...So I began to examine the life and the teachings of these people, and the closer I looked, the more I was convinced that theirs was the true faith, that their faith was indispensable to them and that this faith alone provided them with the meaning and possibility of life.  Contrary to what I saw among the people of our class, where life was possible without faith and scarcely one in a thousand was a believer, among these people there was scarcely one in a thousand who was not a believer.  Contrary to what I saw among the people of our class, where a lifetime is passed in idleness, amusement, and dissatisfaction with life, these people spent their lives at hard labor and were less dissatisfied with life than the wealthy.  Contrary to the people of our class who resist and are unhappy with the hardship and suffering of their lot, these people endure sickness and tribulation without question or resistance - peacefully, and in the firm conviction that this is as it should be, cannot be otherwise, and is good.  Contrary to the fact that the greater our intellect, the less we understand the meaning of life and the more we see some kind of evil joke in our suffering and death, these people live, suffer, and draw near to death peacefully and, more often than not, joyfully.  Contrary to peaceful death - death without horror and despair, which is the rarest exception in our class - it is the tormenting, unyielding, and sorrowful death that is the rarest exception among the people.  And these people, who are deprived of everything that for Solomon and [I] constituted the only good in life, yet who nonetheless enjoy the greatest happiness, form the overwhelming majority of mankind.  I looked further still around myself.  I examined the lives of the great masses of people who have lived in the past and live today.  Among those who have understood the meaning of life, who know how to live and die, I saw not two or three or ten but hundreds, thousands, millions.  And all of them, infinitely varied in their customs, intellects, educations, and positions and in complete contrast to my ignorance, knew the meaning of life and death, labored in peace, endured suffering and hardship, lived and died, and saw in this not vanity but good.

I grew to love these people.  The more I learned about the lives of those living and dead about whom I had read and heard, the more I loved them and the easier it became for me to live.  I lived this way for about two years, and a profound transformation came over me, one that had been brewing in me for a long time and whose elements had always been a part of me.  The life of our class, of the wealthy and the learned, was not only repulsive to me but had lost all meaning.  The sum of our action and thinking, of our science and art, all of it struck me as the overindulgences of a spoiled child.  I realized that meaning was not to be sought here.  The actions of the laboring people, of those who create life, began to appear to me as the one true way.  I realized that the meaning provided by this life was truth, and I embraced it.

But at that point I took a closer look at myself and at what had been happening within me; and I remembered the hundreds of times I had gone through these deaths and revivals.  I remembered that I had lived only when I believed in God.  Then, as now, I said to myself, "As long as I know God, I live; when I forget, when I do not believe in him, I die."  What are these deaths and revivals?  It is clear that I do not live whenever I lose my faith in the existence of God, and I would have killed myself long ago if I did not have some vague hope of finding God.  I truly live only whenever I am conscious of him and seek him.  "What, then, do I seek?" a voice cried out within me.  "He is there, the one without whom there could be no life."  To know God and to live come to one and the same thing.  God is life.

"Live, seeking God, for there can be no life without God."  And more powerfully than ever a light shone within me and all around me, and this light has not abandoned me since.


-  from "My Confession" by Leo Tolstoy