A cause for optimism

Sometimes, not often but sometimes, while I'm reading I'll come across a line or phrase or paragraph that makes me stop and reconsider, well, everything.

In another setting I might bow my head and snap in somber agreement or jump to my feet with a Hallelujah or an Amen, but on my work stool I just sat back, closed the pages and sighed in humble approbation.

"What Corrigan wanted was a fully believable God, one you could find in the grime of the everyday. The comfort he got from the hard, cold truth- the filth, the war, the poverty- was that life could be capable of small beauties. He wasn't interested in the glorious tales of the afterlife or the notions of a honey-soaked heaven.To him that was a dressing room for hell. Rather he consoled himself with the fact that, in the real world, when he looked closely into the darkness he might find the presence of a light, damaged and bruised, but a little light all the same. He wanted, quite simply, for the world to be a better place, and he was in the habit of hoping for it. Out of that came some sort of triumph that went beyond theological proof, a cause for optimism against all the evidence."

-Colum McCan, Let the Great World Spin (page 20)