Tag: G. K. Chesterton

Restraint

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photo by Josh Scholten

So we sit perhaps in a starry chamber of silence, while the laughter of the heavens is too loud for us to hear… The tremendous figure which fills the Gospels… never concealed His tears. Yet He concealed something… He never restrained His anger… Yet He restrained something… There was something that He hid from all men when He went up a mountain to pray. There was something that He covered constantly by abrupt silence or imperious isolation. There was some one thing that was too great for God to show us when He walked upon our earth; and I have sometimes fancied that it was His mirth.
G.K. Chesterton in his closing words of Orthodoxy

There is humor in the Bible –irony, puns, absurdities, parodies, paradox–yet we miss hearing the laughter of the heavens as we are simply too close to the joke to get it.  In fact, we are likely the punch line of the joke more often than not.  God shows remarkable restraint when it comes to observing the hilarious antics of His children.  We don’t see verses such as, “Jesus laughed” or “Jesus smiled” or “Jesus stifled a chuckle”  even though He surely had plenty of opportunity.

We often take ourselves too seriously.   A little joy can’t hurt.

A lot of joy is hearing the laughter of heaven itself.

 

Lenten Reflection–Choosing Sides

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photo by Josh Scholten

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.
John 1:5

The issue is now clear. It is between light and darkness and everyone must choose his side.
G.K. Chesterton

This is not like choosing sides on teams in grade school, numbering off one-two-one-two until everyone knows where they stand. This is not like an election year where choosing sides means aligning myself with the political party that seems to be the best fit at the time, even if I don’t agree with all their platform points. This is not like a Lincoln-Douglas debate tournament where I might represent one viewpoint for the first round, and then be asked to represent the opposite viewpoint in the second half.

It is more like being chosen for one side or the other, even if, klutz that I am, it means always being the last to be chosen for any sports team with all my limitations, my poor coordination, my weakness and my flaws.

This choice is not for an hour or a day or a year, but for eternity; whether to stand in the light as it shines on my dark, glum, sullen head or stay unexposed and hidden in the shadows.

It isn’t just about choosing,
but being chosen,
just as I am.

Though the light shines on things unclean, yet it is not thereby defiled.
Augustine

Called to Advent–Hoping

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photo by Josh Scholten


Even youths grow tired and weary, and young men stumble and fall; but those who hope in the LORD will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint.
Isaiah 40: 30-31

I haven’t found hope effectively marketed in a tablet, elixir, capsule or syringe, but the pharmaceutical companies certainly try. Yet every day I see young people come in to my clinic with a serious deficit of hope expecting that a pill just might make the difference for them. They have no clear purpose or sense of belonging, too often ready to toss their lives on the scrap heap. Some have already been experimenting with throwing themselves away by drinking or drugging away their fears and anxieties, or cutting or burning their skin to feel something akin to relief by controlling the pain they feel, or addicted to distortions of basic desires like food or sex.

It is discouragement, depression and disappointment that becomes a cancer that metastasizes throughout their life, overwhelming their daily experience of everything around them, destroying their joy, their smiles and laughter. It causes all hope to hemorrhage. And a pill can’t change it.

I can’t prescribe the hope described in Isaiah 40. I can’t even recommend it in the government setting in which I work. I can only show them it is possible; I can tell them that others in dire horrible circumstances, like prisoners of war, or Nazi concentration camps, have felt just as badly as they do. Despite such torture, they found their way to a time in their lives where there is purpose and meaning and light and laughter, that there always is a reason to keep on going, to survive and soar above rather than be engulfed and subdued by earthly worries.

Hope is not elusive, expensive or hidden. We need not go looking for it outside ourselves. It is within, pulsing deep in our hearts. Always has been. Always will be.


To love means loving the unlovable. To forgive means pardoning the unpardonable. Faith means believing the unbelievable. Hope means hoping when everything seems hopeless.
G.K. Chesterton

Youth is the period in which a man can be hopeless. The end of every episode is the end of the world. But the power of hoping through everything, the knowledge that the soul survives its adventures, that great inspiration comes to the middle-aged.
G.K. Chesterton

An Advent Tapestry–The Paradox

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Scene of Peace by Rembrandt

A mass of legend and literature, which increases and will never end, has repeated and rung the changes on that single paradox; that the hands that had made the sun and stars were too small to reach the huge heads of the cattle. Upon this paradox, we might almost say upon this jest, all the literature of our faith is founded…

I mean that all the eyes of wonder and worship which had been turned outwards to the largest thing were now turned inward to the smallest…

It is true that the spiritual spiral henceforward works inwards instead of outwards, and in that sense is centripetal and not centrifugal. The faith becomes, in more ways than one, a religion of little things.

– G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man

Lenten Meditation: Ground Down

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“The grinding power of the plain words of the Gospel story is like the power of millstones; and those who read them…will feel as if rocks had been rolled upon them.”

G.K. Chesterton  in The Everlasting Man

The observance of Lent is a downward trajectory, heavy laden.   The betrayal and denial by His closest friends during that final week in Jerusalem only amplifies His suffering and the sacrifice He was prepared to offer, even when forsaken.  Lent is a disconsolate descent into sadness, sliding into the overwhelming reality of the stone being rolled in place to seal a tomb. That moment effectively cuts man off from God, and it is as if we too are crushed, our breath and life forced from us, by that very stone.  There is nothing darker than a sealed tomb, other than the knowledge of eternal separation from God.

From the vantage point under the stone, there is no way to comprehend the eventual lifting of the impossible weight of sin, the ascent into an unbearable lightness of new life.  As hard shelled kernels ground to remove our useless hull, we will never be the same again.

Nor should we ever wish to be.