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DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:20240717
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DTSTAMP:20260526T002532
CREATED:20240714T013715Z
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SUMMARY:Vigils: Weekday
DESCRIPTION:RELIGION IN A FREE SOCIETY\nBy Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel 3\n◊◊◊\nLittle does contemporary religion ask of man. It is ready to offer comfort;\nit has no courage to challenge. It is ready to offer edification; it has no courage\nto break the idols\, to shatter callousness. The trouble is that religion has\nbecome…institution\, dogma\, ritual. It is no longer an event. Its acceptance\ninvolves neither risk nor strain. There is no substitute for faith\, no alternative\nfor revelation\, no surrogate for commitment. We define self-reliance and call it\nfaith\, shrewdness and call it wisdom\, anthropology and call it ethics\, literature\nand call it Bible\, inner security and call it religion\, conscience and call it God.\nHowever\, nothing counterfeit can endure forever… \nIt is customary to blame secular science and anti-religious philosophy for\nthe eclipse of religion in modern society. It would be more honest to blame\nreligion for its own defeats. Religion declined not because it was refuted\, but\nbecause it became irrelevant\, dull\, oppressive\, insipid. When faith is completely\nreplaced by creed\, worship by discipline\, love by habit; when the crisis of today\nis ignored because of the splendor of the past; when faith becomes an heirloom\nrather than a living fountain; when religion speaks only in the name of authority\nrather than with the voice of compassion\, its message becomes meaningless.\nThe primary task of religious thinking is to rediscover the questions to which\nreligion is an answer\, to develop a degree of sensitivity to the ultimate questions\nwhich its ideas and acts are trying to answer… \nThe most serious obstacle which modern men encounter in entering\ndiscussion about the ideas of the Bible\, is the absence from man’s consciousness\nof the problems to which the Bible refers. The Bible is an answer to the\nquestion\, “What does God require of man?” But to modern man\, this question\nis suppressed by another one\, namely\, “What does man demand of God?”\nModern man continues to ponder: “What will I get out of life?” What escapes\nhis attention is the fundamental\, yet often forgotten question\, “What will life\nget out of me?” \nAbsorbed in the struggle for the emancipation of the individual we have\nconcentrated our attention upon the idea of human rights and overlooked the\nimportance of human obligations… Oblivious to the fact of his receiving\ninfinitely more than he is able to return\, man began to consider his self as the\nonly end… We can ill afford to set up needs\, an unknown\, variable\, vacillating\,\nand eventually degrading factor\, as a universal standard\, as a supreme\, abiding\nrule or pattern for living. This\, indeed\, is the purpose of our religious traditions:\nto keep alive the higher Yes as well as the power of man to say\, “Here I am”; to\nteach our minds to understand the true demand and to teach our conscience to\nbe present… \nIt is an inherent weakness of religion not to take offense at the segregation\nof God\, to forget that the true sanctuary has no walls. Religion has suffered from\nthe tendency to become an end in itself\, to seclude the holy\, to become\nparochial\, self-indulgent\, self-seeking; as if the task were not to ennoble human\nnature but to enhance the power and beauty of its institutions or to enlarge the\nbody of doctrines. It has often done more to canonize prejudices than to wrestle\nfor truth; to petrify the sacred than to sanctify the secular. Yet the task of\nreligion is to challenge the stabilization of values. Religion is not for religion’s\nsake but for God’s sake. \n3 Excerpted and quoted from The Insecurity of Freedom (New York: Schocken Books\, 1959\, 1960\,\n1963\, 1964\,1966)\, pp.1-23. Accessed online\, July 5\, 2023.
URL:https://laycisterciansofgethsemani.org/event/vigils-weekday/
CATEGORIES:Vigils Readings
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