THE SITUATION THAT ACCOUNTS FOR THE QUESTION

Our point of departure is not the sight of the shrouded and inscrutable; from the endless mist of the unknown we would, indeed, be unable to derive an understanding of the known. It is the tension of the known and the unknown, of the common and the holy, of the nimble and the ineffable, that fills the moments of our insight.

We do not owe our ultimate question to stumbling in a mist of ignorance upon a wall of inscruatble riddles. We do not ask because of our being poor in spirit and bereft of knowledge; we ask because we sense a spirit which surpasses our ability to comprehend it. We owe our question not to something less but to something which is more than the known. We ask  because the world is too much for us, because the known is crammed with marvel, because the world is replete with what is more than the world as we understand it.
The question about God is not a question about all things, but a question of all things; not an inquiry into the unknown but an inquiry  into that which all things stand for; a question we ask for all things. It is phrased not in categories of reason but in acts in which we astir beyond words. The mind does not know how to phrase it, yet the soul sighs it, sings it, pleads it.

A.J.Heschel, Man is Not Alone, Farrar, Straus & Giroux Inc p. 61