Abraham Joshua Heschel

To live life in radical amazement

Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement...get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted. Everything is phenomenal; everything is incredible; never treat life casually. To be spiritual is to be amazed.

In prayer we shift the center of living from self-consciousness to self-surrender

We do not step out of the world when we pray; we merely see the world in a different setting. The self is not the hub, but the spoke of the revolving wheel. In prayer we shift the center of living from self-consciousness to self-surrender. God is the center, the Source, toward which all forces tend, and we are the flowing, the ebb and flow of God's tides. Prayer takes the mind out of the narrowness of self-interest, and enables us to see the world in the mirror of the holy.

Listening to the soul's recessed certainty

Our awareness of God is a syntax or the silence in which our souls mingle with the divine, in which the ineffable in us communes with the ineffable beyond us. It is the afterglow of years in which soul and sky are silent together, the outgrowth of accumulated certainty of the abundant, never-ending presence of the divine. All we need to do is to let the insight be and to listen to the soul's recessed certainty of its being a parenthesis in the immense script of God's eternal speech.

The soul's recessed certainty of its being a parenthesis in the immense script of God's eternal speech

Our awareness of God is a syntax of the silence in which our souls mingle with the divine, in which the ineffable in us communes with the ineffable beyond us. It is the afterglow of years in which soul and sky are silent together, the out-growth of accumulated certainty of the abundant, never-ebbing presence of the divine. All we are called to do is to let the insight be able to listen to the soul's recessed certainty of its being a parenthesis in the immense script of God's eternal speech.

The Sabbath

We must conquer space in order to sanctify time. All week long we are called upon to sanctify life through employing things of space. On the Sabbath, it is given us to share in the holiness that is in the heart of time. Even when the soul is seared, even when no prayer can come out of our tightened throats, the clean, silent rest of the Sabbath leads us to a realm of endless peace, or to the beginning of an awareness of what eternity means. There are a few ideas in the world of thought which contain so much spiritual power as the idea of the Sabbath. Aeons hence, when of our many cherished theories only shreds will remain, that cosmic tapestry will continue to shine. Eternity utters a day.