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"That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life -- the life was made manifest, and we saw it, and testify to it ...." I John 1:1-2 (RSV)

"After his resurrection the disciples saw the living Christ, whom they knew to have died, with the eyes of faith (oculata fide)." Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, III, 55, 2 ad 1, as quoted in D. M. Stanley, Jesus in Gethsemane (New York, Paulist Press 1980).

Tuesday, November 6, 2012

The Journey - Abraham Joshua Heschel

Life as a  "journey" is an important Gospel theme, which has been the subject of a previous post.
Tim at Glacier National Park Montana July 2012
Credit:  Jack Schuessler
Here is a beautiful comment on the journey, from a Jewish perspective:

Human faith is never final, never an arrival, but rather an endless pilgrimage, a being on the way.  We have no answers to all problems.   Even some of our sacred answers are both emphatic and qualified, final and tentative, final in our own position in history, tentative because we only speak in the tentative language of man.  

Abraham Joshua Heschel, "No Religion Is an Island," in No Religion Is an Island:  Abraham Joshua Heschel and Interreligious Dialogue, ed. Harold Kasimow and Byron L. Sherwin (Maryknoll, N.Y.:  Orbis, 1991) at 16 (quoted in  Feldman,  Egal,  Catholics and Jews in the Twentieth Century. Urbana, University of Illinois Press,  2001, at 142).  The fact that  human speech is tentative does not mean that we are left groping on the journey with no help from above.  Rabbi Heschel speaks to God's mysterious role in the journey, as creator, as friend of Abraham, and as one who is alive in the world today,  but that will be the subject of another post.
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