Recently I've managed to make it into the heart of The Brothers Karamazov--at least if you define "heart" in terms of number of pages, and intensity of action. One of the brothers may have just murdered someone accidentally. We'll see.

Long before that happened, during spring break I was reading Father Zossima's very, very, very lengthy deathbed discourse. I must confess to having struggled through it, though some of his ideas were fascinating, and some of the passages were beautiful. Take these, for example:

"Nature is beautiful and sinless, and we, only we, are sinful and foolish, and we don't understand that life is heaven."

And:

"We are each responsible to all for all, it's only that men don't know this. If they knew it, the world would be a paradise at once."

Beautiful and seductive. I'm tempted myself to write as though nature is perfect--the perfect mirror for God's character, the perfect conveyor of truth about the human condition--but it's not. It's under the curse just the way human beings are. (And anyway, I find the binary between nature and humans problematic. God doesn't seem to think of nature and humans as separate. When nature was created, so were people; when humans disobey, all of nature gets cursed, too, and when Christ returns, He displays power over the entire created order, human and otherwise.)

This point, though, resonated with me as being in dialogue with my earlier questions about suffering:

"The Creator, just as on the first days of creation, looks upon Job and again He praises His creation. And Job praising the Lord, serves not only Him but all His creation for generations and generations, and for ever and ever, since for that he was ordained."

I can begin to understand, if only dimly, how God's glory becomes more majestic in the world when human beings--rational but deeply flawed--demonstrate such an operation of His grace that they praise and worship Him even when they are in pain or grieving. That shows His worthiness, I think, in some way that nothing else could.