Cuts me to the Quick (Part 2)

I'm spending far too much time browsing a new blogging site. But it's like a book I can't put down.

Another post - one about Living Out the Gospels.

Two worthy excerpts:

I thought about how the writers who have posed those questions [the big questions in life] were often the ones who suffered most deeply: Dostoevsky, Van Gogh, Flannery O’Connor, Kafka, Emily Dickinson, Anne Frank, Simone Weil, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Beethoven. "We only believe in those thoughts which have been conceived not in the brain but in the whole body," noted Yeats, and those who ask the deepest questions seem to be the ones who have lived the questions, which is to say suffered the questions, in and on and through their bodies--and then have somehow linked the suffering to the rest of us.

People hear "living out the Gospels" and tend to think "compliance with some arbitrarily rigid moral code." To me living out the Gospels means consciously suffering, and realizing we are complicit in the suffering of the world, and that the way to overcome that is by beauty and love, and that, as Dostoevsky said, "Love in reality is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams." You will do things out of love that go way, way beyond the "strictest" moral code. You will sit at your desk sweating tears of blood trying to get the work right for years on end out of love. You will suffer cold, hunger, loneliness, poverty, misunderstanding, and failure for love. All true and enduring art springs from love.