Here is a Life-Line worth taking hold of:
The beginning of faith is not a feeling for the mystery of living or a sense of awe, wonder or fear. The root of religion is the question what to do with the feeling for the mystery of living, what to do with awe, wonder or fear. Religion, the end of isolation, begins with a consciousness that something is asked of us. It is in that tense, eternal asking in which the soul is caught and in which man’s1 answer is elicited.
Wonder is not a state of esthetic enjoyment. Endless wonder is endless tension, a situation in which we are shocked at the inadequacy of our awe, at the weakness of our shock, as well as the state of being asked the ultimate question.
Endless wonder unlocks an innate sense of indebtedness. Within our awe there is no place for self-assertion. Within our awe we only know that all we own we owe. The world consists, not of things, but of tasks. Wonder is the state of our being asked. The ineffable is a question addressed to us.
All that is left to us is a choice—to answer or to refuse to answer. Yet the more deeply we listen, the more we become stripped of the arrogance and callousness which alone would enable us to refuse. We carry a load of marvel, wishing to exchange it for the simplicity of knowing what to live for, a load which we can never lay down nor continue to carry knowing where.
~ Abraham Heschel, from Man is Not Alone: A Philosophy of Religion, p. 68-69.
1 Rabbi Heschel wrote before the conscientization of exclusive and inclusive language.
This somehow strikes at the root of my life. I have pondered these things also, but have not found the ability to articulate it well enough to repeat it and allow it to dwell interiorly enough to change me. I have been twice challenged by an individual who says “we can’t save everybody”, but what ought to have been my real time reply is “God’s will be done”, and then go about assuming He can save everyone and desires to save everyone. That is enough for me
Thanks for your comment, Peter.