An Uncontextualized or Discontextualized quotation from Eugene Peterson

I collected this quotation from Eugene Peterson several weeks ago, having turned to his essay for insight about reading Dostoevsky:

For most of us, the desire for beauty and the good proves infinitely frustrating, for we are mainly aware of what we are not. When we do things well, we get satisfaction. When we are well (holy) we are unconscious of it and so get no satisfaction, at least not in the sense of ego gratification. And since mostly we are not well (unholy), we live with a deep sense of inadequacy. The only reason we continue to aspire to holiness is that the alternative is so insipid. (Eugene Peterson, “Fyodor Dostoevsky: God and Passion,” his emphasis)

It's from and essay published in a collection titled More Than Words: Contemporary Writers on the Works That Shaped Them, compiled and introduced by Philip Yancey. The book is just the sort of thing that Philip Yancey would do.

By the time I tried to share it with Damon a few days later, I had already forgotten just what it was that struck me about it. I realize that to find out what it means within Peterson's context, I have to go back and re-read that essay, approached so casually on a Tuesday morning but identified as a story that matters to me in some sense if I can only remember how.

Beauty and the good. They are all around us, but they are obscured. What are they obscured by? Sin, violence, death, what we discern about ourselves. But these are not the gifts that God has given us (though indirectly and in some obscure way they are a gift). Read Ephesians if you are one who does believe. I understand that much, or at least I can agree with it, but that's when things get sticky. Why is Peterson talking about satisfaction in relation to holiness? And ego-gratification? Why even bring it up? “We...aspire to holiness” because “the alternative is...insipid.” It sounds like something Walker Percy would say, and while I dearly wish to quote him I cannot figure out how.

The long and short of it is, I like this statement Peterson makes, and I think it will be worth the effort to go back and re-read the essay in which he states it to find out what he means by it, if such a thing can be done, and I do expect that such a thing can be done. Maybe not today, but some day soon. In the meantime I think there could be some profit in thinking about it even apart from context, and that too is something I mean to do.