When love conquers fear

While writing in my last about “Secret Strength” I had a strong desire to talk about wartime Holland and its sufferings under Nazi occupation. In particular I wanted to share an aria on YouTube, beautiful on its own account but even more moving for this little piece of history:

When the Netherlands were liberated in May 1945, the jubilation in the Zaan region (North Holland) reached the same unsurpassed level as everywhere else. A man hit on the idea of wheeling his old brown piano out on to the street. He sat down and began to play a patriotic song, naturally, with bystanders joining in with utmost emotion. Suddenly someone in the crowd cried: “There's a real singer living just near by. She must join us.” A few minutes later some bystanders brought a young lady, somewhat thin, smiling shyly, for she was shy by nature: Aafje Heynis. There were cries of “Sing, sing!” Standing by the old piano she began to sing George Frideric Handel’s “Dank sei dir, Herr”. It became completely still, and people began to weep. Aafje’s beautiful timbre, her own emotion, the splendid melody, the greatness of the occasion (freedom after five years of German occupation), all these cast a spell on the dozens of witnesses. “Never again have I been able to sing Handel quite like that”, the famous contralto was later to say.

Aafye Heynis died a few weeks ago. It is now known that the words and music were written by Siegfried Ochs (1858-1929) in parody of Handel, but no matter. They were apt for the occasion, as this translated excerpt shows:

Thanks be to Thee,
Thanks be to Thee, O Lord,
Thou hast led Thy people
With Thee,
Thine is now the land.

Even before these enemies menaced us,
Thy hand protected us,
In Thy grace Thou gavest us salvation.
. . .

My personal connection with this goes deep. On my birth certificate it says my father was Jan Jacobus Mulder, merchant, 38 years, from Den Helder, Holland. My mother never told me that it was otherwise, nor did she confess it to her late husband’s sister living in Arnhem. On the contrary, she left me with “Auntie Non” in 1947, while on her madcap quest for a rich new husband in Switzerland. Thus I lived with my alleged aunt and paternal grandparents, went to school and picked up a knowledge of Dutch, to the extent that I became rusty in English. It’s only in the last few days that I’ve asked myself “Why?”, now when there’s no one else left to ask.

Why did my mother take me away from the convent school in England where I’d spent one term, away from her parents’ house where we’d been living since our arrival from Australia, where I was born? I was barely five. I’d learned to read, at my grandmother’s knee. I had never been emotionally dependent on my mother like most young children. We had lived in a bungalow in Perth WA, where the landlady and other lodgers provided enough child care to let my mother gallivant as she pleased. After that I had roamed unfettered on the ship to England, overloaded with war brides; seeing my mother at mealtimes and in our cramped cabin shared with other passengers. It was unexpected to be left in Holland, suddenly and without a goodbye. Auntie Non offered tea and cake, I sat on the floor absorbed in a new toy, my mother simply slipped out while I wasn’t looking, “so as to avoid a fuss”, as she told me years later. It wasn’t a huge shock. I was used to abrupt changes and new places. The bigger shock was when she suddenly returned months later to take me back to England. I didn’t want to go, just as I hadn’t wanted to leave Australia. In Holland I had a proper life. I was Dutch, spoke the language, was learning to read and write in it.

I became part of a solid family where things made sense. It didn’t matter that my aunt was fierce, six foot tall with a hooked nose; that her husband was a solemn Calvinist schoolteacher given to Bible readings while we sat at table; that her father was a cantankerous old sea-captain, difficult to handle; that her mother was permanently bedridden, up those steep narrow Dutch stairs to the attic. This “grandma” liked to hug me but I would wriggle from her grasp and run from that stuffy room. Reflecting now, I see what I meant by “solid family”. Despite their quirks, they were close-knit and open-hearted. I was only required to take them on their terms. Beyond those, I enjoyed an extraordinary freedom. I have only two concrete memories of Auntie Non. One is of being shooed out of the back door between meals, to give space for her demanding housework and care-providing. I sometimes wandered far and wide, rendered safe by my homing instinct. As on the SS Rangitata sailing to England, hunger would bring me back on time. The other memory is of Auntie Non bathing her daughter Jannie or changing her nappies, telling me what she’d learned about baby-care, considering me old enough to have such conversations. For all I know, she may have guessed I was not her brother’s child, but it wouldn’t have mattered. After the Nazis, what else could matter? The Occupation had hardened the Dutch to tempered steel, sharpened them to survival. Sentiment was clutter and luxury.

When I started school, she must have taken me there on the first day but I don’t remember it, only that I went on my own with a tin of jam sandwiches each day for lunch, forcing myself to remember the route—at least half a mile—and trying not to be frightened of big dogs running free. I can’t imagine a parent or guardian treating their children this way today without intervention from the authorities, but this was Holland, less than two years after Liberation. It must have felt safe everywhere, with the whole country united in thanksgiving, bound together as firmly as the Hop-Mulder family of Beekhuizenseweg in Velp.

I was 49 before I discovered my true paternity, which makes me Australian rather than Dutch. It doesn’t change my feeling about Holland. There’s no language I love to hear more than Dutch, though I can’t speak it any more. Perhaps everyone craves an identity, inventing one if necessary; and perhaps the strongest patriotism burns in the soul of exiles, especially those who can’t decide where they’re exiled from. I know from Fernando Pessoa, another lifelong exile, that the greatest nostalgia is for events we missed, or which only occurred in fancy.

I wanted to speak of these things: what I remember, what I don’t, what I missed, what I’ve invented and imagined, straws to clutch through the torrent of life. Especially when talking of empathy in my last. Slender threads of personal sentiment, like unrequited love. Moving as Victor Frankl’s story is, it feels somehow distant, like hearsay; whereas Holland is mine, I lay claim to the land and its past. But I didn’t know how to connect it to my theme of “Secret Strength”.

Then serendipity lent a hand. Going aimlessly around the town, as mentioned in my last, I visited the Oxfam shop, where they keep shelves of second-hand books. I was drawn to a fat paperback of 700 pages, The Assassin’s Cloak. I wavered, then resisted the idea of adding another volume to my collection of Tsundoku, and left empty-handed. But next day I still hankered for it, hoped it would be still there, and it was. It’s arranged in day order, an anthology based on the diaries of 167 people.

I bought it on February 25th, so started to read from the entries for that day:

February 25th, 1942 [Holland]:
It is now half past seven in the morning. I have clipped my toenails, drunk a mug of genuine Van Houten’s cocoa, and had some bread and honey, all with what you might call abandon. I opened the Bible at random, but it gave me no answers this morning. Just as well, because there were no questions, just enormous faith and gratitude that life should be so beautiful, and that makes this a historic moment, that and not the fact that we are on the way to the Gestapo this morning.

This was from the diary of Etty Hillesum. I wondered anxiously about that visit to the Gestapo, but then discovered this, shortened from her entry of February 27th:

How rash to assume that man shapes his own destiny. All he can do is determine his inner responses. . . . Very early on Wednesday morning a large group of us was crowded into the Gestapo hall, and at that moment the circumstances of all our lives was the same. All of us occupied the same space, the men behind the desk no less than those about to be questioned. I noticed a young man with a sullen expression, who paced up and down looking driven and harassed and making no attempt to hide his irritation. He kept looking for pretexts to shout at the helpless Jews: ‘Take your hands out of your pockets’ and so on. I thought him more pitiable than those he shouted at, and those he shouted at I thought pitiable for being afraid of him. . . . I am not easily frightened. Not because I am brave, but because I know I am dealing with human beings and that I must try as hard as I can to understand everything that anyone does. . . . All the appalling things that happen are no mysterious threats from afar, but arise from fellow human beings very close to us. That makes these happenings more familiar, then, and not so frightening. The terrifying thing is that systems grow too big for men and hold them in a satanic grip, the builders no less than the victims of the system, much as large edifices and spires, created by men’s hands, tower high above us, yet may collapse over our heads and bury us.

Wikipedia tells us she died in Auschwitz a year later. World of Books Ltd has mailed me a copy of her diary. I want to know how her strength held out as things got darker. Meanwhile, I leave you with this:

...I am also thinking of Etty Hillesum, a young Dutch girl of Jewish origin who died in Auschwitz. At first far from God, she discovered him by looking deep within her and she wrote in her diary: “There is a really deep well inside me. And in it dwells God. Sometimes I am there, too. But more often stones and grit block the well, and God is buried beneath. Then he must be dug out again”. In her disrupted, restless life she found God in the very midst of the great tragedy of the 20th century: the Shoah. This frail and dissatisfied young woman, transfigured by faith, became a woman full of love and inner peace who was able to declare: “I live in constant intimacy with God"...”

From an address by Pope Benedict XVI, on February 13th, 2013. Does such “secret strength” owe anything to religion? This will be something to explore further.

Secret Strength

When we are alert to its promptings, the unconscious mind can reach us through various means. Blake had his waking visions; many of us have dreams. They may clothe themselves in a jumble of recent experiences, yet contain latent messages ready for decoding, which may open our eyes to things our well-controlled consciousness has kept hidden. At the foot of this page, I’ve added links to several accounts of dreams by readers of this blog, and one of my own too. (1)

Usually I don’t remember dreams but receive words or phrases in waking life that I like to call “angel-whisperings”. These too are ready for decoding and are always worth brooding over. The latest came to me at 3am as part of a tangled train of thought. I would love to report it as a golden string to lead me in at Heaven’s gate, in Blake’s terms, but it wasn’t so. What use are night thoughts stirring to action, when one’s only half awake, reluctant to move a muscle, let alone reach for a notebook? I picked on a key phrase, “secret strength”, as a shorthand to help remember all the rest. Next morning I woke with the phrase intact but nothing else—all blank.

Later in the day, K and I were taking our “shortcut to everywhere”, she to go and have her nails done in iridescent kingfisher blue, I to keep company on the way, kiss the sky and wander aimlessly. I asked her what “secret strength” might mean. We both thought the same: a latent ability unknown to its possessor until called upon—perhaps in a crisis or deadly peril. In short, when “that which is unchosen” befalls us from a blue sky, we may rise to the occasion, if we have a secret strength; failing which, we won’t. This accords with the drama of my own life, in which some characters I’ve known closely went to pieces and never recovered. It’s overcome or succumb. I can’t tell those stories here. For myself, I respond badly to minor annoyances, but when things get serious, I’m coolly focused, clear-thinking and energized. As to extreme circumstances, I don’t know how I’ll react.

I shall assume that “secret strength” is a stripped-down message from the unconscious, a dream with no drama, the answer to a question which lay begging. For in my last I spoke of the unchosen as a gift which might, by means of a process not unlike the smelting of ore, be revealed as a blessing. Natalie responded thus:

Any hardships we’ve endured are nothing in comparison to what so many face every day—not only hunger, poverty, oppression, cruelty, but also severe disability, illness, pain—the list is endless. Certainly these are unchosen afflictions/circumstances and I find it hard to see how they could be turned into blessings by those who are suffering.

Could “secret strength” point to an answer? I reflect that civilization has spoilt us with its comforts and security. How can we know how others feel, besieged in war zones or fleeing from them, or in any of those circumstances Natalie lists? Do we have it in us to endure such things? Do we feel enough affinity with those who are faced with those challenges? Can we summon true empathy, as opposed to vague commiseration? Like an actor drawing on inner resources to play his role, I can only use material from my own life, as lived in reality, or in imagination through literature and music, say, which pluck at my heartstrings and deeper understanding. Endurance is an obvious strength. Empathy too, I suspect. If my enemy and I can see one another with masks off, unarmed, eyeball-to-eyeball (or some virtual equivalent) a spark may pass between us to make us no longer enemies, even when we are compelled to act true to our assigned roles.

Thus endurance and empathy may be among our secret strengths, but we cannot tell till the occasion comes. Does this answer the question, how dire circumstances can turn into a blessing? Not yet. We must look at examples. Having ruled out any from my own life, I shall quote from someone’s experience of World War II concentration camps. (2) He describes how prisoners are being marched by brutal guards in the dark and cold, awaiting kicks and blows for the smallest infringement:

Hiding his coat behind his upturned collar, the man next to me whispered suddenly: “If our wives could see us now! I do hope they are better off in their camps and don’t know what is happening to us!”

That brought thoughts of my own wife to mind. And as we stumbled on for miles, slipping on icy spots, supporting each other time and again, dragging one another up and onward, nothing was said, but we both knew: each of us was thinking of his wife. Occasionally I looked at the sky where the stars were fading and the pink light of the morning was beginning to spread behind a dark bank of clouds. But my mind clung to my wife’s image, imagining it with an uncanny acuteness. I heard her answering me, saw her smile, her frank and encouraging look. Real or not, her look was then more luminous than the sun which was beginning to rise.

A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth—that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved. In a position of utter desolation, when man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way—an honourable way—in such a position man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfilment. For the first time in my life I was able to understand the meaning of the words, “The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory.”

As Viktor Frankl summarizes it:

In spite of all the enforced physical and mental primitiveness of the life in a concentration camp, it was possible for spiritual life to deepen.

The whole book contains many examples to illustrate this point, though he makes it clear that some of the inmates were stretched far beyond their endurance, and went to pieces irredeemably. Here is another, it’s one that I quoted in a piece six years ago (3):

. . . the young woman whose death I witnessed in a concentration camp. It is a simple story. There is little to tell and it may sound as if I had invented it; but to me it seems like a poem.

This young woman knew that she would die in the next few days. But when I talked to her she was cheerful in spite of this knowledge. “I am grateful that fate has hit me so hard,” she told me. “In my former life I was spoiled and did not take spiritual accomplishments seriously.” Pointing through the window of the hut, she said, “This tree here is the only friend I have in my loneliness.” Through that window she could see just one branch of a chestnut tree, and on the branch were two blossoms. “I often talk to this tree,” she said to me. I was startled and didn’t quite know how to take her words. Was she delirious? Did she have occasional hallucinations? Anxiously I asked her if the tree replied. “Yes.” What did it say to her? She answered, “It said to me, ‘I am here—I am here—I am life, eternal life.’”

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(1) Click here for Natalie’s dream of falling down a well; or here for Bryan’s dream about “The Good Book”; appended in the comments are Vincent’s dream about Donald Trump at Woodstock, Cindy’s about Hillary Clinton as a mischievous ghost haunting her kitchen and bathroom.
(2) Viktor Frankl in Man’s Search for Meaning.
(3) It was in a piece called “Eternity”.

That which is unchosen

On Monday morning I passed through the little footpath that leads to the children’s playground at the back of our house. It’s my shortcut to everywhere. Litter-pickers don’t work at the weekend, nor do those with fresh paypackets and the urge to celebrate with their friends on beer and fast food, who gather where they can sit in the open air on the low walls provided. There are “No Dogs” signs but dogs can’t read and their owners don’t care.

Emerging from the shortcut into the playground I heard the single word “Unchosen”, as if whispered by an angel. I took it to be a comment on the litter, and what I wrote in my last : “I ended up here, which is exactly where I want to be.” “Here” means everything that it can mean, including this particular spot on earth, in all its unchosen states, desirable or otherwise.

There are some whose paths are swept clean wherever they go, perhaps with a red carpet unrolled before them. These are the privileged, whose wealth and power can give up to 99% protection against the unchosen—like bathroom disinfectants in their fight against germs. The human ambition towards total security is understandable, but I seem to have lacked it as far back as I can remember. I’ve recently been making some tentative efforts at memoirs of my adult life. (They’re not for public viewing, at least in my lifetime.) I discover I’ve been at the opposite end of the spectrum. Instinctively I saw that working to any kind of planned goal would be self-incarceration, like living in a gated community. Or perhaps I was never able to see what I really wanted in this world. I couldn’t have defined what it was, only that I dimly understood it to be a feeling, not to be imagined, but recognized when it happened. There was no way of chasing it. So I took what was offered indifferently, wayfaring on a choiceless path. All this happened without awareness at the time. And so I have found value in looking back in wonder at what happened, and the suffering it brought, not always just to me; and perhaps the point of it all.

I wonder if I unconsciously knew that the choiceless is more to be treasured than privilege. That which arrives unsought is a gift. It comes like an ore dug up from the earth. You might mistake it for dirt. It needs to be smelted. The process can take a long time, perhaps most of your life. Then it shines bright. Such is the nature of blessings.

I had a guru once who used to say that “the thing you are looking for is within inside of you.” Aside from being ungrammatical, it was quite off the mark. You could look inside yourself for a lifetime, and find nothing. You might “die wondering” like a virgin spinster. Having given his methods a trial for thirty years, I can speak out with confidence, perhaps not just for myself. Sometimes the personal is indeed the universal.

What was I looking for? A feeling. Where did I find it? Not in myself alone; but where the “I” touches the All, by which I mean the world, a reality which inwraps me in love’s embrace. Says Blake,

Eternity is in love with the productions of time

The attraction is mutual and ecstatic. And thus there is Heaven on Earth, always present, visible to us when we’re in a state of grace.

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I didn’t mean for these thoughts to fly off into the sky. I too am privileged, up to a comfortable point. I’m sure my regular and target readers are too. Privilege can come by itself, but shouldn’t be taken for granted. In England we have a nickname for those who have nothing better to do than deplore litter and fouling by dogs in the streets: “Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells”. One might have a sense of entitlement, and be irked by that pesky 1% fly in the ointment. Bless such people, for they too will be swallowed up by death just like the less fortunate.

Meanwhile, there are millions whose only privilege is to be alive. All the rest is unchosen. And there are those who would sweep away the divine embrace as outdated superstition, offering material progress for all as a substitute. It turns out to be a skimpy blanket, too small and threadbare; easily snatched away. Many there are, and always have been, who depend on blessings. What a blessing is, I can’t rationally say; only that it is something given.

shortcut to everywhere


no dogs! On the right is the back of my house


dogs can’t read . . .