I like a book that reflects an author's own Job-like wanderings and sufferings and confusions. Job's sufferings, it could be argued, are the artistic rendering of confusion, of knowing the right thing and being faithful, deep in the heart or at least somewhere, and not being exactly sure how to carry through with it. So, one suffers, one endures sufferings, and maybe it all makes you a better person. Yes, that's all good material for a book, being faithful, but lost in something like a dark wood.

Being the Son of Man, the human being, is of course desirable. We want to be like a Jesus, or a perfect Buddha-being. So in artistic representation, to get this point very much across, about our longings to be better, the human being is endowed with miraculous powers and deeper kindness and charity.

"Morality, important though it may be as a preparatory to 'the higher life,' does not alone lend itself to that awakening of the spiritual faculties without which progress on the Path is not possible. In good citizenship morality is practised out of regard to certain preconceived notions of the needs, the health and happiness of ourselves, our fellows and the community at large. According to theosophy, it would appear that these notions are for the most part mistaken, or at any rate they are quite insignificant in comparison with the interests with which the traveller along the Path soon finds himself absorbed. It is not that human needs are to be disregarded, but that the pabulum which he now sees that humanity really requires is of an incomparably higher order than that which is generally so considered."
The Encyclopedia Brittanica, 11th Edition, on Theosophy, contributed by St G. L. F.-P. (as my Dad said, whoever that is!)

And so, how does one raise the level of discourse, from normal bread and wine amongst publicans and sinners and common fisherman types, miscellaneous ascetics (ha ha) and so forth, into something bearing upon the meaning of life, instead of the usual conversation and small talk? How can you do it?

Dostoevsky gives us a wonderfully apt vision of the issue in the Grand Inquisitor sequence from Karamazov, a passive Christ mute before the interrogating high priest. In our own times authority is given, in matters seemingly spiritual , to ones who invoke and incite terrorism. Or to Donald Trumps, people who are authorities because we made them authorities through our attention to them, who knows why. (Twain, remember, was good at charlatans.)

Staying quiet is not the answer.