Religious booknotes
Gerhart, Mary
later still strikes one as being as emancipated as anyone her age today. When in March 1941 Etty started to record her odyssey, she was still living in a sunny and comfortable room...
...The relationship between these two was as erotic as it was prayerful and contemplative: it was complete...
...Still "this is what I must do if I am ever to give my life a reasonable and satisfactory purpose . . . . " On this first page she also avows being "accomplished in bed, just about seasoned enough to be counted among the better lovers...
...They could share Etty's "addressing God in that silly, naive and deadly serious dialogue with what is deepest inside me and which for con(Continued on page 474) Commonweal: 4727 September 1984:473...
...S. has been characterized in one review I read, as a charlatan...
...Her involvement with Julius Spier, the man she refers to as S. had just started...
...Love indeed suits me perfectly...
...They were not merely lovers, but fellow pilgrims on the ultimate pilgrimage...
...In it she found her capacity for a love that would not remain "set apart from the really essential" in her, that would grow into that greater love which lays down life for friend...
...What was locked away would be set free between these first entries and that final one of August 24, 1943, at the end of her pilgrimage: "We should be willing to act as a balm on all wounds...
...She felt "full of fear of letting go, of allowing things to pour out of me...
...S. was the man who "taught me to speak of God without embarrassment...
...But she adds, "yet it remains a mere trifle set apart from what is really essential, deep inside me there is still something locked away...
...When in March 1941 Etty started to record her odyssey, she was still living in a sunny and comfortable room overlooking Amsterdam's largest square, notwithstanding the gloom that was enveloping Nazi-occupied Holland...
...He was nothing of the kind, this gifted man who after a career as a banker and then as a publisher had studied with Carl Jung, and was encouraged by Jung to use professionally his extraordinary capacity of reading character in palms...
...From Etty's description he was on as urgent a search for the specifically, centrally human in himself as she was, an urgency no doubt intensified by the impending doom of which both were fully aware...
Vol. 111 • September 1984 • No. 15
