Hillesum: Finding Answers in Emotional Difficulties

“Thinking gets you nowhere. It may be a fine and noble aid in academic studies, but you can’t think your way out of emotional difficulties. That takes something altogether different. You have to make yourself passive then and just listen. Re-establish contact with a slice of eternity.”—Etty Hillesum in An Interrupted Life, Daily Quote, June 29, 2018, Inwardoutward.org, Church of the Saviour.

Etty Hillesum, a Jewish writer who died during the Holocaust, shares her formula for finding a way through difficult emotional situations. Those who make decisions using their thinking (T) function, what is reasonable, will probably disagree. Considering the importance of relationships, those who make decisions using their feeling (F) function may agree with Hillesum. They both are right. We need both thinking and feeling when making decisions.

Looking beyond personality types takes us to another level. Hillesum is trying to tell us to let the committee in our heads rest by whatever means we use: reading, meditation, music, walking, praying, writing, or just being. She tells us to connect with the God within us, especially after the silence that follows our spiritual practice. Jake Owensby also recently wrote about Hillesum and her experience of feeling God’s presence.1 He reminded us that hope in times of great difficulty is not a spiritual achievement on our part.

We do not generate hope with our practice. Instead, spiritual practices open us to the source of hope: to the God who is always already present to us and with us.

We are to try to find an answer from something greater than ourselves, our God who is always beside us. We may not know the exact answer. We will recognize it because we know it will have something to do with love.

1 Jake Owensby in “A Hope-Shaped Life,” The Woodlands: A Place for Exploring the Spiritual Life, February 13, 2026.

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