I just recently installed MacSword on my MacBook, and I was delighted to find an old Christian favorite available for inclusion in the modules that you can use to customize MacSword, Gilbert Keith Chesterton. Following my brief bout of depression regarding the mix-up at St. John, I consider myself blessed to have stumbled onto Chesterton once again. Not only is he one of the most wonderfully charming and inventive writers of the 20th century, he is also perhaps the most intellectually satisfying of that marvelously gifted group of English Christian writers. This is no mean feat considering that he counted amongst his contemporaries such names as C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien.
The following essay features Chesterton at his best: disarmingly intelligent, passionate, and filled with the joy of his Christianity. This made my weekend so much more blessed. It might prove to be a daunting read, but it remains so only if you insist on approaching Chesterton with an unbecoming seriousness. Dour, solemn, and overly serious readers might be put off by his breezy, elegantly whimsical intellectual spirituality. Chesterton is like fine wine with a delightful bouquet and a full-bodied robustness that sneaks past your initial encounter. In other words, sip: do not gulp.
A final word to my family: I really enjoyed the weekend. This essay underscores the wealth of our joy, which we find in God and one another. Enjoy!
From Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton, Authority and the Adventurer
The mass of men have been forced to be gay about the little things, but sad about the big ones. Nevertheless (I offer my last dogma defiantly) it is not native to man to be so. Man is more himself, man is more manlike, when joy is the fundamental thing in him, and grief the superficial. Melancholy should be an innocent interlude, a tender and fugitive frame of mind; praise should be the permanent pulsation of the soul. Pessimism is at best an emotional half-holiday; joy is the uproarious labour by which all things live. Yet, according to the apparent estate of man as seen by the pagan or the agnostic, this primary need of human nature can never be fulfilled. Joy ought to be expansive; but for the agnostic it must be contracted, it must cling to one comer of the world. Grief ought to be a concentration; but for the agnostic its desolation is spread through an unthinkable eternity. This is what I call being born upside down. The sceptic may truly be said to be topsy-turvy; for his feet are dancing upwards in idle ecstacies, while his brain is in the abyss. To the modern man the heavens are actually below the earth. The explanation is simple; he is standing on his head; which is a very weak pedestal to stand on. But when he has found his feet again he knows it. Christianity satisfies suddenly and perfectly man's ancestral instinct for being the right way up; satisfies it supremely in this; that by its creed joy becomes something gigantic and sadness something special and small. The vault above us is not deaf because the universe is an idiot; the silence is not the heartless silence of an endless and aimless world. Rather the silence around us is a small and pitiful stillness like the prompt stillness in a sick-room. We are perhaps permitted tragedy as a sort of merciful comedy: because the frantic energy of divine things would knock us down like a drunken farce. We can take our own tears more lightly than we could take the tremendous levities of the angels. So we sit perhaps in a starry chamber of silence, while the laughter of the heavens is too loud for us to hear.
Joy, which was the small publicity of the pagan, is the gigantic secret of the Christian. And as I close this chaotic volume I open again the strange small book from which all Christianity came; and I am again haunted by a kind of confirmation. The tremendous figure which fills the Gospels towers in this respect, as in every other, above all the thinkers who ever thought themselves tall. His pathos was natural, almost casual. The Stoics, ancient and modern, were proud of concealing their tears. He never concealed His tears; He showed them plainly on His open face at any daily sight, such as the far sight of His native city. Yet He concealed something. Solemn supermen and imperial diplomatists are proud of restraining their anger. He never restrained His anger. He flung furniture down the front steps of the Temple, and asked men how they expected to escape the damnation of Hell. Yet He restrained something. I say it with reverence; there was in that shattering personality a thread that must be called shyness. 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 impetuous 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.
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