Oscar Wilde - His Conversion and Belief in Jesus. Part 1.

Oscar Wilde was converted when he was in prison. (Some dispute that)  He wrote about his change in the book, De Profundis. In this book I found some great truths and beautiful descriptions of Jesus. I thought I would share some of them with you.

What he thought before he was imprisoned:
I said to her (a friend), there was enough suffering in one narrow London lane to show that God did not love man, and that wherever there was any sorrow, though but that of a child, in some little garden weeping over a fault that it had or had not committed, the whole face of creation was completely marred.

I was entirely wrong. She told me so, but I could not believe her. I was not in the sphere in which such belief was to be attained to. Now it seems to me that love of some kind is the only possible explanation of the extraordinary amount of suffering that there is in the world. I cannot conceive of any other explanation. I am convinced there is no other, and that if the world has indeed, as I have said, been built of sorrow, it has been built by the hands of love, because in no other way could the soul of man, for whom the world was made, reach the full stature of its perfection. Pleasure for the beautiful body, but pain for the beautiful soul.

Written about his imprisonment:
I bore up against everything with some stubbornness of will and much rebellion of nature until I had absolutely nothing left in the world but one thing. I had lost my name, my position, my happiness, my freedom, my wealth. I was a prisoner and a pauper. But I still had my children left. Suddenly, they were taken away from me by the law. It was a blow so appalling that I did not know what to do, so I flung myself on my knees and bowed my head and wept and said, "The body of a child is as the body of the Lord; I am not worthy of either."

That moment seemed to save me. I saw then that the only thing for me was to accept everything. Since then - curious as it will no doubt sound - I have been happier. It was of course my soul in its ultimate essence that I had reached. In many ways I had been its enemy, but I found it waiting for me as a friend. When one comes in contact with the soul it makes one simple as a child, as Christ said one should be.

The fact that God loves man shows us that in the divine order of ideal things it is written that eternal love is to be given to what is eternally unworthy. Or, if that phrase seems to be a bitter one to bear, let us say that everyone is worthy of love, except him who thinks that he is.

To be continued...