Amongst the spiritual directors I return to when I am confused and uncertain about the call of God to His people, is Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. One of the signs of a prophet is the capacity to see clearly and say courageously, and to offer a diagnosis of the surrounding culture that is not itself so culturally conditioned it merely echoes its context. That doesn't mean it is unaffected by context. All speech emerges from that inevitable nexus of history, experience, intellectual conviction and personal commitments that is the human mind reflecting with self consciousness on our own existence.
But Heschel never would claim to be an objective and distant commentator. He took his convictions and experience, his faith commitment and the history of his people and his own life, and he used them freely and openly to look at the world from an honestly confessed standpoint. In other words the prophet has a perspective like everyone else – it's just that it is more often counter-cultural than culturally conditioned, interrogative instead of affirmative, future oriented rather than complacently contemporary. So I read the words below and regain a necessary perspective – to see the world as a place where, whatever the darkness, the light shines in that darkness and the darkness has not overcome it:
The spiritual blackout is increasing daily. Opportunism prevails, callousness expands, the sense of the holy is melting away. We no longer know how to resist the vulgar, how to say no in the name of a higher yes. Our roots are in a state of decay.
The is an age of spiritual blackout, a blackout of God. We have entered not only the dark night of the soul, but also the dark night of society. We must seek out ways of preserving the strong and deep truth of a living God theology in the midst of the blackout.
For the blackness is neither final nor complete. Our power is first in waiting for the end of darkness, for the defeat of evil; and our power is also in coming upon single sparks and occasional rays, upon moments full of grace and radiance.
We are called to bring together the sparks, to preserve single moments of radiance, and keep them alive in our lives; to defy absurdity and despair; and to wait for God to say again, "Let there be light".
And there will be light.
Another Jewish Rabbi, following his encounter with the Living Christ urged the Philippian Christians to shine as lights of the universe in the midst of a dark and crooked generation. Faith in light over darkness, hope that the light will not be put out, bringing together single moments of radiance, – such is the witness of a community of the Living God.
Quotation from A J Heschel, Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity, (Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1996) page 267
The photos were taken late evening looking west from Sherrifmuir.
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