Spiritual Audacity and Radical
Amazement
Last week I discovered a document I never knew existed: the manifesto signed by 80 Protestant
ministers in Atlanta in November 1957 in response to President Eisenhower’s
sending federal troops into Little Rock to allow Black children to go to
schools in their own neighborhoods (See http://rccapilgrims.ning.com/profiles/blogs/80-atlanta-pastors-sign). Later in the week, and completely coincidentally, I began
reading the work of Rabbi Abraham Heschel, whose name kept appearing in my research
on curriculum and ethics. I’m not talking about a few citations. I mean every
time, his well-placed words were used by non-theological scholars to knock
their points out of the ballpark. Sometimes God knocks me over the head with
stuff.
Rabbi Heschel was born
in Poland in 1907, to an Orthodox Jewish family. He studied philosophy at the
University of Berlin while also studying for rabbinic ordination. When the
Nazis took over, he was arrested by the Gestapo, and after a great deal of
struggle, he came to the U.S. in 1940. After several years he ended up at the
Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City. Although he escaped, his mother
and three sisters were murdered by the Nazis. He never returned to Germany or
Poland because, as he put it, "If I should go to Poland or Germany, every
stone, every tree would remind me of contempt, hatred, murder, of children killed,
of mothers burned alive, of human beings asphyxiated." In the 1960s he
worked side by side with Dr. Martin Luther King for civil rights and to stop
the war in Vietnam. When they marched together in Selma, he said, I felt my legs were praying (Essential Writings, p. 36). On March 25, 1968, Dr. King gave a
keynote address at Rabbi Heschel’s birthday celebration. Rabbi Heschel invited the
King family to join his family for the Passover Seder later in the spring, but
we know what happened. Reverend King was assassinated on April 4, just days
before Passover. Rabbi Heschel spoke at his funeral and walked in the
procession in Atlanta. Like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, we could stop with his
biography and consider his life as we stand in amazement. But for Rabbi
Heschel, amazement was not sufficient for working toward justice in the world.
He called for radical amazement, and
to get there, he called for us to pray.
In September 1963 (the
month and year I was born) he offered a prayer for Soviet Jews who were not
being allowed to practice their religion or even study Hebrew freely. Many
years later his daughter found the unpublished prayer on a scrap of paper in
his files. It includes these words: Prayer
has meaning: the beginning of commitment, the starting point of personal
involvement (EW, p. 81). The times, he said, call for radical action (EW, p. 74). In
protest to American involvement in Vietnam he wrote, Some are guilty; all are responsible. Prayer is our greatest privilege.
Prayer…is radical commitment, a dangerous involvement in the life of God (EW,
p. 85). Prayer is radical and it is dangerous. This makes me want to pray, and
I need to learn how to pray radically
and dangerously. The times still call
for radical action. The times call for prayer.
Last month an old friend
from high school asked me about prayer, and I confessed to her that I had
trouble praying. She replied, Well, isn’t
that a problem, since you’re in seminary and all? Uh, yeah, it is. I’d say
the words, and try to reach up to God with them, but it felt more rote—like a
wish list. Another friend once wrote that when he was a kid God was like Santa
Claus. I longed for my prayers to have depth—beyond
thank you and please—beyond Santa. I wanted to draw nigh unto God (James 4:8). Rabbi
Heschel knew the connection between prayer and justice, and I am grateful that
he took the time to explain it to us. I think I’m getting it now.
In his book The Insecurity of Freedom, published in
1966, he wrote about prayer. He begins with the premise of God’s immediate and personal concern for the world and us. He is eminently quotable,
and I will cite from him liberally by compiling a kind of Letterman Top Ten
List of Rabbi Heschel’s “How To” Guide to Prayer.
10. Prayer is more than a cry for the mercy of God. It is more than a
spiritual improvisation. Prayer is a condensation of the soul.
9. For prayer to live in humans, humans must live in prayer.
8. You cannot analyze the act of prayer while praying. To worship God
means to forget the self, and extremely difficult, though possible, act.
7. I am not ready to accept [the idea of prayer] as a dialogue. Who are we
to enter a dialogue with God? The better metaphor would be to describe prayer
as an act of immersion…
6. Prayer is a moment when humility is a reality. Humility is not a
virtue. Humility is truth. Everything else is an illusion.
5. [Prayer] begins with praise because praise is the prerequisite and
essence of prayer. To praise means to make God present, to make present not
only God’s power and splendor but also God’s mercy. God’s mercy and God’s power
are one.
4. How does a human become a person, an “I”? By becoming a thought of God.
This is the goal of the pious human: to become worthy to be remembered by God.
3. Thus the purpose of prayer is to be brought to God’s attention: to be
listened to, to be understood by God….What we long for [in prayer] is not to
know God but to be known by God….
2. [Prayer] is the moment of a person in anguish forgetting his anguish
and thinking of God and God’s mercy. That is prayer.
And the number one on Rabbi
Heschel’s “How To” Guide to Prayer:
1. The way to prayer leads to acts of wonder and radical amazement.
One thing I notice about
Rabbi Heschel, he used the word radical
a lot throughout his writing. The word has several meanings. Although we
usually think of it as meaning extreme, it
also means fundamental and existing inherently in a thing or person. Radical
action, radical amazement, and radical commitment—those “doing somethings” to
which he referred, are fundamental to us as humans. They exist in us, and to get
to them, we ask to be known by God. We pray.
Abraham Joshua Heschel Essential Writings (2013). Susannah Heschel, Ed. Modern Spiritual
Masters Series. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books.
No comments:
Post a Comment