Today’s Life-Line is: 

“I’m a soul in wonder.” ~ Van Morrison

Here are some comments on yesterday’s quote by Abraham Heschel. If you haven’t read the previous post or quote, I recommend you do so before reading today’s reflection. Just click “Previous” above. The quote begins–

“To pray is to take notice of the wonder, to regain a sense of the mystery that animates all beings, the divine margin in all attainments. . .

Rabbi Heschel is hoping to deepen and expand our understanding and practice of prayer. In this passage taken from his book Man’s Quest for God he connects prayer to wonder, which for him is innate to the human person: precognitive, presymbolic, and pretheological. Elsewhere he states “The beginning of our happiness lies in the understanding that life without wonder is not worth living.”1

For Heschel, wonder is both natural, that is, indigenous to each and all persons, and requires cultivation and nurturance throughout our lives by conscious, intentional practice. Sadly, what was once spontaneous and native to us as children begins to atrophy like an unused muscle unless we deliberately and continually activate it. The more we “ooh” and “aah” at the incomprehensible surprise of being—“the meditation of mountains, the humility of flowers — wiser than all alphabets,” at the blessing of a body or a bed, the sound of a loved one laughing, the inebriating smell of your grandbaby’s head, the glory of a good friend, the opportunity to grow with the help of turmoil, failure, or loss, “the right to serve, to adore, and to fulfill”—the more we will find things to “ooh” and “aah” about. If you can get a better gig–take it.

Rabbi Heschel makes the connection between wonder and the overlooked act of noticing. It’s not just that he wants us to notice the wonder but to realize that noticing opens the door to wonder. The late American poet Mary Oliver writes, “If you notice anything,/ it leads you to notice/ more and more.”2 Like bird watchers and mystics, she knows that noticing no less than wonder has to be intentional. Noticing invites not merely looking but beholding. Beholding is an integral part of contemplative engagement, a premeditated way of going out to meet and greet the day, a way of fully, actively, and consciously participating in the liturgy of life honed by all mystics or contemplatives. Whether beholding a blue heron or a blue moon, a blinking field of fireflies or the wild fires that burgle people’s lives, the broken fingers of a beggar or the face of a loved one broken by grief or broken open by delight, to behold something or someone is to hold the being of that which we are taking in and allowing it to take us into it’s mystery and unsayable truth. It is “to regain a sense of the mystery that animates all beings.”

Beholding is done with what the author of the Letter to the Ephesians called the eyes of the heart and activates our God-given capacity to be moved. The conscious practice of being “susceptible to now,” to borrow a phrase from poet William Stafford, is what keeps our heart moist, juicy, soft so that we neither become professional sleepwalkers nor stone boys and girls nor petrified women and men. American author Annie Dillard, who knows a thing or two about beholding,3 writes “How we spend our days, of course, is how we spend our lives.” To which we might add how we live our moments and minutes is how we live our days.

Before prayer can become “our humble answer to the inconceivable surprise of living,” it first must be our willingness to be questioned by the ineffable, to be acted upon by that which can be experienced but not fully grasped, by that which instead grasps us. The ineffable or the sublime is that aspect of reality, that depth of life present in the magnificent and the mundane, concealed and revealed, which we can sense but not adequately communicate. Heschel proffers, “The greatest experiences are those for which we have no expression.”4 Our willingness to be moved indicates our trust and courage to sense the question inherent in the “surprise of living” and our desire to be attuned to the mystery that sustains us and to which the world alludes.

Prayer is what happens in the noticing, the beholding, the willing susceptibility, and the consent to being moved. For Rabbi Heschel indifference to the sublime wonder of living is the root of sin. It is the refusal, and the presumption that fuels it, that Heschel considers the primal sin of humans, not pride. Or perhaps the refusal to pay attention, to behold, to be appreciative and grateful is at the heart of pride. For inherent in the refusal to be moved, to be surprised, is the resistance to be human. “We take it . . . for granted,” Heschel argues, “that a person who is not affected by the vision of earth and sky, who has no eyes to see the grandeur of nature and to sense the sublime, however vaguely, is not human. . . . It is unworthy of [humans] not to take notice of the sublime.”4

to be continued . . .

NOTES

1 Abraham Heschel, Man is Not Alone, 37. Also in God in Search of Man, 46.

2 Mary Oliver, “Moths” in New and Selected Poems, 132.

3 See especially Dillard’s early work Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.

4 Abraham Heschel, Man Is Not Alone, 15-16.

5 Abraham Heschel, Man Is Not Alone, 3.

ARTWORK: Sunset at the Garden of the Gods, by Kathy Conzelman.
Used with the artist’s permission. See Kathy’s work here.