Friday, September 23, 2011

The small things

Cynics look high and low for wisdom - and never find it,
the open-minded find it right on their doorstep.

Proverbs 14: 6 (Message translation)

The ineffable inhabits the magnificent and the common, the grandiose and the tiny facts of reality alike.  Some people sense this quality at distant intervals in extraordinary events; others sense it in the ordinary events, in every fold, in every nook; day after day, hour after hour.  To them things are bereft of triteness....Slight and simple as things may be - a piece of paper, a morsel of bread, a word, a sigh - they hide a never-ending secret: a glimpse of God? kinship with the spirit of being? an eternal flash of a will?

Abraham Heschel, from Man is Not Alone: A Philosophy of Religion


No comments: