Right now many of us are dealing with the frustration of feeling powerless and being exhausted from constant insults to our intelligence by the current regime. Nightmares torment us of the Trump/MAGA cult being unstoppable and completing their evil intent to consume the world. But, as Martin Luther King preached, we must keep our eyes on the prize. We must remember that we have come a long way already and temporal bullies cannot touch our True Selves.
We possess messages left for us by past people suffering similar abuse from ignorant bullies. Such a one was the young Jewish woman Etty Hillesum (1914–1943), who left us her diaries from the German Holocaust. Shortly before her departure for internment at the Westerbork transit camp, Hillesum wrote in her journal reflecting on Jesus’ words not to worry about tomorrow (Matthew 6:34):
We have to fight them daily … those many small worries
about the morrow, for they sap our energies.…
The things that have to be done must be done,
and for the rest we must not allow ourselves to become
infested with thousands of petty fears and worries,
so many motions of no confidence in God.…
Ultimately, we have just one moral duty:
to reclaim large areas of peace in ourselves,
more and more peace, and to reflect it towards others.
And the more peace there is in us, the more peace
there will also be in our troubled world.
An Interrupted Life: The Diaries of Etty Hillesum, 1941–1943,
trans. Arno Pomerans (Pantheon Books, 1984), 185
The powers of empire and slave mongers cannot touch our sovereign True Self where God dwells, and which is kept in the Will of our creator. That loving Will has brought us to this moment and intends Life to proceed past the evil resistance. As Hillesum repeated Jesus’ peace in the face of threatening empire, we too are agents of the Life beyond their grasp. We base our reality upon the Mystery that has nurtured us from the beginning 13.8 billion years ago, and which loves us beyond this incomprehensible tangle in our journey.
In the meantime we project such peace and confidence onto others and lift heads to see the signs of hope beyond the temporal blows of deniers and gluttons.
O, the signs of past empires
now laying as skeletons in the dust.
We search and dig for their bones and buildings
to see what clues they may offer
our quandaries about progress and impasse.
Woe to those too self-centered to become
aware of past failures, those who bungle
their way carrying their money and images
into mass graves intended for everyone else.
Though we follow the example of Gethsemane,
the impossible grace of resurrection
is us walking through the night
of our incomplete formation,
not knowing what we shall be.
But we know that we will be
the extension of the Will making us,
for we shall see our Maker face to face.
Mark R. Turner
July 23, 2026
Athens House
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