I often walk with a spring in my step along the barbed wire….I can’t help it, that’s just the way it is, like some elementary force—the feeling that life is glorious and magnificent and that one day we shall be building a whole new world.
On September 6, 1943, Hillesum was shocked to see her own name on the transport list, along with her parents and brother Mischa. Her mother had written to the head of the German SS asking that her son be spared. The letter seems to have backfired, and they were all sentenced to die.
A friend, Jopie Vleeschhouwer, later reported that Hillesum was at first devastated by the news. But after an hour, she recovered her spirit. She began scrounging what provisions she could find for the journey. Vleeschhouwer then described her departure. “Talking gaily, smiling, a kind word for everyone she met on the way, full of sparkling good humor, perhaps just a touch of sadness, but every inch the Etty you all know so well.”
Once inside the train she wrote a postcard to a friend, which she tossed through a crack in the boarded-up carriage. It was picked up by some farmers and sent back to Amsterdam. “Christine,” it begins, “opening the Bible at random I find this: ‘The Lord is my high tower.’ I am sitting on my rucksack in the middle of a full freight car. Father, mother and Mischa are a few cars away….We left the camp singing, Father and mother firmly and calmly, Mischa too.”
She died in Auschwitz on November 30, 1943.
INTEGRATION
Few of us are going to experience a personal transformation as complete as the one Hillesum experienced. Few of us are going to live as selflessly as the community weavers. But their lives serve as models. They are models for many reasons, but in part because they illustrate a core point: One task in life is synthesis. It is to collect all the fragmented pieces of a self and bring them to a state of unity, so that you move coherently toward a single vision.
Some people never get themselves together; they live scattered lives. Some get themselves together but at a low level. Their lives are oriented around the lesser desires. Hillesum got herself together at a very high level. As the external conditions of her life became more miserable, her internal state became more tranquil.
And the way she achieved unity was not through an endless inner process of self-excavation. It was through an outer process of giving her whole self away. “Happiness,” Dr. William H. Sheldon wrote, “is essentially a state of going somewhere, wholeheartedly, one-directionally, without reservation or regret.”
The practical way we do that is through commitments—through making maximal commitments to things we really care about and then serving them in a wholehearted way. The core challenges of the second-mountain life are found in the questions, How do I choose my commitments? How do I decide what is the right commitment for me? How do I serve my commitments once they have been chosen? How do I blend my commitments so that together they merge into a coherent, focused, and joyful life?
These are the sorts of question the next section of the book is designed to address. It aims to be a practical (and yet spiritual!) guidebook to the committed life, to the life lived in service of a vocation, a marriage, a creed, and a community. The second-mountain life is a spiritual adventure, but it is lived out very practically day by day.
The Four Commitments
PART II
Vocation
NINE
What Vocation Looks Like
In 1946, George Orwell published a brilliant essay called “Why I Write” about his vocation as a novelist and essayist. In it, he tries to puncture a lot of the pious and pretentious writing about writing. With the sense of guilt that is never far from the surface in his work, Orwell wants to expose and maybe shock you with his own low and selfish motives.
He writes, he says, for four basic reasons. First, sheer egoism. The desire to seem clever and to get talked about. Second, aesthetic enthusiasm. The pleasure he gets from playing with sentences and words. But Orwell is nothing if not honest. And he has to admit that there are higher motives as well. Third, then, is the “historic impulse,” the desire for understanding. The desire to see things as they are and find out true facts. Fourth, his political purpose. The desire to push the world in a certain direction, and to alter people’s