Sound and Distant Friends (NOT FINISHED)

If anyone could prove to me that Christ is outside the truth, and if the truth really did exclude Christ, I should prefer to stay with Christ and not with truth. -Fyodor Dostoevsky


I love the writings of Dostoevsky. He died hundreds of years ago, but he feels like a close friend. It's different from how I feel about other Authors. Reading C.S Lewis, for instance, is like coming home. And when I read Louisa May Alcott it's like I'm in the backyard, sharing a shady spot with my mother under a tree. 
Few things have ever shaped my heart the way this did. It set me on a track, infusing into me a thirst to understand Compassion and Christ. Now, I came to love many great Russian Authors that semester in Dr. Kelly's class. And make no mistake I'll be telling you about Pushkin and Tolstoy another day. But my connection to Dostoevsky was set. I felt it so strong that the following semester I took a class on him from Dr. Mark Purves. What a class, and by the way WHAT professors. Each taught me so much. There isn't a class I have recommended more, or even as much, as I have these. 
Now many people see Dostoevsky's writing as cold and atheistic. And why not? He writes of Patricide, Prostitutes, Poverty, all the while his characters making very reasonable arguments against God. The Grand Inquisitor in "The Brother's Karmazov" is the most thrashing argument I've read thus far. Indeed I even listened to a minister quote and site that chapter, as part of his explanation and justification for choosing to become an atheist. 
But I think they see only what they wish. And while I admit the same may be true of me as well. I would rather learn, in fact I crave to understand, what Dostoevsky thought himself.  He said in one of his notebooks "It is not as a child that I believe and confess Jesus Christ. My hosanna is born of a furnace of doubt."
"Even those who have renounced Christianity and attack it, in their inmost being still follow the Christian ideal, for hitherto neither their subtlety nor the ardor of their hearts has been able to create a higher ideal of man and of virtue than the ideal given by Christ."

   But Dostoevsky is something else. Something in the blood as it pumps through my heart tells me I need to hear what he was trying to say. And that in some small portion what he wrote was written so I would read it. Somehow, over 200 years and thousands of miles, he wrote to me. 


I first had the inkling when listening to this talk by Dr. Michael Kelly, a professor of Russian at BYU. He spoke on loving kindness and compassion in Dostoevsky's writing.