The Idiot's Wisdom

We can approach God in many ways. We can understand Jesus message and mission from many sources. We can grasp Him in our thoughts. We can have the feeling since we are born. We can get inspired by the martyrs. And we can get in touch by the Bible, or be enlightened by a miracle. God speaks to us in the most unexpected fashions, and it is up to us if we are willing to hear His voice or not. One man that I think understood the Gospels of the Lord more than anyone else in his time was the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky. With "guilt" in Crime and Punishment, "nihilism" in The Damned, "sanctity" and "greed" in The Brothers Karamazov, and surprisingly with "naivety" in The Idiot, this Russian novelists grasps in very simple and unexpected moments what seems to be the whole message of the Gospels of Christianity. What do we do when the most impressive religious revelations take form through art, and literature? In a civilization that turn its back on God, and no longer has the force to hope, Dostoyevsky seems to me the author of a rebirth of Christianity. I live you with the particular passage that caught my attention this time:

"There is joy for a mother in her child's first smile, just as God rejoices when from heaven he sees a sinner praying to Him with his whole heart. (...) The essence of religious feeling doesn't depend on reasoning, and it has nothing to do with wrongdoing or crime or atheism. There is something else there and there always will be, and atheists will always pass over it and will never be talking about that" (1969: 240).