In Zikh and Dark Lightning

Poetry—The Ineffable Name of God: Man

(We, as creature, are created in the Image of God.) I had to smile when I read about 'in zikh'.

 In 1933 Heschel already invited his readers to experience a tangible sense of divine presence in his poetry. Heschel’s early poems thus serve as a wonderful introduction to his thought: we can see in them Heschel’s core goals before his exposure to formal academic training and his distraction by phenomenology, aesthetics, and comparative religion.3 In these poems Heschel asks how we are to overcome the indifference of the world around us to God. “It is only God who still believes in God,” he argues (181). Rather than relying on existentialism, Heschel’s method produces an answer to God through the in zikh (thing itself) school of Yiddish poetry. Following its method, Heschel seeks to capture an expressionistic mood of the moment in itself—in this case an expressionistic sense of the divine as an identity with God and an empathy with divine pain.⁴

Am I not—you? Are you not—I?

When a need pains You, alarm me!

When You miss a human being

Tear open my door!

You live in Yourself! You live in me. (31)

This concern for God and the expressionistic portrayal of closeness to God, quickly reminds one of Rainier Maria Rilke’s Book of Hours. Rilke writes about his relationship to God, “I want to mirror Your image to its fullest perfection.” Heschel demurs, however, stating “I didn’t need to study in Rilke’s heder to know there is a God in the world.”

Like the prophets of yore, Heschel felt called by God; he pleaded with God, directly beseeching Him to deliver “a message from You. I cannot curse as justly as did Jeremiah…You are meant to help here, Oh God… I will fulfill your duty, pay your debts” (33). As a twentieth-century prophet whose actions bespeak God’s presence and message on earth, Heschel felt God’s direct word since “God follows me everywhere” (57).   ~ Aggadic Man: The Poetry and Rabbinic Thought of Abraham Joshua Heschel by Alan Brill

Images of Hope and Christ and Apollo: a commentary:

    ‘The Confrontation of Particularity’

         From William F. Lynch, SJ in his writings

…the imagination may, on the other hand, as in the case of writers of comedy, see human particularity in the rough and unvarnished guise of a homely, everyday reality…

This first situation of the imagination, the confrontation of particularity, is so fundamental, so sure and so obvious that I hesitate to dress it in any of its several possible metaphysical costumes. For that may make it seem a kind of recondite truth, somewhat beyond the reach of the ordinary mind, which it most certainly is not.

To use familiar examples, however, the finite is given metaphysical form in the concept of haecceitas, the pure and absolute thisness-and-not-thatness which the great Scotus saw in all things; in the "inscape" which Hopkins, following in Scotus' footsteps, saw in everything; in the single far-thing of the Gospel, which was the key to salvation; and in the little, sensible things which were the source of insight for St. Thomas.

It also appears, less familiarly, in Newman [John Henry Newman], whose extraordinarily concrete metaphysics seemed so revolutionary to many theologians and philosophers, but who said he was confident that he could make all his thought consonant with that of St. Thomas. Here is what Newman said about the definite and the limited:

‘I am what I am, or I am nothing. I cannot think, reflect, or judge about my being, without starting from the very point, which I aim at concluding. My ideas are all assumptions, and I am ever moving in a circle. I cannot avoid being sufficient for myself, for I cannot make myself anything else, and to change me is to destroy me. If I do not use myself, I have no other self to use.

     My only business is to ascertain what I am, in order to put it to use. It is enough for the proof of the value and authority of any function which I possess, to be able to pronounce that it is natural. What I have to ascertain is the laws under which I live.

    My first elementary lesson of duty is that of resignation to the laws of nature, whatever they are; my first disobedience is to be impatient at what I am, and to indulge an ambitious aspiration after what I cannot be, to cherish a distrust of my powers, and to desire to change laws which are identical with myself.

"My testimony is the call to disturb"....wrote Elie Wiesel..."I disturb...because I dare to put questions to God, the Source of all Faith...He alone is not disturbed by it." "I disturb the miscreant because, despite my doubts and questions, I refuse to break with the religious...(p.337, Wiesel) 

Bat Galim (Hebrew: בת גלים‎,Bat lit., Daughter of the Waves)

   Elie Wiesel, the prophetic voice raised to experience and see the storms and the lies, sought to ask the right questions, and to get humanity to see, ask, experience and answer the right questions about horrendous events of the human city and the human soul.

   In A Mad Desire to Dance Wiesel wanted the ‘real memory’.  The psychotherapist of Doriel asked him, “But, why did you invent the lie?”

   “To hide from the truth.”

   “Why are you so eager to hide it?”

   Later.  …”fear of not recognizing myself anymore…the fact is I wasted my life.  Yes, this life left me all alone too often, and I betrayed my solitude.”

   The psychotherapist then said, “Let’s talk about love.”

   “…as a philosophical concept?  …comment on Plato’s Symposium whose aim was to praise Eros the ‘god of love’…or…sensible love or passionate love…or Petrarch’s love for Laura or Dante’s for Beatrice?  And what about David’s love for Bathsheba or Ammon’s for Tamar?  Lovers rarely talk about love, and when they do, they talk badly, more often in the past than in the present…philosophers are anything but lovestruck.”

   Doriel returned to ‘the lie’…He thought about his thesis on the ‘relationship between religion and politics by Jewish scholars in Spain before the expulsion….”

   “…the love of knowledge…love of the Torah is deepening it…the ‘lights’ of the ‘seventh day’ still flickered and beckoned in the depths of my memory.  The beginning of the Sabbath.  The celebration of its perfect holiness…”

   “As I returned from the house of prayer with my father, and when I became older, we both sang:

     “Shalom aleichem, malachei ha-sharet malachei ha-shalom”

        [Peace be with you, servant angels, angels of peace.]

“The following day, after the morning prayer and the meal, my father made all of us fulfill our charitable duties…Dina organized cultural get-togethers.  My mother visited hospitals.  As for me, my father used to take me to the edge of the forest to visit the Jewish patients in the insane asylum….Though he was not at all wealthy and worked hard to earn a living, he took an interest in the insane, for according to him, they were more defenseless than the poor.”

   “At first he used to leave me outside, in the courtyard or garden, while he went and brought ‘his patients’ sweets and fruits.  During the Pesach holiday he gave them matzoh.”

    “…once I spoke with one…who said, “Who can rescue me today?”

   Doriel digressed and said to the doctor:  “There’s also religion, Doctor. By clashing with reason, it can prevent you from living in reality…The rigidity of the laws, the bewitchment of the mystics: these I knew and even liked….You who belong to another world and another time, can’t understand Jewish life in a small town---and Brooklyn was a small town, a shetl, which in spite (of all)…became lively spiritual centers “attuned to the slightest flutter of the Lord’s eyelid.”

Where can I go from Your Spirit? Where can I flee from Your Presence?  If I ascend into Heaven, You are there; If I make my bed in hell, behold, You are there.  If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there Your hand shall lead me, and Your right had shall hold me.  ~Ps. 139:7-10

The salvation of man is through love

"One lonely soul on fire with the Love of GOD may set the whole universe ablaze."  ~unknown
"A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth -- that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart:

The salvation of man is through love and in love.

I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved. In a position of utter desolation, when man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way—an honorable way—in such a position man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment. For the first time in my life I was able to understand the meaning of the words, "The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory...." [7]    ~ Vicktor Frankl 

Flannery O’Connor has described the Communion of Saints as "the action by which charity grows invisibly among us, entwining the living and the dead."

God Loves All Things That Are [h/t Terry]

"God overlooks the sins of men that they may repent...
For you love all things that are
and loathe nothing you have made;
for what you hated you would not have fashioned?
You rebuke offenders little by little,
warn them, and remind them of the sins
 they are committing 
that they may abandon their wickedness
and believe in you O Lord!" - Wisdom 11:22-12:2 

(7) A Divine Eccentricity

   Scripture says that God's people are a 'peculiar' people and if truth be told, one only has to peruse the lives of the Saints to grasp the depths of that statement.  I particularly adore God's ability to be creatively 'diverse' without any need to make 'copies.'  He is too 'beyond' for anyone to put Him in any of our paltry little boxes.  There will never be another St. Francis of Asissi---that is his spot and his alone.  So, with St. Therese and St. Joan of Arc and St. Jerome...God also has had a multitude of hidden saints.  The same God who designed and created the mountain lion also created the little house wren and the duckbill platypus.
   I find them everywhere.  He probably doesn't want them to know it---and each of them would never believe they were saints. And if in a time of disastrous temptation one even secretly believes oneself to be a saint, I must warn you about His wondrous but terrifying 'dark lightning' of Love.