A J Heschel: Sincere intensity and intense sincerity

The elephant is a bonny bird,

it flits from bough to bough;

it makes its nest in a rhubarb tree

and whistles like a cow

Nonsense verse, when considered sensibly, usually has some plausible reference to sense! In this case, I realise that, judging from my blogging posts, it must look like my reading pattern flits from book to book. I haven’t abandoned Rob Warner’s Evangelicalism book -but I was, as promised, ambushed by Moltmann’s In a Broad Place, and I’m too much of a Moltmann fan to allow any discipline or prior commitments to keep me from reading it undistracted. I’d just finished it when I was ambushed again – this time by the arrival of Edward Kaplan’s second volume of his biography of A J Heschel, entitled Spiritual Radical. My enthusiasm for this Hasidic philosopher, rescued from the Holocaust by immigration to the US, who combined social justice with mystical piety, and who wrote some of the most sublime prose poetry about the reality of God, will be well enough known to regular readers of Living Wittily.

So again I am sidetracked by a book about someone who is anything but a sidetrack on my spiritual and intellectual journey. Here are a few sentences from some of Heschel’s earliest writing in English:

Prayer takes the mind out of the narrowness of self-interest, and enables us to see the world in the mirror of the holy. For when we betake ourselves to the extreme opposite of the ego, we can behold a situation from the aspect of God.

Faith does not spring out of nothing. It comes with the discovery of the holy dimension of our existence. Suddenly we become aware that our lips touch the veil that hangs before the Holy of Holies. Our face is lit up for a time with the light from behind the veil.  Faith opens our hearts for the entrance of the Holy. It is almost as though God were thinking for us.

In the realm of faith, God is not a hypothesis derived from logical assumptions, but an immediate insight, self-evident as light. To rationalists He is something after which they seek in the darkness with the light of their reason. To men and women of faith He is the light.

Such sincere intensity, and intense sincerity; reading the story of Heschel’s life, and pausing over words forged and glinting in such mystic fire, I sense the shallowness and emotionalism of what we evangelicals call ‘the devotional life. And I further sense the misguided rationalism of many forms of Evangelical apologetics, as if the reality of God, the God who burns with Holy Love revealed in Christ, could be proven into existence by ensuring we were working with the right epistemology. The immediate experience of a Holy God demands self surrender not self indulgence, adoration not argument.