Wild but not too Wilde...

The gods had given me almost everything. But I let myself be lured into long spells of senseless and sensual ease. I amused myself with being a FLANEUR, a dandy, a man of fashion. I surrounded myself with the smaller natures and the meaner minds. I became the spendthrift of my own genius, and to waste an eternal youth gave me a curious joy. Tired of being on the heights, I deliberately went to the depths in the search for new sensation. What the paradox was to me in the sphere of thought, perversity became to me in the sphere of passion. Desire, at the end, was a malady, or a madness, or both. I grew careless of the lives of others. I took pleasure where it pleased me, and passed on. I forgot that every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character, and that therefore what one has done in the secret chamber one has some day to cry aloud on the housetop. I ceased to be lord over myself. I was no longer the captain of my soul, and did not know it. I allowed pleasure to dominate me. I ended in horrible disgrace. There is only one thing for me now, absolute humility. A selection from "De Profundis" by Oscar Wilde

I know that Oscar Wilde led a sinful lifestyle and that his sexuality was deviant to say the least. But his mind though often darkened by his own lusts, did shine like a penetrating sun through the tempest that was going on in his soul. I am often amazed at his lucidity. Sometime Christians have trouble seeing the truth because they have grown dull and too acquainted with it. It reminds me of something G.K. Chesterton said about the good of getting a religious person drunk once a year, because the experience or the repentance afterward would do them some good. We Christians have forgot what we know.

"We live in an Age of Intimidation, in which we are not exhorted to love life but to fear death" Learning to do this in ways that dont undermine the true nature and purpose of living is the tricky part. Learning to eat fully but not be a glutton, to drink deeply but not become a drunkard, to love, to taste, to smell, to work, to laugh, to create, to think, to dance, to weep, to mourn, to suffer and to conquer. This to, glorifies God. 

Wilde's writing reminds me that I am not dead yet...