbork”
with thanks to poet Martin Steingesser
second reader Judy Tierney
and the cello of Robin Jellis

Moved to tears that Sunday morning
by words of poet, rich sounds of cello
retelling the “yes to all life”
revealed in letters and diary
of a young Dutch woman named Ettie
being taken by the Germans to Auschwitz,
I flee to the cocoon of my car,
needing to be alone, to not linger for coffee.
In the stillness,
words and sounds vibrate yet within me.

Ettie wrote during a journey
she need not have taken.
She refused chances to escape,
went voluntarily to the transit camp
that was a next-to-last last stop
for Jews of the Holocost!
She chose to share
the suffering, the fate of her people,
acting with her comforting presence
as a balm for the violence.
The last remaining hours of the lives of others
to her were as precious as her own!

Now, over the years,
Ettie’s spirit reverberates still
through the blending that morning
of voices of two readers underscored by
profound dark, warming light
in the voice of the cello.
Poet and cello express anew her testament,
shining through the very blackest of clouds,
to the unfathomable beauty of human spirit
that in darkness ever shines brightest.

Now my emotion has subsided
but Ettie’s spirit still reaches over the years
to open my heart,
awakening me to unexpected lights, darks,
color in the morning in front of me:
gray clouds blustering over the hilltop
unveiling patches of blue,
briefly opening moments of warming sunlight
that all too soon close again …
goldfinches lighting in leafless white birches
beside the gravel lane,
across from five-foot high gray stone columns
illumined by bright yellow forsythia,
their two large square flat tops connected
by a semi-circular black wrought iron sign:
North Edgecomb Cemetery.

Ettie's spirit has cleared my inner clouds
and with unusual clarity I see
two lively little girls running up
with paper plates from the coffee table inside,
lifting them high as they can reach
to the tops of the columns
as though to feed the birds.
Up the columns like spiders they climb,
joined then by a third.
Innocent as the birds on their perches,
the children happily munch Sunday morning goodies,
oblivious of gravestones, of lives to be remembered,
before being chased back inside by chill in the wind
as the Sun disappears.

For these few moments I am awake
to the wonder of vivid color,
the wonder of contrasting light and dark in all of life,
and I am grateful for all that is.
No sacrifice of self, Ettie’s actions
were a self’s blossoming in fullest expression!
Would that my heart might remain open to such Light.