Today’s Life-Line is:

What characterizes humans is not only our ability to develop words and symbols, but also our being compelled to draw a distinction between the utterable and the unutterable, to be stunned by that which is but cannot be put into words. . .

The attempt to convey what we see and cannot say is the everlasting theme of humankind’s unfinished symphony, a venture in which adequacy is never achieved. Only those who live on borrowed words believe in their gift of expression. A sensitive person knows that the intrinsic, the most essential, is never expressed. Most—and often the best—of what goes on in us is our own secret; we have to wrestle with it ourselves. The stirring in our hearts when watching the star-studded sky is something no language can declare. What smites us with unquenchable amazement is not that which we grasp and are able to convey but that which lies within our reach but beyond our grasp; not the quantitative aspect of nature but something qualitative; not what is beyond our range in time and space but the true meaning, source and end of being, in other words, the ineffable.

The ineffable inhabits the magnificent and the common, the grandiose and the tiny facts of reality alike. Some people sense this quality at distant intervals in extraordinary events, others sense it in the ordinary events, in every fold, in every nook; day after day, hour after hour. To them things are bereft of triteness; to them, being does not mate with non-sense. They hear the stillness that crowds the world in spite of noise, in spite of greed. Slight and simple, as things may be—a piece of paper, a morsel of bread, a word, a sigh—they hide and guard a never-ending secret: A glimpse of God? Kinship with the spirit of being? An eternal flash of a will?

~ Abraham Joshua Heschel

FOR REFLECTION: For Heschel, the sublime or the ineffable, is not limited to the big, vast, exceptional, or spectacular. Can you remember a time when you saw something small or common or seemingly ordinary and it broke you open, stopped you in your tracks, left you moved, speechless, teary-eyed, dumbstruck with awe?

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