Her self-assessment was altered radically when, on the recommendation of a musician she interviewed, she discovered famed Christian author G.K. Chesterton. Eden explains: "Back in December 1995, while doing a phone interview with Ben Eshbach of an L.A. band called the Sugarplastic, I thought I would ask him something more erudite than the usual rock-journalist questions, so I asked what he was reading. He said that he was reading G.K. Chesterton's 'The Man Who Was Thursday.' So, I thought, well, I'll impress him and I'll go out and read it. I picked it up, not knowing what I was in for."
Chesterton, she said, presented the heroes in the book as rebels who "discovered that what they were ultimately searching for was the very thing that they thought they had been rebelling against - God."
"I saw that Chesterton was presenting Christianity as the ultimate rebellion which was very jarring for me because I had defined myself as being countercultural," she said.
"This turned my worldview upside down," Eden went on, "because I had thought that Christians were conformists," said Eden. "It felt strange for me to have this idea planted in my head that to be Christian was to be creative and subversive."
Tuesday, May 01, 2007
She's speaking at the Conference...she's Dawn Eden
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Excellent! Dawn has given a superb summary of GKC's whole view of God-the-Rebel. Here are two refs for your notes:
ReplyDeleteThat a good man may have his back to the wall is no more than we knew already; but that God could have his back to the wall is a boast for all insurgents for ever. Christianity is the only religion on earth that has felt that omnipotence made God incomplete. Christianity alone has felt that God, to be wholly God, must have been a rebel as well as a king. Alone of all creeds, Christianity has added courage to the virtues of the Creator.
[GKC Orthodoxy CW1:343]
It is not only that the very horse-hoofs of Herod might in that sense have passed like thunder over the sunken head of Christ. It is also that there is in that image a true idea of an outpost, of a piercing through the rock and an entrance into an enemy territory. There is in this buried divinity an idea of undermining the world; of shaking the towers and palaces from below; even as Herod the great king felt that earthquake under him and swayed with his swaying palace.
[Cf. LotR II:2 page 288 “This is the hour of the Shire-folk, when they arise from their quiet fields to shake the towers and counsels of the Great.”]
[GKC, The Everlasting Man CW2:313]
What a thrill of anticipation - I am looking forward to meeting her at ChesterCon07...
RE "upside down" - I wonder: do we call these Chestertonian things "conversions" or "inversions"? Hee hee.
--Dr. Thursday