Prayer is not a stratagem for occasional use, a refuge to resort to now and then. It is rather like an established residence for the innermost self. All things have a home: the bird has a nest, the fox has a hole, the bee has a hive. A soul without prayer is a soul without a home.
The Wisdom of Heschel
A candle of the Lord is the soul of man, but the soul can become a holocaust, a fury, a rage. The only cure is to discover that, over and above the anonymous stillness in the world, there is a Name and a waiting. Many people suffer from a fear of the self. They do not feel at home in their own selves. The inner life is a place of dereliction, a no-man's-land, inconsolate, weird. The self has become a place from which to flee.
The true source of prayer is not an emotion but an insight. It is the insight into the mystery of reality, the sense of the ineffable, that enables us to pray.... It is in moments of our being faced with the mystery of living and dying, of knowing and not knowing, of love and the inability of love--that we pray, that we address ourselves to God, who is beyond the mystery.
We teach children how to measure, how to weigh. We fail to teach them how to revere, how to sense wonder and awe. The sense of the sublime, the sign of the inward greatness of the human soul and something which is potentially given to all, is now a rare gift.
People of our time are losing the power of celebration. Instead of celebrating we seek to be amused or entertained. Celebration is an active state, an act of expressing reverence or appreciation. To be entertained is a passive state--it is to receive pleasure afforded by an amusing act or a spectacle.... Celebration is a confrontation, giving attention to the transcendent meaning of one's actions.
This is one of the rewards
of being human:
quiet exaltation,
capability for celebration.
It is expressed in a phrase
which Rabbi Akiba offered to his disciples:
A song every day,
A song every day.
There is only one way to wisdom: awe. Forfeit your sense of awe, let your conceit diminish your ability to revere, and the universe becomes a marketplace for you. The loss of awe is the great block to insight.... The greatest insights happen to us in moments of awe.