I was in physical pain, confined mostly to the couch and bed. I knew what hurt: my lower back, my left hip. I didn’t know what caused the pain. The acute pain was preceded by some noticeable discomfort that, over the previous few weeks, had traveled from my right side along the rib cage, across my shoulders, and eventually down to the lower left side of my back. Complicating the situation, my already difficult relationship with sleep worsened. After a week of sleepless nights and incapacitating pain, one morning at five a.m. I wrote to my therapist, I don’t know how long I can live with this.
Is it any wonder I couldn’t experience, during this time, radical amazement? “Radical amazement,” writes Abraham Joshua Heschel “refers…not only to what we see, but also to the very act of seeing as well as to our own selves, to the selves that see and are amazed at their ability to see.” We could add to the sensation of seeing the other sensations: hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, and, with a nod to Buddhism, thinking. Not thinking about something, but the primal experience of thought happening in the mind.
Everything is God and nothing but God, our Hasidic masters teach. Then why couldn’t I find the Divine in the pain and resulting desperation? I wasn’t looking to some Being, some Creative Force I call “God” to relieve me of the pain. I was troubled at not being able to experience God in the narrow space, the place in which I was trapped and from which I was frantic to escape. I couldn’t disentangle myself from the pain and resulting emotional storm to regard the sensations and feelings with eyes of wonder, instances, however unwelcome, of the continual unfolding of creation within which the Divine is present.
Fortunately, after a few weeks the acute pain began to subside. Now I am returning to another obstacle, deceptively comforting, that gets in the way of my perceiving and experiencing the Divine in the work of Her creation: familiarity.
Leah Goldberg’s prayer-poem, translated from Hebrew by Annie Kantar, reminds me that I am not alone in living with a dulled awareness of the amazing gift of life itself.
from “Poems Where The Road Ends”
Teach me, Lord,
to bless and pray before
the secret of a withering leaf,
the glow of ripening fruit,
this freedom to behold, feel, exhale;
to know, to wait, and fail.
Teach my lips a blessing, a song of praise
in the freshness of your hours
morning and evening,
so my day, today, won’t seem
like any of the others
or subside into routine.
“Awareness of the divine,” writes Heschel, “begins with wonder…. The greatest hindrance to such awareness is our adjustment to conventional notions, to mental clichés. Wonder or radical amazement, the state of maladjustment to words and notions, is therefore a prerequisite for an authentic awareness of that which is.”
Conventional notions, mental clichés: as one ages it may become increasingly difficult to break free of these, the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, each other, the natural world, and the enormous universe in which we find ourselves for a breath. How easily these stories harden into a fortress within which we protect ourselves from any and all threats to our certainty that this is the way it is. Goldberg appeals to God to “teach” her to “bless and pray before” the leaf’s secret, the fruit’s glow. She characterizes our ability to pause and attend to the fundamental processes of life unfolding as “freedom.” Might pausing before “a withering leaf” or the “glow of ripening fruit” save us from subsiding into routine?
Honeysuckle freed me. It grew just outside the door to the building where my office was located for the thirty-two years I worked as a professor. For a few days every spring, I paused to drink in the fragrance of honeysuckle before entering the building and climbing the stairs to my second-floor office where a stack of papers to grade awaited me. As I came alive in the realm of honeysuckle, I didn’t recall what practicing Jews say every morning: “uv’tuvo m’chadeish b’chol yom tamid maaseigh v’reishit; in your goodness, you daily renew creation.” Nor did I translate into words what I was experiencing, “this freedom to behold, feel, exhale; / to know, to wait, and fail.” I was simply present to fragrance and pleasure.
To behold, feel, exhale, know, and wait: I understand each of these as experiences of freedom, freedom to live in our bodies and minds, freedom to exercise our innate ability to choose how we act (“wait”). But the freedom to fail baffled me—until now. Imagine that the order of “freshness” and “routine” were reversed in the poem. Something like this:
Teach me to live so
my day, today, won’t seem
like any of the others
or subside into routine,
teach my lips a blessing, a song of praise
in the freshness of
your morning and evening
hours.
Arranged this way, the poem emphasizes “freshness” and in so doing it may gently scold us. What’s wrong with you, it may imply, that you can’t experience the freshness of God’s creation every moment of every day? The poem’s actual ending, “subside into routine,” represents us—most of us for much of the time–—the way we are, acclimated to our days, numb to the wonder of the boldest and subtlest manifestations of creation: from the butterfly whose wing resembles a flower’s petal to the grinding gears of a heavy machine clearing a lot where a house will be built.
“To the prophets,” writes Heschel, “wonder is a form of knowledge. It is not the beginning of knowledge but an act that goes beyond knowledge; it does not come to an end when knowledge is acquired; it is an attitude that never ceases. There is no answer in the world to man’s radical amazement.”
Wonder. Radical amazement. Those states of being, in my experience, come and go. Based on Goldberg’s poem alone, I’d say that at least for the moment of the poem’s composition, that was Goldberg’s experience, too. Yet, I, too, yearn, when I am in my ordinary mind, to witness and experience the presence of the Divine in whatever direction I turn: to face the Atlantic Ocean at sunrise, to direct my attention to the lightning flash in my lower back when I twist my way out of bed. Ordinary mind, mind shrunken to the narrow path of routine, mind agitated by physical pain: if only I could regard that, too, with eyes of wonder. For if everything is Divine and nothing but Divine, shouldn’t it be possible to pay a bill or brush my teeth or writhe in pain in a state of radical amazement? Mint toothpaste! Lumbar four!
Richard Chess has published four books of poetry, the most recent of which is Love Nailed to the Doorpost. Professor emeritus from UNC Asheville, where he directed the Center for Jewish Studies for 30 years, Chess serves on the boards of Yetzirah: A Hearth for Jewish Poetry and Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, where he co-directs its Faith in Arts project. You can find him at www.richardchess.com .
Close Reading is now available on Substack, where you can sign up to receive all posts directly to your inbox. To learn more, click here.
