Quote for today

Since I am busy ranting, here is the quote for the day, via dappled things:

...A joyfulness based on willful blindness to the horrors of history would ultimately be a lie or a fiction, a kind of withdrawal.

But the converse is also true. Those who have lost the capacity to see that even in an evil world the Creator still shines through are at the bottom no longer capable of existing. They become cynical, or they have to say farewell to life altogether.

In this sense, the two things belong together: the refusal to evade the abysses of history and of man's existence, and then the insight that faith gives us that the good is present, even if we aren't always able to connect the two things. Particularly when one has to resist evil it's all the more important not to fall into the gloomy moralism that doesn't allow itself any joy but really to see how much beauty there is, too, and to draw from it the strength needed to resist what destroys joy....

B16 aka the vatican rottweiler