Facing Sacred Moments by Mark Nepo




The higher goal of spiritual living is not to amass a wealth of information, but to face sacred moments.

~Abraham Heschel

Maybe it's part of being American, this want to build on things instead of facing them. After all, our ancestors believed it their manifest destiny to keep moving on until they ran out of land. But now that there's nowhere left to go, a different sense of exploration, that has waited centuries, is calling.

Instead of building a road to somewhere other than where we are, the life of the spirit requires us to open doors that wait before us and within us. This is what Abraham Heschel calls "facing sacred moments": the opening of doors into the life we already have.

The effort to build our way elsewhere can be admirable, even heroic, but it often distracts us from inhabiting the life we are given.

Certainly, there is nothing wrong with bettering our outer circumstances, but these constructions mean nothing if we never face the very pulse of life that waits like a kind mother at the edge of our exhaustion. 

~Excerpt taken from Mark Nepo's, "The Book of Awakening."

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