The philosophic writer Will Durant said: “Nowadays no one …dares to look at the life as a whole ….Everyone knows his part, but not its meaning in the play as a whole. Life is losing its purpose and is becoming empty just when it seemed so full of promise. …We shall define philosophy as a view of the whole, as the spirit, spread out over life and forging unity out of chaos.”

We are living with chaos everywhere, the socio-political life verges on chaos, so is the religious culture saturated with hatered and rivalry. How can we live with some sense of unity and integrity? Many so called leaders today regularly involve in doublespeak, a very polished tongue for the public consumption and a very poisonous tongue once in own community against the other. Unfortunately, even in Christian circles there is a lot of communal spite and tongue that is targeted against the other of rite, language or ethnicity.

The government at the centre is shamelessly communal, not only in action but also in the speeches of their leaders starting from MLAs to Cabinet minsters. Vituperations against the Taj Mahal, Akbar, religious conversions, political dissents etc go on and on. An assembly in Rajasthan is convening to ban political dissent, even allegations against corruption. Are we in a democratic state?

Are we a nation with a culture? There is a feeling that we are in Ghar Vapsi mood of return to a home of the past, which looks like the animal farm of Orwell. There is hated engulfing us, Hindus are taught to hate Muslims and Christians; there are lots of Muslims becoming fundamentalists and there is a small minority getting into terrorist organisations.

There are so many Christians slowly succumbing to some sort of a communal frame of mind. Are we returning to a kind of fascism and even Nazism? Some of the recent election results in European countries indicate return of Nazi tendencies.

Etty Hillesum, a young Jewish woman who had been living in Amsterdam, was gassed in Auschwitz on 30 November 1943 at the age of 29. She left behind a diary and 73 letters, and more letters are still being found. Many theologians, especially Jewish theologians, have tried to find a new way of understanding God in response to the Shoah. Tormented by existential questions, she was looking for a meaning in life. She asked, “Isn’t it almost godless to keep having such faith in God in times like these? And isn’t it frivolous to go on finding life so beautiful?”

She probed the depths of her self, and discovered what she came to call God.

“… if God does not help me to go on, then I shall have to help God,” she wrote on 11 July 1942. “And that is all we can manage these days and also all that really matters: that we safeguard that little piece of You, God, in ourselves. And perhaps in others as well.

Alas, there doesn’t seem to be much You Yourself can do about our circumstances, about our lives. Neither do I hold You responsible.

You cannot help us, but we must help You and defend Your dwelling place inside us to the last.” What does this defence of the temple inside mean? It is not an escape into some illusions, but is squarely facing the reality with responsibility before God with all the moral indignation which is simply the voice of God within. It’s not always possible to spend this span of existence as some laurel.We must be human, shunning fatalism; we also are only once.

Never again, never again to evil. The fight is our moral duty against evil of the time which must not be allowed to engulf and submerge us. In a letter dated to the end of December 1942, she wrote:

“And I also believe, childishly perhaps but stubbornly, that the earth will become more habitable again only through the love that the Jew, Paul described to the citizens of Corinth in the thirteenth chapter of his first letter.” If God is love, as we can read in 1 John 4—with which Etty was familiar—then it is only through love that God is recognisable.

Etty decided to love, choosing love above all. This was not a matter of feeling. The feeling of love failed her at times, and was certainly rare in the world surrounding her. Moreover, the absence of hatred in no way implies the absence of moral indignation. But only love can make better times possible.