The art of our time, sacred art included, will necessarily be characterized by a certain poverty, grimness and roughness which correspond to the violent realities of a cruel age. Sacred art cannot be cruel, but it must know how to be compassionate to victims of cruelty: and one does not offer lollipops to a starving man in a totalitarian death-camp. Nor does one offer him the messages of a pitifully inadequate optimism. Our Christian hope is the purest of all lights that shines in darkness, but it shines in darkness, and one must enter into darkness to see it shining.
— Sacred Art and the Spiritual Life, Thomas Merton
