Reading “I asked for Wonder” by Abraham Heschel this week. It’s a spiritual anthology. I like reading wise people from different traditions. Abraham knew Martin Buber, who is one of my favorite Jewish thinkers.

 Being blessed by this Jewish poet, theologian and mystic this week, who asked not for success in life, but who asked for Wonder! I’ve always appreciated his thoughts, and especially his writings on the prophets. Mysticism can be practical, as it was in the life of the prophet Daniel, among many others. It’s helpful to see the spiritual realm to make wise decisions in the natural one. That story of Elisha opening the eyes of his disciple to see what was really going on!

 Heschel was a hasidic Jew from Poland, so had those basic tenets of God’s immanence, our ability to know God by practical union, and that God can be met through the mundane daily activities of life-that there is a spiritual dimension which interfaces with the physical. Not bad tenets. He also was friends with many Christians, and even at his death priest were present. Two days before he died, he was at a jail protesting for the release of a priest friend of his. Good fruit.

 Here are a couple of his spiritual poems:

Light

God is not a hypothesis derived from logical assumptions,

but an immediate insight, self-evident as light.

He is not something to be sought in the darkness with the light

of reason.

 He is the light.

By Degrees

…Awareness of God does not come by degrees

from timidity to intellectual temerity;

it is not a decision reached at the crossroads of doubt.

It comes when, drifting in the wilderness,

having gone astray,

we suddenly behold the immutable polar Star.