Thursday's Dr. Thursday Post

Thursday during the Great Novena

I am very busy just now, but even if I had time, I hesitate
to approach the profound harmonies which would link GKC's work with the
Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit... it will demand a greater discipline
and a purer holiness and a simpler and clearer mind than I have, sinful
as I am. But I will dare make a selection for our meditation today. It
is in very great resonance with the "Fairy Tale" essay by our beloved
J.R.R.Tolkien, and of course with many other writings of GKC like
Manalive. And I would especially mention that superlative
discussion on the "literary style" of Jesus and His bridge-building
fulfillment of the "granting of a real romance", discussed in the second
half of The Everlasting Man.

Please read it slowly, and think carefully, and deeply, while pondering
the story near the beginning of the "Acts of the Apostles" where the
great wind came, not to Beacon Hill, but to the upper room where the
Apostles where in prayer with Mary...

--Dr. Thursday.

For every mood there is an appropriate impossibility - a decent and
tactful impossibility - fitted to the frame of mind. Every train of
thought may end in an ecstasy, and all roads lead to Elfland. But few
now walk far enough along the street of Dickens to find the place where
the cockney villas grow so comic that they become poetical. People do
not know how far mere good spirits will go. For instance, we never think
(as the old folk-lore did) of good spirits reaching to the spiritual
world. We see this in the complete absence from modern, popular
supernaturalism of the old popular mirth. We hear plenty to-day of the
wisdom of the spiritual world; but we do not hear, as our fathers did,
of the folly of the spiritual world, of the tricks of the gods, and the
jokes of the patron saints. Our popular tales tell us of a man who is so
wise that he touches the supernatural, like Dr. Nikola; but they never
tell us (like the popular tales of the past) of a man who was so silly
that he touched the supernatural, like Bottom the Weaver. We do not
understand the dark and transcendental sympathy between fairies and
fools. We understand a devout occultism, an evil occultism, a tragic
occultism, but a farcical occultism is beyond us. Yet a farcical
occultism is the very essence of "The Midsummer Night's Dream." It is
also the right and credible essence of "The Christmas Carol." Whether we
understand it depends upon whether we can understand that exhilaration
is not a physical accident, but a mystical fact; that exhilaration can
be infinite, like sorrow; that a joke can be so big that it breaks the
roof of the stars. By simply going on being absurd, a thing can become
godlike; there is but one step from the ridiculous to the sublime.

[GKC, Charles Dickens CW15:49-50]

.....Come Holy Ghost, renew in us Your seven-fold gifts...