Good Stuff

Feeling literary again tonight!  Must be the cold weather, or something, bringing out the intellectual in me.  Tonight I began delving into G.K. Chesterton's St. Francis of Assisi, primarily to look for this quote -

The man who went into the cave was not the man who came out again; in that sense he was almost as different as if he were dead, as if he were a ghost or a blessed spirit.  And the effects of this on his attitude towards the actual world were really as extravagant as any parallel can make them.  He looked at the world as differently from other men as if he had come out of that dark hole walking on his hands.

Some of you know WHY I was looking for that quote, for the rest of you, well, I'll just leave you wondering, as that is not the point of this post.

The point is, I then began reading the essay from the beginning and quickly became enthralled by things like this -

 The first fact to realize about St. Francis is involved in the first fact with which his story starts; that when he said from the first that he was a Troubadour, and said later that he was a Troubadour of a newer and nobler romance, he was not using a mere metaphor, but understood himself much better than the scholars understand him.  He was, to the last agonies of asceticism, a Troubadour.  He was a Lover.  He was a lover of God and he was really and truly a lover of men; possibly a much rarer mystical vocation.

But as St. Francis did not love humanity but men, so he did not love Christianity but Christ.

Wow!  I love that!  LOVE IT!  A bit later it goes on -

to this great mystic his religion was not a thing like a theory but a thing like a love-affair. 

Oh, how I want that to be what my religion is!!!!!

Now, I must keep reading.  According to my Kindle I am only 8% through this, and I'm already riveted.