Live Auction May 3rd--Letter from Chesterton

Starting bid $200. For those collectors among us.

UPDATE: Someone got it today for $250 A good deal. They expected anywhere from $350 to $1,000,000.

Homeschool Conference

Over the weekend, I spoke at a homeschool conference, where my topic was "Chesterton and Children." I tell parents the many ways they can introduce their children to the great man, G.K. Chesterton, and his writing. I had quite a room full of not only parents, but teens as well, a couple of whom are from ChesterTeens, which was really fun. I'm going to see if I can get the CD to bring to the Chesterton Conference.

Omaha Discussed Thursday

Misc.

Rod Bennett would like you to take a look at his post about Chesterton in Nashville, TN.

Sara Bowen sends this bit of information: Anne Perry, the interesting (to say the least) historical mystery novelist, was asked for her top 5 historical novels by the Wall Street Journal. Ballad of White Horse is #5. The text of the article is on-line but requires a subscription. Here is a summary, thanks to Sara.
1. I, Claudius
2. Full Dark House
3. The Scarlet Pimpernel
4. To Say Nothing Of the Dog
5. The Ballad of The White Horse
By G.K. Chesterton
John Lane, 1911

This is the story of the English King Alfred's desperate stand against invading Danes in 878. England is conquered, and Alfred is a fugitive when he sees a vision of the Virgin Mary that bids him call together the remnants of his people for a final battle. "The Ballad of the White Horse" is an epic poem of courage, passion and unsurpassable beauty. When Alfred asks the Saxons to join the battle, the dismaying reply is: "Friend I will watch the certain things, / Swine and slow moons like silver rings, / And the ripening of the plums." Left to fend for themselves, Alfred and his followers are strengthened by a faith in God and a love of England that are as deep as the bone. It is the meeting of history and myth, a song of undying hope and faith in mankind. "Being what heart you are, / Up the inhuman steeps of space, / As on a staircase go in grace, / Carrying the firelight in your face, / Beyond the loneliest star."

Ms. Perry's "We Shall Not Sleep" (Ballantine), the fifth and final novel in
her World War I series, has just been published.

Dr. Thursday's Thursday Post

"It is between light and darkness and everyone must choose his side."
-- G. K. Chesterton

Perhaps due to my excitement about a certain idea, I misquoted Tolkien, having Gandalf tell the Balrog he was "a guardian of the Secret Fire"; the word should be "Servant". This was a natural enough error, given - er - my background, and interests. In particular, partly due to the proximity of some cloistered Carmelite nuns, I have found a thrilling association between their work and the Vestals of ancient Rome, who really were "guardians of the fire". Someday perhaps I will tell you more about the Vestals, and the Carmelites, and maybe even what I mean by "proximity" (since in reality they are about 40 miles away!) But since we are in the Paschal time, counting through the Week of Weeks, and I am trying to concentrate on the symbols of that season, today I shall address the symbol of fire.Continue reading.

The very first scene of the grand drama of the Easter Vigil is the kindling of fire, usually done just outside the church. Children find this fascinating. The objective, of course, is to have enough of a flame to light up the Paschal candle, and from it, all the other candles of the clergy, the faithful, and the church itself. Most churches nowadays use electrical lighting, so someone usually presses the switches at the proper time - but even there the symbolism is not lost, as we shall see.

Fire is so important - the singular "element" in the ancient sense, by which Man demonstrates His authority over creation. Terribly, horribly dangerous. Critically, frighteningly necessary. Fire is not just a tool for cooking and lighting and keeping wild animals at bay; it is (in at least a certain sense) the means to a very large portion of civilization.

St. Francis called fire his strong "brother" - Chesterton's comments have a nearly Praeconium-like (the Easter-vigil-canticle) feel:

Gradually against this grey background beauty begins to appear, as something really fresh and delicate and above all surprising. Love returning is no longer what was once called platonic but what is stiff called chivalric love. The flowers and stars have recovered their first innocence.Fire and water are felt to be worthy to be the brother and sister of a saint. The purge of paganism is complete at last. For water itself has been washed. Fire itself has been purified as by fire. Water is no longer that water into which slaves were flung to feed the fishes. Fire is no longer that fire through which children were passed to Moloch. Flowers smell no more of the forgotten garlands gathered in the garden of Priapus; stars stand no more as signs of the far frigidity of gods as cold as those cold fires. They are all like things newly made and awaiting new names, from one who shall come to name them. Neither the universe nor the earth have now any longer the old sinister significance of the world. They await a new reconciliation with man, but they are already capable of being reconciled. Man has stripped from his soul the last rag of nature-worship, and can return to nature. ... For us the elements are like heralds who tell us with trumpet and tabard that we are drawing near the city of a great king; but [St. Francis] hails them with an old familiarity that is almost an old frivolity. He calls them his Brother Fire and his Sister Water.
[GKC, St. Francis of Assisi CW2:44-5, 74]

And it is not really all that strange to see a four-fold structure in nature: earth, water, air, fire - we no longer call these the four "elements" yet we do speak of the four "states" of matter: solid, liquid, gas, plasma. (No, I am not going to get all scientific just here, as much as I want to; where GKC would quote Shakespeare or Milton or somebody, I would rather use tech words or give an equation. It's merely a matter of what one has in one's head, after all, and yet still we are talking about the same God and the same universe!)

But the fire kindled at the Vigil is used as a specific for a more general thing, far harder to hold and if anything far more important: Light.

After all, the priest does not chant "Christ our Fire". Though Jesus did say "I have come to kindle a fire" [Lk 12:49] He did not tell us He was "the Fire of the World" [cf. Jn 8:12]. No, for in the Word was life, and the life was the light of men. [Jn 1:4] That light, now shining on the single Paschal candle in the hushed, crowded darkened church, is just an echo of the Light which shines in the Darkness, the Light that the Darkness cannot comprehend, overcome, or defeat.

It would be delightful (pun intended) to digress here on the "dual nature" of the photon, and make some poetic speculations on how that duality relates to the Hypostatic Union - or to the energy/matter relation made famous by Einstein's E = m c ² - but I will resist. And if you think this discussion of fire is surprising, just wait until we get to water! Ahem.

To resume. Omitting for the moment the necessary realities of breathing and (like "R.E.M."'s "Stand") of having our feet on the ground, light is the primary means by which we experience our surroundings. Yes, light is energy, but unlike plants, we use light primarily for learning about things beyond our own selves (or, at the very least, beyond our reach.) In our "information age" it should be increasingly more clear that light is the vehicle by which information is transported - at this very moment it is light which is bringing my words to you, unless you happen to have a voice-synthesizer, or are having this read to you. Light is a frontier - there is nothing faster. Careful experiments have demonstrated its absolute character, defeating the whining relativist philosophers with cold truths of science. How dramatic is this? Light enables you to read, whether from a self-luminous computer screen, or by differential reflection from a printed page. Light gives you information about where you are about to put your hands - or even your feet (again I hear R.E.M. singing "your head is there to move you around"!) Light is sent through lenses and tells us about things too small - or too large? - for our eyes to see. And even when light itself is too cumbersome, as when we wish to explore at the atomic level, we still "reduce" the information to a visual form in order to deal with it.

Earlier I used the word "drama" about the Vigil and this service of Light. Indeed, each autumn in the Northern Hemisphere, there is a drama of the service of light, when we can go outside in the evening when it is dark enough, and look at a dim little smear of light, at 4h right ascension, 41 degrees north declination. That smear, the great Andromeda galaxy, is (according to one estimate) about 2 million light years away, and contains some 3 billion stars. The little smear of light, easily covered by the tip of your little finger, is so incredibly far (yet one of the "local cluster" of galaxies!) and vast almost beyond imagining.

And yet we have a far greater drama of light to consider.

I quoted St. John's curious coupling of terms: "the life was the light of men". This coupling would be more dramatic if we could read it in Greek: "light" is FWS and "life" is ZWH. An ancient artist (or crossword-maker wannabe) made a plus-sign-shaped symbol from these two words, using the W as the centerpoint. Having played with DNA and even read a book or two about biology (which uses the other Greek word for life) I have pondered what John means by this relation. It would be glib to say (with reference to Einstein) that the light is energy, and living things are in motion, which requires energy. But there is a much more profound and much more Chestertonian way of looking at this question of light:

...all these [questions about life, death, and martyrdom] come back not to an economic calculation about livelihood but to an elemental outlook upon life. They all come back to what a man fundamentally feels, when he looks forth from those strange windows which we call the eyes, upon that strange vision that we call the world. [GKC The Everlasting Man , CW2:271]

A brilliant Victorian scientist delighted in declaring that the child does not see any grass at all; but only a sort of green mist reflected in a tiny mirror of the human eye. This piece of rationalism has always struck me as almost insanely irrational. If he is not sure of the existence of the grass, which he sees through the glass of a window, how on earth can he be sure of the existence of the retina, which he sees through the glass of a microscope? If sight deceives, why can it not go on deceiving? [GKC St. Thomas Aquinas, CW2:528-529]

"Seeing is believing" was no longer the platitude of a mere idiot, or common individual, as in Plato's world; it was mixed up with real conditions of real belief. Those revolving mirrors that send messages to the brain of man, that light that breaks upon the brain, these had truly revealed to God himself the path to Bethany or the light on the high rock of Jerusalem. [GKC St. Thomas Aquinas, CW2:493]

Yes, there is far more to say, and far more needs to be said, and I have only begun the discussion today. But perhaps someday I will go further. But let us delight in the light, then our choice will be clear.

Lumen Christi! --- "The Light of Christ!"
Deo Gratias! --- "To God, thanks!"

Carpooling to the Conference

Dr. Thursday mentioned the challenge of getting to the conference.

I am happy to connect carpoolers here if anyone needs a ride.

Please write in the comments or send me an e-mail if you'd like to share the drive with someone to ChesterCon07. Give a first name and a city where you are coming from.

I think this is a very Chestertonian way of coming to a Chesterton conference.

Important News about accomodations for ChesterCon07

This just in: Our usual accomodations for the Chesterton Conference, Grace Hall, is under construction this summer. Our substitute hall is Cretin Hall, right next door to Grace, but apparently, not quite as nice.

UPDATE: The main difference, as I can see, is that the bathrooms are shared and down the hall. However, there is another option of another dorm, which is air conditioned, and three blocks away, with two rooms sharing a bathroom, as we had at Grace Hall.

If you've ever pondered getting a hotel or motel, this might be the year to do it.

To get a hotel: First, check out the Visitor's Guide to the University of St. Thomas, which is where the conference takes place. Then check out the map of nearby hotel accomodations. See you at the conference!

On-line and mail in registration for ChesterCon07 now available

Happy Monday!

We're on the road, returning home to Chicago from Fort Worth via Oklahoma City. Everyone is tired, but happy. I finished reading TMWWT, but feel reluctant to post the last chapter, because then we're done.

Gosh! What am I thinking? Chesterton has plenty of other books to discuss. What should we do next? I will take suggestions, but I'd like to do Poet and Lunatics, what do you say?

ChesterCon 07 T-shirt

Prepare your bank account. There is, as we speak, a ChesterCon t-shirt being designed. You have been warned.

ChesterCon 07 Logo

Watch your mailboxes for the conference registration information. If you're not on the mail list, get on it. You can also watch the conference link and there will be an on-line form for registering (the whole thing is FREE! But we like to know if you're coming, and you need to order meals if you want to eat with the rest of the attendees (which I recommend if you can, as the bonding and conversations that take place at the meals is one of the really fun parts of the conference) you will need to order them using the form.

Thursday's Dr. Thursday Post

...children are innocent and love justice; while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy. [GKC, The Coloured Lands 195]

Far too thrilled with the Paschal excitement, I leaped into last week's posting without a grander plan to the work of the Week-of-Weeks. But sometimes fools rush in (into print, that is) where angels fear to post. And as it turns out, there already seems to be a thread which unites, this time a wild Chestertonian application of technology to the various tokens of Easter. Last week we considered how the Church "stops" her liturgical time in order to give us a taste of Eternity. Today, since we are in the Octave of Mercy, let us look at Mercy - that is, at the famous picture of our Jesus of Mercy, for there are one or two items we might learn from it.
Read more.In particular, we note the two streams, red and white, flowing from the Heart of Jesus - that heart to which we call in the 33 splendid invocations of the Litany of the Sacred Heart. It was just after the Roman death-certificate was issued, as St. John reports:

But one of the soldiers with a spear opened His side: and immediately there came out blood and water. And he that saw it hath given testimony: and his testimony is true. And he knoweth that he saith true: that you also may believe. [Jn 19:34-35]

You can find discussions of the cardiac pathology if you wish; there is one touching, half-poetic suggestion that Jesus died of a "broken heart".

But there are other things suggested by the red-and-white streams. The blood is itself a clear fluid, except for the erythrocytes it carries - the "red vessels" which transport oxygen. It comes as a grave shock to some to learn that these living creatures are celibate, since they have no nucleus and no DNA, and thus do not produce offspring. Formed in a "poetic" and specially guarded place - the hemopoetic tissues of marrow deep within the bones - they "sacrifice" their lives of some 30 days in bringing the "outside air" to even the most distant cells of the body.

Yet, there are also the leukocytes, whose name recalls "Doctor White", St. Paul's "most dear physician" [Col 4:14]. Where the red cells have no nuclei, the white cells have multiple nuclei, and are specially built to fight against any invasion of the body.

But perhaps this Mystical Histology (cf. 1 Cor 12) is a bit too technical for today. Let us find, as Chesterton did, something common, something ordinary, which we can look at differently, and so learn something new:

When we read about cabbages or cauliflowers in the papers, and especially the comic papers, we learn to think of them as commonplace. But if a man of any imagination will merely consent to walk round the kitchen-garden for himself, and really looks at the cabbages and cauliflowers, he will feel at once that they are vast and elemental things like the mountain in the clouds. He will feel something almost monstrous about the size and solidity of the things swelling out of that small and tidy patch of ground. There are moods in which that everyday English kitchen plot will affect him as men are affected by the reeking wealth and toppling rapidity of tropic vegetation; the green bubbles and crawling branches of a nightmare.

But whatever his mood, he will see that things so large and work so laborious cannot possibly be merely trivial. His reason no less than his imagination will tell him that the fight here waged between the family and the field is of all things the most primitive and fundamental. If that is not poetical, nothing is poetical, and certainly not the dingy Bohemianism of the artists in the towns. But the point for the moment is that even by the purely artistic test the same truth is apparent. An artist looking at these things with a free and a fresh vision will at once appreciate what I mean by calling them wild rather than tame. It is true of fire, of water, of vegetation, of half a hundred other things. If a man reads about a pig, he will think of something comic and commonplace, chiefly because the word "pig" sounds comic and commonplace. If he looks at a real pig in a real pigsty, he will have the sense of something too large to be alive, like a hippopotamus at the Zoo.
[GKC, The Coloured Lands 197-8]

And so, the next time it is dark, and you have to go somewhere in your car, and you drive on a highway of any reasonable size and busy-ness, take a glance at what you see. And look at it as Chesterton would...

Do you see the streams of white and red? Do you not have the sense that you are travelling toward His heart?

Indeed, it is something "too large to be alive" - except that it is alive, for it is the Mystical Body: "I am the Way." [Jn 14:6] An amazing and merciful way: "It was that abyss that nothing but an incarnation could cover; a divine embodiment of our dreams; and he stands above that chasm whose name is more than priest and older even than Christendom; Pontifex Maximus, the mightiest maker of a bridge." [GKC, The Everlasting Man CW2:380]

Heart of Jesus, abyss of all virtues, have mercy on us.

"For Four Guilds: II. The Bridge-Builders"

In the world's whitest morning
As hoary with hope,
The Builder of Bridges
Was priest and was pope:
And the mitre of mystery
And the canopy his,
Who darkened the chasms
And doomed the abyss.

To eastward and westward
Spread wings at his word
The arch with the key-stone
That stoops like a bird;
That rides the wild air
And the daylight cast under;
The highway of danger,
The gateway of wonder.

Of his throne were the thunders
That rivet and fix
Wild weddings of strangers,
That meet and not mix;
The town and the cornland;
The bride and the groom;
In the breaking of bridges
Is treason and doom.

But he bade us, who fashion
The road that can fly,
That we build not too heavy
And build not too high:
Seeing alway that under
The dark arch's bend
Shine death and white daylight
Unchanged to the end.

Who walk on his mercy
Walk light, as he saith,
Seeing that our life
Is a bridge above death;
And the world and its gardens
And hills, as ye heard,
Are born above space
On the wings of a bird.

Not high and not heavy
Is building of his:
When ye seal up the flood
And forget the abyss,
When your towers are uplifted,
Your banners unfurled,
In the breaking of bridges
Is the end of the world.
[GKC, Collected Poems 86-7]

TMWWT-Chapter Fourteen

The Six Philosophers

This is a great turnaround chapter, going from a wild goose chase, with torn clothes and confusion, to a ballroom dance and confusion.

I love how Syme is always "carrying his yellow beard forward."

And also, what I pointed out in last chapter, about Sunday being so heavy and being carried away in a balloon, is quite exactly the point of the beginning of Chapter 14.

There is a paradox when the Professor says he would hurt Sunday if he could catch him, and then he calls him a diminutive, "Little Snowdrop"--what's that all about?

Sunday was fat and light, a Chestertonian paradox. Great line: "Supreme strength is shown in levity."

Sunday is seen as being absentminded. Not unlike the author. Probably neither of whom really was.

Each detective finds Sunday different, but they each compare him to the universe itself.

And then Chesterton does that "back of the world" thing, like the back of the tapestry idea.

Chesterton's humor: "...he was only like a father playing hide-and-seek with his children....It is a long game..." I laughed at that!

The whole "Who is your master?" scene with Syme reminded me for some reason of the part in the Bible where Jesus sends his disciples to prepare a room for him, and he tells them exactly who they'll see and what that person will ask, and how they will answer.

And also, the "hedges were ordinary hedges, the trees seemed ordinary trees; yet he felt like a man entrapped in fairy-land" is a line that reminded me of Chesterton's description of his first visit to the Blogg home, where he says something like (this is from memory) the mailbox looked ordinary, the door looked ordinary, there was nothing to indicate that the window might wink or something to that effect.

Many of Chesterton's descriptions in this chapter reminded me of how I saw things as a child. Especially that "face lining up" thing. You see things differently as a child--unless you make an effort to remain child-like.

Mistake? When Syme's dress is first described, it is green, but a few paragraphs later, it is blue and gold. What?

A sword? With the Sun and the moon? How does that fit together?

The disguises don't disguise but reveal. Ah, what do they reveal?

Travel in Texas

I'm on business in Texas and so blogging may be light this week, though I was reading The Man Who Was Thursday in the truck so that I could post more on that soon.

TMWWT

I really should post more about Thursday, but I really have to pack up to go to Texas. I promise to write from the road and we'll get back into the book, 'kay?

Conference Schedule Up

Check it out. The registration form should be available early next week. Plan to come! Especially to that Friday morning, the first talk there, wow, that sounds interesting.

Aidan! Dawn! Peter! Dale! Joseph! Gosh, I can't wait to hear them all, meet them all, re-meet them. Are YOU coming? It won't be the same unless you do...you're invited.

But if you can't come, know that I will, as I did last year, be blogging daily from the conference, to help you feel, as it were, "there".

Thursday's Dr. Thursday Post

This is the day the Lord has made, let us rejoice and be glad, Alleluia!

On the third day the friends of Christ coming at daybreak to the place found the grave empty and the stone rolled away. In varying ways they realised the new wonder; but even they hardly realised that the world had died in the night. What they were looking at was the first day of a new creation, with a new heaven and a new earth; and in a semblance of the gardener God walked again in the garden, in the cool not of the evening but the dawn. [See Rv 21:1, Jn 20:15, cf Gn 2:15 and Gn 3:18] [GKC, The Everlasting Man CW2:345]

Happy Easter Thursday!

Among the many thrills of this holy time there is one which I find to be exceedingly high-tech. As we know, ever since God created the "Great Light" to rule the day, and the "Lesser Light" to rule the night, and the stars, and set them in motion to govern times and seasons, we have marked off intervals of time by a variety of means: calendars, priests calling out the "kalends", suns, moons, years of the reign of King-x-Son-of-King-y, counting the AUC: Years since the Founding of the City, or the years since the signing of the Declaration, counting the crazy somersaulting motions of the earth and the moon, the long slow motions of the galaxy, the insanely rapid vibrations of electrons leaping from shell to shell in the atoms of krypton or of cesium (whichever is the current standard).

And by many other means.

But none of those is the high tech one.

Not even the French Revolution (Say, just when is the Fifth Thermidor of An 4???), no, not even that Great Fear of 1999, solemnizing the coming the Eetook Comet, making people replace vacuum cleaners, doorknobs, and lightbulbs because they might contain a chip which would fail, could change the demarking of the years since the birth of Jesus.

But there is something which does stop this marking off of time - at least a tiny little bit. Read more.Actually two somethings. Christmas and Easter.

Yes, the highest-tech mechanism of time is the accurate placement of ribbons in the Books of Worship of the Roman Catholic Church: the Lectionary and the Divine Office. (Along with that grand and deeply mystic tech code on the Paschal Candle, but I shall save that for another today.)

For this most solemn octave of days, the Great Clock pauses. No, we are not lunatics, hee hee - the moon and also the sun, the cesium and krypton, the various civil and other demarkings, are proceeding uninterruptedly. We - yes, even the most solemn of us - know that today is Thursday, the day of Sun, Moon, and Stars (See TMWWT for more on that.)

But at Holy Mass today, the priest says: "We praise You with greater joy than ever on this Easter Day, when Christ became our Paschal Sacrifice..." And at Morning Prayer, and Evening Prayer, the psalms repeat (and GKC and the choirs of heaven murmur, "Do it again!") each of these eight days, the same happy psalms of Easter.

Yes, like a little kid, our ancient Holy Mother Church "does it again". The Easter Day lasts a whole 8 days.

Why is this?

This is but our childlike attempt (alas, so weak) at telling each other what Eternity is like. And this is very hard to do, even for the Church. Chesterton admitted the difficulty:

There are twenty tiny minor poets who can describe fairly impressively an eternity of agony; there are very few even of the eternal poets who can describe ten minutes of satisfaction. Nevertheless, mankind being half divine is always in love with the impossible, and numberless attempts have been made from the beginning of human literature to describe a real state of felicity. Upon the whole, I think, the most successful have been the most frankly physical and symbolic; the flowers of Eden or the jewels of the New Jerusalem. Many writers, for instance, have called the gold and chrysolite of the Holy City a vulgar lump of jewellery. But when these critics themselves attempt to describe their conceptions of future happiness, it is always some priggish nonsense about "planes," about "cycles of fulfilment," or "spirals of spiritual evolution." Now a cycle is just as much a physical metaphor as a flower of Eden; a spiral is just as much a physical metaphor as a precious stone. But, after all, a garden is a beautiful thing; whereas this is by no means necessarily true of a cycle, as can be seen in the case of a bicycle. A jewel, after all, is a beautiful thing; but this is not necessarily so of a spiral, as can be seen in the case of a corkscrew. Nothing is gained by dropping the old material metaphors, which did hint at heavenly beauty, and adopting other material metaphors which do not even give a hint of earthly beauty. [GKC, "Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens" CW15:311]

One might suspect Tolkien had this in mind when he explained how Bilbo had a good time at Rivendell, but took only a line or two to tell about it, whereas the terrors of the "goblins" and other such things took whole chapters... Well, unlike either the goblins or the dwarves, GKC is hardly a "minor" poet (hee hee) yet he wrote one of the most mathematically perfect poems about eternity, which of course is about the one real thing we know we're going to be doing there: thanking God.

"Eternities"

I cannot count the pebbles in the brook.
Well hath He spoken: 'Swear not by thy head,
Thou knowest not the hairs,' though He, we read,
Writes that wild number in His own strange book.

I cannot count the sands or search the seas,
Death cometh, and I leave so much untrod.
Grant my immortal aureole, O my God,
And I will name the leaves upon the trees.

In heaven I shall stand on gold and glass,
Still brooding earth's arithmetic to spell;
Or see the fading of the fires of hell
Ere I have thanked my God for all the grass.
[GKC Collected Poems CW10:210]

Amen, Amen. This IS the Day the Lord has made: Let us rejoice and be glad indeed.

Alleluia, Alleluia.

Ideas

I'm looking for some ideas here. I have the golden opportunity to write a book about Chesterton. I'd like to write a book that you'd like to give to all those people who say, "I can't read Chesterton" or "I've tried Chesterton, he's too deep for me" or "Chesterton who?"

What would catch the eye of a non-Chestertonian? I'm looking for title ideas, and content ideas. I have some ideas, but I'm just one person, so I thought I'd get your ideas. We all run across non-Chestertonians every day. What kind of book might turn them into Chestertonians...a book that isn't written by Chesterton but about Chesterton?

Thanks for your help, proceed to the comments box.

Here are some title ideas I've had:
Chesterton Who?
Chester--Who?
Chesterton for Dummies (Can't do that, but something like that)
You CAN Read Chesterton (with a little help)
A Chesterton Primer
Trying Out Chesterton
What's the Big Deal About Chesterton?
Who is (was?) Gilbert Chesterton?
Trying to Read Chesterton
Chesterton: Too Deep for Me
How to Read a Book By G.K.Chesterton
Chesterton for the Average Joe

Gilbert & Frances Scholarship Deadline

May 1st. Please tell all of the college students you know about this. Thanks.

Chesterton's Teeth

I've read that Chesterton had really bad teeth, and he is rarely seen smiling with his teeth showing. From what I've heard, you can be glad this isn't a color photograph. Naturally, all that smoking, and the times he lived in, led to poor dental care.

See The Surprise--a Puppet Play!

Chesterton would have loved it. This is the Troubador, isn't he cute?

New Chesterton Photo

Thanks to Mike via Dave.

Happy Easter

Here is an Easter Sunday Homily that starts out with an idea of Chesterton's. Although I seriously dispute the 400lb weight--I don't believe Chesterton ever weighted that much. But the rest of it is a good reminder that we have "something to live for."

The Greatest Detective Story of All

The Mystery of Christ on the Cross. I hope today brings you peace, and helps you draw closer to Christ.

Thursday--Holy Thursday--Dr. Thursday

You may have wondered how I was going to handle this post, since I had already treated the five Sorrowful Mysteries. But today, Holy Thursday, the Fifth Luminous Mystery shold be contemplated. Yes, there must be those horrid last few notes to end one part of the Mysterious Suite (a descending pedal solo, played on a 32' flue, perhaps) as Judas leaves, signifying "It was night".

But just as there are other ways and others days in which we shall ponder this mystery - I mean the post-Pentecost feast of Corpus Christi, and September's Exaltation of the Cross - just so there must also be another theme to our suite, something old and exalted, solemn and homely, but also new...
Read more.
Yes, as the Good Steward who brings forth old and new, or St. Augustine's "Beauty": for today, on Spring's first Full Moon, on this feast day of the Old Covenant, the One Who commanded Moses now gives a new command: "this is the New Covenant, in My Blood..."

Here again is the Sacrifice and Holy Meal, and the Blood which liberates, but now the Priest is also the Victim.

Our Uncle Gilbert speaks of this great mystery with a large amount of care:

On an occasion when Holy Communion was brought to Frances at home he said, "I am a simple man and I am afraid when God comes to my house." [Ward, Return To Chesterton 293]

Something so amazing would clearly bring forth whole books from his prolific pen, but he knows that these words are the Division which Jesus brought. [see Lk 12:51] For when He told the Jews in six different ways how they would be obliged to eat His flesh and drink His blood, "many of His disciples went back and walked no more with Him." [Jn 6:67] Here is one example, from his essays on Catholicism:

As to Transubstantiation, it is less easy to talk currently about that; but I would gently suggest that, to most ordinary outsiders with any common sense, there would be a considerable practical difference between Jehovah pervading the universe and Jesus Christ coming into the room. [GKC The Thing CW3:180]

But in his fiction he is far more bold:

"I want you to hate me! " cried Turnbull, in agony. "I want you to be sick when you think of my name. I am sure there is no God."
"But there is," said Madeleine, quite quietly, and rather with the air of one telling children about an elephant. "Why, I touched His body only this morning."
"You touched a bit of bread," said Turnbull, biting his knuckles. "Oh, I will say anything that can madden you!"
"You think it is only a bit of bread," said the girl, and her lips tightened ever so little.
"I know it is only a bit of bread," said Turnbull, with violence.
She flung back her open face and smiled. "Then why did you refuse to eat it?" she said. [GKC, The Ball and the Cross]

Of all the fiction of GKC, somehow that book seems the most appropriate for today. True, the famous picnic on the roof in Manalive has some resonance... and the grand theater as Lucian Gregory comes before the Council of the Seven Days...

But tomorrow is the paradoxical "feast day" of the Cross, and we must "enter into" that symbol, as much as Bastian Balthazar Bux enters into "Auryn" in The Never-Ending Story. For us, the Eucharist makes this possible: we enter into, and partake of, Calvary - which means the Cross.

I heard somewhere how the U.S. Army changed the boot-soles for those going to the Near East, as the old form of treads would leave the ground marked with signs of the cross. One wonders about such a view - is the ASCII character 00101011 (which looks like this: "+") likewise forbidden? Are draftsmen forbidden T-squares? Are geometers prevented from using angles measuring pi over 2? Are no picket fences permitted? Is star-gazing shunned when Cygnus (the "Northern Cross") is in the sky?

But Chesterton has a whole chapter exploring, and answering, this riddle. Here is just a sample:

[Professor Lucifer said] "What could possibly express your philosophy and my philosophy better than the shape of that cross and the shape of this ball? This globe is reasonable; that cross is unreasonable. It is a four-legged animal, with one leg longer than the others. The globe is inevitable. The cross is arbitrary. Above all the globe is at unity with itself; the cross is primarily and above all things at enmity with itself. The cross is the conflict of two hostile lines, of irreconcilable direction. That silent thing up there is essentially a collision, a crash, a struggle in stone. Pah! that sacred symbol of yours has actually given its name to a description of desperation and muddle. When we speak of men at once ignorant of each other and frustrated by each other, we say they are at cross-purposes. Away with the thing! [see Jn 19:15] The very shape of it is a contradiction in terms."

"What you say is perfectly true," said Michael, with serenity. "But we like contradictions in terms. Man is a contradiction in terms; he is a beast whose superiority to other beasts consists in having fallen. That cross is, as you say, an eternal collision; so am I. That is a struggle in stone. Every form of life is a struggle in flesh. The shape of the cross is irrational, just as the shape of the human animal is irrational." [GKC, The Ball and the Cross]

Indeed, we DO like contradictions in terms. Such is the whole story of the Incarnation:

...in this case [of Bethlehem] it is rather heaven that is under the earth. And there follows in this strange story the idea of an upheaval of heaven. That is the paradox of the whole position; that henceforth the highest thing can only work from below. [Cf Jn 13:2-15] ... For those who think the idea of the Crusade is one that spoils the idea of the Cross, we can only say that for them the idea of the Cross is spoiled; the idea of the Cross is spoiled quite literally in the Cradle. [GKC, The Everlasting Man CW2:313-4

Let us give Madeline, the heroine of The Ball and the Cross, the last word today, for her words give an almost Thomistic summary of today's Mystery:

"...the Mass is very long and tiresome unless one loves God. ...if you are really sorry it is all right. If you are horribly sorry it is all the better. You have only to go and tell the priest so and he will give you God out of his own hands."

Dr. Thursday

For the Ale Drinkers

TMWWT-Chapter Thirteen

The Pursuit of the President

Now one of the fantastic things about this chapter is that previously, we had the impression that Sunday was ponderous, over-sized, heavy and elephantine. Here, in chapter thirteen, he's running around like an athlete or a circus performer or a really fast elephant (a Chestertonian paradox?).

At Chesterteens, there was some discussion of the mysterious notes Sunday throws back at the detectives. They seem to conclude that the notes are meant to confuse and are nonsensical. Do you agree?

Great lines: If they were harmless officers, what was Sunday? (notice "what" not "who")
If he had not seized the world, what on earth had he been up to?
I confess that I should feel a bit afraid of asking Sunday who he really is.
Why? for fear of bombs?
No, for fear he might tell me.

We are six men going to ask one man what he means.
I think it is six men going to ask one man what they mean.

Humor: Candidates are only required to answer to eight out of the seventeen questions on the paper.
The scene in the zoo.
Nature was always making quite mysterious jokes. He wondered whether even the archangels understood the hornbill.
The heavy Sunday escaping in a balloon.

You will understand the sea, and I shall be still a riddle; you shall know what the stars are, and not know what I am.

And another surprise, this time about Sunday's identity.

Emily Post on Literary Etiquette

Of course, Chesterton is always right for the guest room bedside table. ;-)
Hat tip: Denny

Another picture