*I think of Dostoevski in The Brothers Karamazov when the body of Alyosha's beloved Father Zossima begins to stink in death instead of giving off fragrance as the dead body of a saint is supposed to, and at the very moment when Alyosha sees the world most abandoned by God, he suddenly finds the world so aflame with God that he rushes out of the chapel where the body lies and kisses the earth as the shaggy face of  the world where God, in spite of and in the midst of everything, is.
-Frederick Buechner