Effulgence [ih-fuhl-juh ns]

This week’s word is effulgence. Literally it means a shining forth and refers to a brilliant radiance.

One of the reasons I was first drawn to the writings of Abraham Heschel was because of the sheer beauty of the language. This is especially mind-boggling, since Rabbi Heschel, who was rescued along with other Jewish intellectuals just six weeks before the Nazis invaded Poland, came to the United States speaking very little English. An eminent scholar, a philosopher and theologian, his first published book was a collection of Yiddish poems when he was just 26. As erudite, at times difficult and cryptic as his writing is, he always writes with a poet’s heart and a poet’s vision.

I first remember coming across the word effulgence in a book of his where he parses the meaning of the word glory, explaining that, in reference to the Divine, the word glory pertains not to the essence but to the presence of God. “The whole earth is full of God’s glory,” Heschel explains, means the whole earth is full of the Divine presence, which, sensed in grandeur but more than grandeur, is neither an aesthetic nor a physical category. Rather, he writes, “it is . . . a living presence or the effulgence of a living presence.”1

With minimal transposition, this line suggests a noble and enlivening way to live: first, by cultivating an inner translucence that allows for the effulgence of the living presence to shine through us; second, by moving through our days with an eye for the resplendence that is hidden in and shines forth from both the magnificent and the mundane and alludes to a living presence we too cavalierly call God; and third, by recognizing and calling forth the radiance that resides within each person, however unawares.

The intimate connection between wonder and compassion, the rendezvous point where the inner mystic and the inner prophet meet within ourselves, is the capacity and the willingness to be moved. Those who notice the effulgent dimension of reality, are consciously on the lookout for it and acutely aware of anyplace it seems absent or is being obscured. Those who are oblivious to the wonder, are usually unmoved by injustice. The person who is moved by the sight of the fierce elegance of a spawning salmon or the iridescent inner lining of an abalone shell on the beach or snow falling in a cathedral of Douglas Firs tends to be the same person who is moved by the sight of the mother with two small children begging at the freeway entrance or the aerial photo of mountaintop removal mining in Kentucky or the luminous face of the bald-headed girl on the pediatric oncology ward.

One of my favorite places on this earth is Little Rock Pond where a glacier once scooped out a bowl in the woods of Vermont like the hands of God. From a large rock outcropping, I have had the pleasure of sitting enthralled by the game the sun and water played, the afternoon light dancing on the wind-rippled pond like flecks of flashing mica. And I sensed the effulgence of a living presence.

I remember coming home from college once during my freshman year to see my mother who was dying of cancer. When she heard me come in the front door, she called excitedly for me to come into her bedroom. She was sitting propped up in her bed. After kissing her, I sat down and she peppered me with questions about my classes, new friends, and basketball. I still recall how hard it was to concentrate on what she was asking or what I was saying because her face was so radiant, shining almost and moist with tears. And in her emaciating dying, which neither of us could approach with words, I saw in this beautiful woman a strange beauty I had never seen before, and sensed the effulgence of a living presence. I remember the well-known scene from the life of Thomas Merton while on a rare trip outside the monastery into Louisville where on 4^th and Walnut he had an epiphany, suddenly seeing the radiant beauty of the pedestrians and realizing his connection to each and all of them whom he experienced as “walking around shining like the sun.”2

I am a slow learner, I admit. But if I have learned anything in the six decades of my life it is that for those with eyes to see “the world is a wedding,” and all the earth is a sacrament, and all our days too—woven with joyful and sorrowful mysteries, fired by love and mired by loss—contain visible signs of an invisible grace, a living presence “within our reach but beyond our grasp.”3

In the lineage of the Holy Baal Shem Tov who knew the spiritual radiance of the world but who understood that the resplendent sublimity of it could be obscured with a small hand held close to our eyes, Rabbi Heschel encourages us to cultivate our innate sensibility for the ineffable and to nurture our rapport with the mystery of all reality which are overtures of Divine presence.

So the soul’s summons is to pause and pay attention to the mystery in which we are involved, to keep wonder alive, to stand rapt in reverence “amidst the meditation of mountains, the humility of flowers—wiser than all alphabets,”4 and to live in awe which “enables us to perceive in the world intimations of the divine, to sense in small things the beginning of infinite significance, to sense the ultimate in the common and the simple; to feel in the rush of the passing the stillness of the eternal.”5 In the end, those who have been exposed to the resplendence of the natural world, discovered the effulgence that alludes to the presence that lives within them and sustains all, will themselves be radiant and glorify God.

FOOD FOR THOUGHT AND ACTION:

• Be on the lookout for the resplendent aspects of life.
• Look for simple ways to recognize the effulgence of the living presence in people.
• Mantra: Shine forth from me !!

1 Abraham Heschel, God in Search of Man, 83.
2 Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, 157.
3 Abraham Heschel, GSM, 83.
4 Abraham Heschel, Man’s Quest for God, 5.
5 Abraham Heschel, GSM, 75.