Grace Cathedral

Our three month series, Walking with the Mystics, exploring mystical spirituality across Christianity, Judaism and Islam, continues tonight at our Candlelight Labyrinth Walk with Etty Hillesum, a modern Jewish mystic who was killed at Auschwitz. In the face of Nazi atrocities, Hillesum turned inward, recording her thoughts in a collection of diaries that she handed over to a friend before she was martyred. Her writings reveal a woman of great spiritual courage and profound depth, who developed a surpassing inner peace even as the world unraveled around her.

Jason Ditzian, a clarinetist and leader of Kugelplex, will offer music from the Jewish old-world tradition of klezmorim. Jason has performed with such musical luminaries as Joan Baez, and will be leading an ecstatic klezmer chamber dance concert immediately after the labyrinth walk right down the street at Old First Church Concert at 8 pm.

At 6:30 pm in the Chapel of Grace, Dr. Barbara Morrill, core faculty and former chair of the Integral Counseling Psychology Program at the California Institute of Integral Studies, will offer a thirty minute presentation on Etty Hillesum, followed by ten minutes of Q&A. Dr. Morrill has spent years studying Hillesum’s work, and retracing her life’s steps. In 2008, Morill presented at the International Transpersonal Congress in New Delhi, India: Being in the Face of Annihilation: Transformation Through Writing as Inquiry in the lives of two Dutch Women During the Holocaust: Etty Hillesum (1914-1943) and Jetteke Frijda (1925-present).

Healing Prayer will be offered in the Chapel of the Nativity from 6:30 – 7:30 pm. Next month we’ll turn to Rumi with a focus on peace in the Sufi tradition.