Sabine Lichtenfels - Spiritual Work

To all Peaceworkers,

Today we direct our global peace prayer especially to Israel/Palestine. It is a day when Jews, Germans and Palestinians come together and direct their spirit towards the Holocaust and recognise and heal the global wounds left in all of us by the history of fascism.

Sami Awad from Bethlehem/Palestine, Emma Shamba and Michal Tal from Israel, and others who are part of the group planning the PRV (Peace Research Village) will jointly accompany this day in a „geistig“ (spiritual/mental) way.

(More: http://www.sabine-lichtenfels.com/en/Home_Article.html) We send a text out into the Ring of Power written by Etty Hillesum. May this text accompany us throughout this week and give us the power for our own spiritual search and truth.

On the 11th of April 2001 a massacre took place in Colombia: the victims were the Nasa ethnic group. Still today they have to fight for their survival under difficult conditions. We include them in our peace prayer. Throughout the world it is the same pain that people have to suffer, be they tortured, suppressed or threatened by murder.

I pray that it be our inner truth which shall accompany us in all of our actions and our political dealings. Spiritual truthfulness stands beyond any religion, any dogma and any political device. It is the same light, the same love, the same truth in our hearts that takes us by the hand and gives us the courage to speak up, when others are silent, and enables us to stay with love where others begin to hate, and that leads us on our path.

Text of Empowerment: "Life is something Magnificent and Big"

by Etty Hillesum, An interrupted life: the diaries of Etty Hillesum, 1941-1943

Etty Hillesum was a Dutch Jew from Amsterdam. She was murdered in Auschwitz in 1943, at the age of 29. Her diary, written during the last two years of her life, is a testimony of love and compassion, of trust in life and deep spirituality. In the darkest time she urged to prepare for the new to come:

I like to be in warmth and security but I shall not refuse to go into the cold if only your hand guides me. On your hand I shall go anywhere and I shall try no to be too timid. I shall try to radiate some of the love, the human kindness that is within me, wherever I shall be. But with the word “human kindness” one must not brag. One never knows whether one truly has it. I do not want to be anything special. I only want to try to be the one who is still looking to unfold her self inside of me fully.

Faced with her experience of the concentration camp she continues to write:

The misery is really big, but nevertheless, I often walk late in the evening when the day behind me has sunk away into profundity. I walk with whipping steps along the barbed wire and then it wells up out of my heart again and again – I cannot help it, it is the way it is, it is of an elementary power: Life is something wonderful and big, later we have to build up a whole new world – and each further crime and each further cruelty we have to contrast with a further piece of love and goodness which we have to conquer within ourselves. We are allowed to suffer but we are not allowed to break.

Sentence of Empowerment: Each further cruelty we have to contrast with a further piece of love and goodness which we have to conquer within ourselves.

With best wishes!

Sabine Lichtenfels