Thursday, 04 January 2007

•  “Great fiction shows us not how to conduct our behavior but how to feel. Eventually, it may show us how to face our feelings and face our actions and to have new inklings about what they mean.”

  -Eudora Welty

  I want to start reading again. I want to start writing again. It's inspiring to remember, or rather, to be reminded of how art changes us. And to remember why.

  I read the above quote in the latest issue of Image. It was followed by this:

  "It may sound like heresy, but I believe that religion is as much about how to feel as it is how to behave. In the end, the best antidote to moralism run amok is true religion, not secularism. About a year before his election to the papacy, Joseph Ratzinger gave the funeral homily for an Italian priest named Luigi Giussani, who had founded a lay movement that had nearly disintegrated in the political turmoil of the late 1960s. Ratzinger characterized Giussani’s vision—a vision that successfully moved beyond that upheaval—in this way: “Christianity is not an intellectual system, a packet of dogmas, a moralism, Christianity is rather an encounter, a love story; it is an event.” He went on to say:

  It was the great temptation of that moment to transform Christianity into a moralism and moralism into politics, to substitute believing with doing. Because what does faith imply? We can say, “In this moment we have to do something.” And all the same, in this way, by substituting faith with moralism, believing with doing, we fall into particularisms, we lose most of all the criteria and the orientations, and in the end we don’t build, we divide.

  In art, as in faith, the heart of the matter is not doing, but the wonder we experience—the way we feel—in the face of the encounter. And we are never more willing to change and to build than when we fall in love."
  

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