Here's the thing...

“There’s a truth that’s deeper than experience. It’s beyond what we can see, or even what we feel. It’s an order of truth that separates the profound from the merely clever, and the reality from the perception. We’re helpless, usually, in the fact of it; and the cost of knowing it, like the cost of knowing love, is sometimes greater than any heart would willingly pay. It doesn’t always help us to love the world, but it does prevent us from hating the world. And the only way to know that truth is to share it, from heart to heart.” - Gregory David Roberts

Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of hearts, there remains… an unuprooted small corner of evil. —Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

I was reminded of Antjie Krog's excellent book, Country of My Skull: Guilt, Sorrow, and the Limits of Forgiveness in the New South Africa , this evening and so reread some. Here's a great part: “And I wonder: God. Does he hear us? Does he know what our hearts are yearning for? That we all just want to be human beings ... some with more colour, some with less, but all with air and sun. And I wade into song ... in a language that is not mine, in a tongue I do not know. It is fragrant inside the song, and among the keynotes of sorrow and suffering there are soft silences where we who belong to this landscape,…all of us,…can come to rest. Sometimes the times we live in overflow with light.”