a poem by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (ca. 1972)
How easy it is to live with You, O Lord.
How easy to believe in You.
When my spirit is overwhelmed within me,
When even the keenest see no further than the night,
And know not what to do tomorrow,
You bestow on me the certitude
That You exist and are mindful of me,
That all the paths of righteousness are not barred.
As I ascend in to the hill of earthly glory,
I turn back and gaze, astonished, on the road
That led me here beyond despair,
Where I too may reflect Your radiance upon mankind.
All that I may reflect, You shall accord me,
And appoint others where I shall fail.
(Solzhenitsyn died today at the age of eighty-nine.)
Weird that so little christianity made it into his books. Though maybe it was there in some sub-texual form that, charactaristically, I missed.
— cw · Aug 4, 02:19 AM · #
cw, Solzhenitsyn didn’t get serious about Christian belief until around the time that he wrote this little poem, so religion doesn’t play a big part in the major novels. You see it in the Gulag volumes, though, and The Oak and the Calf, and in later life the restoration of Orthodoxy in Russia was his obsession.
— Alan Jacobs · Aug 4, 09:10 PM · #