Of all the books to have come out of the Holocaust, surely one of the most enriching is An Interrupted Life, the letters and diaries of Dutch Jewish author Etty Hillesum, charting her spiritual awakening ahead of her death in Auschwitz in November 1943. In response to evil, Etty counsels us to look inwards:
Ultimately, we have just one moral duty: to reclaim large areas of peace in ourselves, more and more peace, and to reflect it towards others. And the more peace there is in us, the more peace there will also be in our troubled world.
So of all Mark Lawson’s recommendations from the Edinburgh Fringe, I’d choose to see Sarah Finch’s Etty…In Transit, a new multi-media play about the possibility of finding a deeper spiritual self in extremis.
While racist rioters were trashing British streets, across the channel Team GB was modelling what a multicultural society can, at best, achieve. Rejoicing in the Paris Olympics, in which “a competition gene” worked in harmony with “a cooperation gene”, a second Tablet leader argues that watching men and women excelling in sport is a cause for hope – “a virtue that acknowledges how things are, and recognises how they could be”.
Anna Rowlands, St Hilda Professor of Catholic Social Thought and Practice at the University of Durham, looks back with grief and shock at how the murder of three young girls in Southport on 29 July turned into an event of manufactured social rage. The riots have represented a new and worrying pattern of elite social media-agitated racial and religious intimidation. But the blame does not lie with the alt-right social media agitators alone. Those holding offices of state have administered toxic messages to the people: that those arriving by boat are bogus and threaten our communities; that Islam is a dangerous religion incompatible with British values. In response, we should focus on those who showed up in massive numbers in the wake of the riots, to clean up the streets, to check on vulnerable neighbours, to work for the common good.
After the Southport murders, rumours swirled that the perpetrator was an asylum seeker. That he’d recently arrived on a small boat. That he was a Muslim. None of these were true, but as Muslim writer and journalist Samia Rahman writes, “the trope of the Muslim male, a misogynist groomer, proved an easy myth to exploit”. The far-right riots have, Rahman states, awakened in British Muslims “a knot of unbelonging”. Her friends speak of being jolted back to the memories of “P***-bashing” that tainted their childhoods. And it’s not just the prospect of far-right riots that scare them: it’s casual, banal abuse on public transport, or in the supermarket, or sitting in the car waiting for traffic lights to change. “There is tension in their bodies as they anticipate harm.”
In the sixth in our series on pilgrimage, poet Fiona Sampson chances upon a shrine to Our Lady in the Karst region of Slovenia, and finds it a place where she can pray – “Or rather it was the only place I could do anything that remotely resembled praying. Wordless stuff, nothing more than a kind of openness.”
Sue Gaisford’s memories of summer holidays – whether munching dark chocolate sandwiches on the way to North Norfolk, or waving her fan in Spain – are vivid. And every stage they encompass – from early childhood to late grand motherhood – is precious.
In a letter from Dublin, Gerry O’Hanlon SJ comments that the image of the Roman Curia on the cover of The Tablet (10 August) – exclusively male and presumably celibate – will do little to persuade many of the possibility of its deliberations being of any relevance to the problems facing Christianity and God’s world today. He hopes that Francis will make the Curia more transparent and accountable. Charles Mugleston writes from Suffolk of the need, in the wake of the riots, to let go of our attachment to particular identities – of geographical origin, religious tradition, class – and to affirm our universal humanity. In response to Jeremy Treglown’s article “Straight is the Gate” (3 August), in which Treglown shared his experience as a divorced Anglican, discerning a call to become Catholic but denied the opportunity to marry a Catholic in a Catholic church, Rhiannon Parry Thompson reflects on the exclusion of those denied the Eucharist. She quotes Pope Francis: “The Eucharist, although it is the fullness of sacramental life, is not a prize for the perfect, but a powerful medicine and nourishment for the weak.”
Peter Clarke, from Oxford, feels it is absurd that, aged 87, he should address his parish priest as Father.
In the Books pages, Anthony Gardner finds Scottish Religious Poetry: From the Sixth Century to the Present chock-full of delights, and filled with “the offbeat and entertaining”. Lucy Lethbridge is overcome with grief reading Alexandra Fuller’s Fi, a memoir of her son who died aged 21. And Markie Robson-Scott revels in cold sea swimming and soul music in Benjamin Myers’s new novel, Rare Singles.
In Arts, Joanna Moorhead finds David Hockney’s devotion to the Renaissance Masters beautifully illustrated in a National Gallery exhibition: “Hockney and Piero: A Longer Look”. Brian Morton calls Robyn Hitchcock’s Now That’s What I Call Music “simply the most unguilty musical pleasure you can allow yourself this summer”. Lucy Lethbridge recommends a new Sky documentary, Klitschko: More than a Fight, about the mayor of Kyiv (a never-once-floored boxer).
Brendan Walsh
Editor of The Tablet
The Tablet can be found in good newsagents’ and church bookstalls. Double summer issue now on sale.