Daniel says, “Hilda, the Temple in Jerusalem has been destroyed for almost 2,000 years and there is no longer any worship there, but liturgical life has evolved. Part of it has assumed a family form, another part takes place in the synagogue, and Judaism has survived because that is what the Lord wanted. Never fear, Hilda. We do what we can on this earth, and judgments as to the value or otherwise of what we do will be taken upstairs without our involvement.”
Meanwhile, Paul has found a house. It is not vast but has a wonderful garden and I will be able to live there and no longer have to rent. It is also in need of repair. The main thing is the really quite large garden in which we can build a new home for our old people. I’ve already thought all about it. It will have two stories, with small bedrooms upstairs (but each with a balcony), and all the amenities and a hall downstairs. Musa has a builder friend with several teams who will construct it.
I cannot say my life here is straightforward. It is far from that for many reasons, but what a joy it is to be here, in the place where I am right now. Do you remember I wanted to become an artist, to work in the theater, or something of the kind? I find it strange now even to remember that. Was it really me? Do you remember how you tried to steer me away from the arts and advised me to study something useful—accountancy, or a secretarial course? I have to thank you. You were right about everything, though I did move in a different direction.
How are my brothers? Axel wrote me a lovely letter. Did you know he has a girlfriend he is completely crazy about? Or am I giving away secrets? Please write.
Lots of love,
Hilda
13. 1972, Haifa
L
ETTER FROM
H
ILDA TO HER MOTHER
Dear Mother,
I can see from your letters how orderly and unvarying your life is. One thing follows on from another like clockwork. Here in Israel, in our parish at least, extraordinary things happen all the time, some of them very amusing or instructive. Last Sunday a nun from somewhere in the Balkans, I didn’t gather where exactly, wandered into our morning service. She was wearing a kind of floor-length brown habit and had a pectoral cross like a bishop. There was a cap on her head and a rucksack on her shoulders.
As we started, she took out a rosary and knelt with it, and stayed like that to the end of the service. Afterward we invited her to share our meal. There were twenty people or so. Daniel said grace, everybody sat down, and she suddenly started speaking a weird, terribly funny mixture of languages: Serbian, Polish, French, and Spanish. At first Daniel translated, managing somehow to conjure meaning out of incoherence. She had come from the village of Garabandal where the Virgin Mary and the Archangel Michael had appeared to them, and above them in the sky a great eye of the godhead had shone. At this point Daniel interrupted her and said that people were hungry, so they should first have their dinner and then she could tell us everything properly. She got very cross and waved her arms at him, but he said to her very strictly, as if talking to a child, “Sit down and eat your dinner! Our Savior also first fed people and instructed them afterward.”
I immediately started trying to remember how it had been with the Savior, and actually I think it was the other way around. Anyway, everybody started eating and so did she. The food on the table was what our women had brought from home. We ate and drank and then Daniel said, “Tell us, sister, what you want to. Only not too quickly. I have to translate it.”
Her story was that ten years ago or so, the Virgin Mary appeared in their village to four girls. She appeared over a period of several months and through the girls conveyed tidings to all humankind. There were three messages in all. In the first she called for repentance, in the second she warned that the chalice of patience was overflowing, and that pastors were particularly sinful. She predicted punishment in the absence of repentance. In the third there was something important about Russia, but I don’t remember what exactly. The Virgin also told the girls ten secrets. They were on white sheets of some celestial material on which for now nothing could be seen, but with time the letters would appear and it would be possible to read them. The nun then produced from her rucksack some brown vestments exactly like the one she was wearing and said that anybody who died wearing this habit would never know the eternal fire. The Virgin Mary had promised. She then invited us to buy them at a modest price.
At this point Daniel stopped translating and started speaking to her very rapidly in Polish. She replied in some Slavonic language and they appeared to be arguing. It ended when she shouted, “The sun is dancing! The sun is dancing!” and departed. I think he had simply told her to get out. The congregation were perplexed. They had never before seen Daniel so annoyed. He sat unspeaking, looking at the table. The women cleared away the dishes and washed everything up but still he did not speak. They all went away without having received any explanation. Only brother Elijah stayed behind, fussing about as always with his tape recorder, and two students from Mexico who had asked to stay the night.
I made coffee for Daniel. He drank a little and said very quietly, “What an unpleasant episode. I should have explained my point of view, but I couldn’t. I have to admit, Hilda, that it is always very difficult to decide what you can say openly and what you should keep to yourself. When I was young I believed people should be told everything and that, as a pastor, I had a duty to share all my knowledge. Over the years I came to see that was a mistake. A person may know only what they are capable of assimilating. I have been thinking about this for half my life, and especially since I have been in Israel, but there are few people I can confide in. Really only you. You see, it is a terrible thing to disturb someone’s equilibrium. If a person has become accustomed to thinking in a particular way, even a slight digression from that can prove painful. Not everybody is open to new ideas, to making their understanding more precise and supplementing it, to change. I have to admit that I am changing. Today my views on many matters have diverged from those generally accepted in the Catholic world, and I am not the only person in that situation.
“You see, the birth of the One whom the Christian world knows as Jesus Christ happened just 200 kilometers from here, in the town of Beit Lechem. His parents were from Nazareth, a village only two days’ journey from here. We venerate Him as our Savior, Master, and the Son of God. We venerate his holy parents. However, the combination of the words ‘God’ and ‘Mother’ to give the concept ‘Mother of God,’ which is so widespread in Eastern Christianity as the title of Miriam, the mother of Jesus, is completely unthinkable in Hebrew to the Jewish mind. Yoledet El, ‘she who gave birth to God,’ would cause the outraged ears of a devout Jew to fall off! Yet half the Christian world venerates Miriam as none other than the Mother of God. The first Christians would have considered that expression sacrilegious. The cult of the Mother of God appeared in Christianity at a very late stage. It was only introduced in the sixth century. God, the Creator of all that exists, the Maker of the world and all that lives in it, was not born of woman. The concept of ‘The Son of Man’ appeared long before the nativity of Christ and had an entirely different meaning.
“The legend of the birth of Jesus from Mary and the Holy Spirit is an echo of Greek mythology. Beneath that is the earth of a powerful paganism, the world of the great orgy, the world of worship of the powers of fertility, of Mother Earth. In the popular mind, the goddesses of antiquity are invisibly present, the cult of the Earth, of fertility, of abundance. Every time I encounter this, it drives me to distraction.