“Just to be is a blessing. Just to live is holy.”

These words come from Abraham Joshua Heschel, a man who inspired many during his long and distinguished lifetime. After escaping from his native Germany, Rabbi Heschel taught at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York from 1945 to his death in 1972.

Beyond that, he allied himself with Martin Luther King in the struggle for civil rights, he led protest against the Vietnam War, and he provided spiritual dynamic for the age liberation movement of the1960s and 1970s.

“Just to be is a blessing.” A friend with whom I have frequently exchanged views of the world recently received the gift of a deeper understanding of what these words mean. My friend, a physician by training, underwent surgery for a routine health condition. The surgery was expected to take only an hour and recovery would be rapid, everyone thought.

Something went terribly wrong, however, and the operation took much of a day, most of it turning into an effort to save my friend’s life. Two days later, he woke up in the intensive care unit, not knowing what had happened. He had narrowly escaped death and, by now, has recovered completely.

My friend tells me that as a result of this near-death experience his outlook has changed in two ways. First, life has become more precious to him, a gift that he appreciates more than he did before. And, secondly, he has lost his fear of death. No longer is he afraid of what is going to happen to him when his turn comes to die. He is surprised by how free he now feels about the threats to his life that may loom up before him.

My friend now feels more deeply than ever before the truth that being is a blessing. A person of faith, he realizes that his very existence is a gift of God. Being comes from God who creates human beings and everything else out of nothing. Created things share in the mystery of God, the supreme being.

“Just to live is holy.” By right, holiness belongs to God alone. But  the creator has made creatures to share in his holiness. We are flawed, and thus never perfectly holy, but just by living we can partake in what belongs to God.

The heart of holiness is love. So, to the extent that we live by love, we live in holiness. Walking in love, we can embody the holiness of God and bring out the potential of life to be holy.

The classical response in the presence of the holy is awe. When we become more deeply aware of our lives as holy we can feel this amazement at having life. Being alive is a mystery, it goes beyond any explanation we can give, no matter how far our knowledge of genetics advances.

Recently I visited an old friend who is in sharp physical decline. He suffers from the terrible disease abbreviated as ALS. But while his energy and physical abilities diminish each day, his spirit amazed me. He manages to regard his life as precious despite the assaults on it the disease inflicts. Undoubtedly, he must have private moments of doubt, but he seems to cherish his life and care about others around him.

Rabbi Heschel’s two sayings discussed here do not come from a merely optimistic view of human life and the world. This spiritual leader was too sensitive to the presence of evil to have indulged in facile Pollyannish upbeat philosophy of life. Instead, his outlook took root in the hope he had in God.

Hope places confidence in God’s power to accomplish what human beings cannot. This quality of heart also leads toward that reverence for life expressed by the rabbi. “Just to be is a blessing. Just to live is holy.” These two statements reflect a soul that has made deep soundings in spirituality and has come up with pure gold.

I propose these two sayings as suitable for carrying around in one’s heart during the day and night. They can serve as mantras, fixed guides that can make our activities spiritually meaningful. Repeated over and over they can ground a person in reality and enable us to lay hold of more of reality than we otherwise could.

Richard Griffin