On
the Tenth Day of Christmas:
“Everything necessary has been given us in the
Gospels. What is it? Firstly, the love of one’s neighbor–the supreme form of
living energy. Once it fills the heart of man it has to overflow and spend
itself. And secondly, the two concepts which are the main part of the make-up
of modern man–without them he is inconceivable–the idea of free personality and
of life regarded as sacrifice.”
Words from one of the great novels of the
twentieth century, a novel born out of the nightmare conditions of modern
totalitarianism–Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago. Again and again in this astonishing
work, Pasternak returns to the point, the point of vision that gave him his own
personal resource to fight back against the pressure to silence and conformity
in Stalin’s Russia.
“Something in the world had been changed. Rome
was at an end. The reign of numbers was at an end . . . The story of a a human life became the story
of God and filled the universe."
– Rowan Williams, ‘Choose Life, Christmas and
Easter Sermons in Canterbury Cathedral’
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