Already taken down your Christmas decorations? Put that fruitcake in the freezer? Finished off the eggnog? Maybe so, but I think you’d agree that there are timeless messages in the Christmas story that become our inspirations for every day of the year. Perhaps the greatest of these is the infinite Love expressed in the life of Jesus. My colleague, Van Driessen, writing for the December 15, 2017 issue of thedailystar.com, challenges us to remain seekers and shepherds every day and to embrace “Hearts Without Borders.” Here’s Van:
“We are all involved with one another,” observed the great Jewish thinker and rabbi, Abraham Joshua Heschel. “A person is not just a specimen of the species called Homo sapiens… The human is a disclosure of the divine, and all men are one in God’s care for man.” Addressing both Jews and Christians in a commentary entitled “No Religion Is an Island,” he continued, “To meet a human being is the opportunity to sense the image of God, the presence of God.”
Heschel was writing in the shadow of the Holocaust. He had left Poland shortly before the start of the German invasion and lost members of his family in Nazi concentration camps. And yet, he became a prophetic theologian of hope, writing of “the radiance of the Bible” as “the ongoing effort for a breakthrough in the soul of man.”
He taught and inspired a generation of students at Hebrew University in Cincinnati and Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York. He marched for civil rights with Martin Luther King Jr., calling it “praying with my legs.” His writings speak powerfully today not only to Jews but to all people of profound faith.