the trouble with goodness

The trouble with goodness is that it is so hard to write well about it. So many try -- especially people who have experienced it, who want to share it with the world -- but so often, the result is inadequate, prone to annoy rather than to attract. At least, that's how i feel about a lot of writing that tries to be transcendent. Simply put, it fails.
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The few writers i've come across who do it well: Marilynne Robinson, Christian Wiman, Marie Howe, William Fiennes, Arthur Yap (in that gorgeous gorgeous poem, 'your goodness')...
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Can't quite put my finger on what makes the difference between the successes and the failures. i do think that the failures have this annoying tone that ... i dunno. Just sounds (to me) so flaccid and flabby and washed-out. Too easy, i think. There's no tension in it. And i don't mean an unhappy tension. i mean the taut tensile strength of a violin string that enables it to sing. It's what happens when the technical skill of the writer doesn't match up to the ambition of the writing. And if that sounds mean, i wonder if perhaps it's kinder than saying that it's what happens when the writer's life experience has not been searing enough to ready him/her for the difficult task of writing about goodness.
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