The Earth is the Lord's

Our age is brilliant with electric light. No further description is needed of this as we see it re-invent itself with each passing day. But what of the inner life? If we measure culture by the quality and quantity of its books, by the number of its universities, by our artistic accomplishment or our scientific discoveries, the Western civilization is a golden age. But what if we use a different criteria, "namely, how much spiritual substance there is in everyday existence."

"The patter of life of a people is more significant than the pattern of art. What counts most is not expression, but existence itself. The key source of creativity lies in the will to cling to spirituality, to be close to the inexpressible, and not merely in the ability of expression." The God of the scriptures is always more concerned with our daily pattern of life than our abilities of any sort. More than that, the sense of transcendence, what Heschel calls staying "close to the inexpressible" seems necessary lest our abilities blunt and darken.

What he is hinting at in the introduction, as he prepares to introduce us to the inner world of the Jew in East Europe, is what I have been working on in my own life for the last 10 years. Whatever talent I may have as a writer or thinker or creator, my life's work will be my life and all the living beings connected to it. Any slender volume of print will only be lasting in God's eyes depending on the lived life that shapes the turning and twisting of my pen. Words empty of experience do not count before one who sees into the heart of men and women. What is important as we try and take stock of our own lives or of Western culture in general is the history of our soul.

I have been very interested in this word lately: the soul. The soul is a word that captures everything within a living person: his body, his relationships, his heart and mind, his place in the world. It is a word for everything about him. It is that word that drove me to read this essay by Abraham Heschel. I plan to comment on much of what he said, so I guess this is a multi-part blog entry. If you are looking for something to title this, it would go something like: What we can all learn from Abraham Heschel and his people.

Abraham Heschel was saved out of Nazi Germany with other Jews who had published great works of scholarship. He was brought to America where he marched with Martin Luther King, Jr, living in a neighborhood with Neiber, and developed a long standing friendship with Father Neauhaus among other things. My friend Keith introduced me to Heschel when I was in college. He is a world of thought. One thing the Jewish people do far better than we Christians do is to remember. They remember and they study the collected memories and the tell their children the stories of the past. "The present moment overflowed its bounds. People lived not chronologically, but in fusion of past and present." The world is crammed with the living beings who have gone before and made a way for us to be here. There is much for us to learn.