"God in Search of Man"

[Guest guest]

Jaya Sri Radhey!

 

I like to share some good quotes from the book-

"God in Search of Man" by Abraham Joshua Heschel:

 

 

We have not only forfeited faith;

we have lost our faith in the meaning of faith.

All we have is a sense of horror. We are afraid of man.

We are terrified at our own power.

 

Our proud Western civilization has not withstood the stream of

cruelty and crime that burst forth out of the undercurrents of evil

in the human soul. We nearly drown in a stream of guilt and misery

that leaves no conscience clean.

 

What have we done with our power?

 

What have we done to the world?

 

The flood of wretchedness is sweeping away our monstrous conceit.

Who is the Lord? We despair of ever regaining an awareness of Him, of

ever regaining faith in the meaning of faith. Indeed out of a system

of ideas where knowledge is power, where values are a synonym for

needs, where the pyramid of being is turned upside down - it is hard

to find a way to an awareness of God.

 

If the world is only power to us and we are all absorbed in a gold

rush, then the only god we may come upon is the golden calf.

Nature as a tool box is a world that does not point beyond itself.

It is when nature is sensed as mystery and grandeur that it calls

upon us to look beyond it.

 

....

 

As civilization advances, the sense of wonder declines. Such decline

is an alarming symptom of our state of mind. Mankind will not perish

for want of information; but only for want of appreciation.

 

The beginning of our happiness lies in the understanding that life

without wonder is not worth living. What we lack is not a will to

believe but a will to wonder.

 

Awareness of the divine begins with wonder. It is the result of what

man does with his higher incomprehension. The greatest hindrance to

such awareness is our adjustment to conventional notions, to mental

cliches. Wonder or radical amazement, the state of maladjustment to

words and notions, is therefore a prerequisite for an authentic

awareness of that which is.

 

....

 

What fills us with radical amazement is not the relations in which

everything is embedded but the fact that even the minimum of

perception is a maximum of enigma. The most incomprehensible fact is

the fact that we comprehend at all.

 

....

 

Jaya Sri Radhey!

[Guest guest]

Jaya Sri Radhey! Namaste.

 

A few more Excerpts from 'God in Search of Man':

 

The Bible is the quest for the righteous man, for a righteous people.

 

"The Lord looks down from heaven upon the children of man, to see if

there are any that act wisely, that seek after God. They have all

gone astray, they are all alike corrupt; there is none that does

good, no, not one."

Psalms 14:2-3

 

The incidents recorded in the Bible to the discerning eye are

episodes of one great drama: the quest of God for man; His search for

man, and man's flight from Him.

 

...

 

The prohetic act is an experience of an act of God which was both

beyond and for the sake of man. Unlike the mystic act, revelation is

not the result of a quest for esoteric experience. What characterizes

the prophet is, on the contrary, an effort to escape such experience.

 

Never does he relish his vision as one relishes the attainment of a

goal longed for. Revelation is not an act of his seeking, but of his

being sought after, an act in God's search of man.

 

The prophet did not grope for God. ... This is at the core of all

Biblical thoughts: God is not a being detached from man to be sought

after, but a power that seeks, pursues and calls upon man.

 

The way to God is a way of God.

 

....

 

Man would not have known Him if He had not approached man.

God's relation to man precedes man's relation to Him.

 

The mystic experience is man's turning toward God; the prophetic act

is God's turning toward man.

 

....

 

>From the mystic experience we may gain an insight of man into the

life of God; from the prophetic act we learn of an insight of God

into the life of man.

 

Therefore, to characterize revelation as a prophetic insight or

experience is to reduce a reality to a perception.

 

Seen from man's aspect, to receive a revelation is to witness how

God is turning toward man. It is not an act of gazing at the divine

reality, a static and eternal mystery.

 

The prophet is in the midst of a divine event, of and event in the

life of God, for in addressing the prophet, God comes out of His

imperceptibility to become audible to man. The full intensity of the

event is not in the fact that "man hears" but in the fact that "God

speaks" to man.

 

The mystic experience is an ecstasy of man;

revelation is an ecstasy of God.

 

------

 

Jaya Sri Radhey!