12.23.2013 SS - G.K.CHESTERTON; yancey

if you had asked me during college years where i would end up,
'christian writer' would have fallen last on my list of options.
i would have recounted the lies my church had told me about race and other matters
and poked fun at its smothering legalism.
i would have described an evangelical as a socially stunted wannabe
-a fundamentalist with a better income, a slightly more open mind and a less furrowed brow.
i would have complained about the furloughed missionaries at the bible college i attended
who taught classes in science and philosophy while knowing less about those subjects
than my high school teachers.
that school tended to punish, rather than reward, intellectual curiosity:
one teacher admitted he deliberately lowered my grades in order to teach me humility.
'the greatest barrier to the Holy Spirit is sophistication', he used to warn his classes.

at the same bible college, however, i first encountered the writings of c.s.lewis and g.k.chesterton.
although separated from me by a vast expanse of sea and culture,
they kindled hope that somewhere christians existed
who loosed rather than restrained their minds,
who combined sophisticated taste with a humility that did not demean others,
and above all, who experienced life with God as a source of joy and not repression.
ordering tattered used copies through bookshops in england,
i devoured everything i could find by these men,
one an oxford don and the other a fleet street journalist.
as L himself wrote after discovering Ch while recovering in a hospital during WWI,
'a young man who wishes to remain a strong atheist cannot be too careful of his reading'.

their words sustained me,
a lifeline of faith in a sea of turmoil and doubt...

in his story of the prodigal son, Jesus does not dwell on the prodigal's motive for return.
the younger son feels no sudden remorse nor burst of love for the father he insulted.
rather, he tires of a life of squalor and returns out of selfish motives.
apparently, it matters little to God whether we approach Him
out of desperation or out of longing.
why did i return? i ask myself.

..my career as a journalist gave me the opportunity to investigate people,
such as those i have assembled in this book,
who demonstrate that a connection with God can enlarge, rather than shrink, life.
i began the lifelong process of separating church from God.
though i had emerged from childhood churches badly damaged,
as i began to scrutinize Jesus through the critical eyes of a journalist,
i say that the actualities that so upset me
-legalism, self righteousness, racism, provincialism, hypocrisy-
Jesus had fought against and were probably the very qualities that led to his crucifixion.
getting to know the God revealed in Jesus, i recognized i needed to change in many ways
-yes, even to repent, for i had absorbed the hypocrisy-
Jesus had fought against and were probably the very qualities that led to his crucifixion.
getting to know the God revealed in Jesus, i recognized i needed to change in many ways
-yes, even to repent, for i had absorbed the hypocrisy, racism and self righteousness of my upbringing
and contributed numerous sins of my own.
i began to envision God less as a stern judge shaking his finger at my waywardness
than as a doctor who prescribes behavior in my best interest in order to safeguard my health.


'i am the man who with the utmost daring discovered what had been discovered before,
g.k.chesterton declared triumphantly.
'i did try to found a heresy of my own
and when i had put the last touches to it,
i discovered that it was orthodoxy'.
guided in part by Ch i landed in a similar place after a circuitous journey.

when someone asked Ch what one book he would want to have along if stranded on a desert island,
he paused only an instant before replying,
'why a Practical Guide to Shipbuilding, of course.'
if i were so stranded and could choose one book apart from the bible,
i may well select Ch's own spiritual autobiography, Orthodoxy.
why anyone would pick up a book with that formidable title eludes me,
but one day i did so and my faith has never recovered...

Ch  has sometimes been called 'the master who left no masterpiece',
perhaps the curse of his chosen profession.
for most of his life (1874-1936) he served as editor of a weekly newspaper of ideas,
in the process writing some 4000 essays on topics both trivial and important.
he straddled the turn of the century, from the 19th to the 20th,
when such movements as modernism, communism, fascism, pacifism, determinism, darwinism and eugenics
were coming to the fore.
as he surveyed each one, he found himself pressed further and further toward christianity,
which he saw as the only redoubt (complete enclosure, fort) against such potent forces.
eventually he accepted the christian faith not simply as a bulwark of civilization
but rather as an expression of the deepest truths about the world...

as a thinker, Ch started slowly.
by the age of 9 he could barely read and his parents consulted with a brain specialist
about his mental capacity.
he dropped out of art school
and skipped university entirely.
as it turned out, however,
he had a memory so prodigious that late in life
he could recite the plats of all 10,000 novels he had read and reviewed.
he wrote five novels of his own as well as 200 short stories...
tried his hand at plays, poetry and ballads;
wrote literary biographies of such characters as robert browning and charles dickens;
spun off a history of england
and tackled the lives of francis of assisi, thomas aquinas and Jesus Himself.
writing at breakneck speed, getting many facts wrong,
he nevertheless approached each of his subjects with such discernment, enthusiasm and with
that even his harshest critics had to stand and applaud.

..he stayed at home, read widely and wrote about everything that crossed his mind.
the rollicking adventures took place inside his great shaggy head.
one can hardly overestimate his impact on others, though.
mahatma gandhi got may of his ideas on indian independence from Ch
one of his novels also inspired michael collins's movement for irish indepencence
and c.s.L looked to Ch as his (a?) spiritual father.

..he resuscitated my moribund faith.

albert einstein once articulated the most important question of all:
is the universe a friendly place?
in childhood and adolescence i received mixed messages at best.
like the children of alcoholics-don't talk, don't trust and don't feel- i had responded by flat lining emotionally.

..i turned inward, sealing off one by one any avenue whereby people could bet to me,
either to manipulate me or cause pain.
i read..sartre and camus..i read nietzsche, who described a superman impervious to suffering.
i learned not to laugh or smile and not to cry.
i tried not to care or react: to cold or heat, to good smells or bad..to beauty or ugliness, to love or hate.
in a perverted experiment, i broke my own arm against the metal frame of a bunk bed
to test my mastery of pain.

i see now what i could not see then, that i was erecting a strong stone fortress against love,
for i thought myself unlovable.
in the most unlikely place, the bible college i viewed as a kind of asylum,
that inner fortress began to crumble.
i found solace not in religion, where everyone around me claimed to find it, but in music.
late at night i would steal out of the dormitory and make my way to the chapel and its 9' steinway grand...

then i fell in love.
janet and i drew together for all the wrong reasons
-mainly we sat around and complained about the oppressive atmosphere of the school
-but eventually the most powerful force in the universe, love, won out.
i had found someone who pointed out everything right with me, not everything wrong.
hope aroused.
i wanted to conquer worlds and lay them at her feet.
for her birthday learned beethoven's sonata pathetique
and invited her, trembling, to be the very first audience to hear me play.
it was an offering to new life and to her who had called it forth.

'the worst moment for the atheist is when he is really thankful and has no one to thank, wrote Ch.
and also, 'joy, which was the small publicity of the pagan, is the gigantic secret of the christian.'
i know well that worst moment and know too the first stirrings of joy
that flapped fresh air into crevices long sealed off.
great joy carries within it the intimations of immortality.
suddenly i wanted to live, even to live forever.

(..back to the question, is creation friendly?)
another scientist, the naturalist loren eiseley,
tells of an event he calls the most significant learning experience of his long life.
caught on a beach in a sudden rainstorm, he sought shelter under a huge piece of driftwood
where he found a tiny fox kitten, maybe ten weeks old, which as yet had no fear of humans.
within a few minutes it had engaged eiseley in a playful game of tug of war ,
with eiseley holding one end of a chicken bone in his mouth and the baby fox pulling on the other end.
the lesson he learned, said eiseley, is that at the core of the universe, the face of God wears a smile...

..gradually, music and romantic love and especially nature softened
the incessant monotone of despair inside that had nagged me like a dull pain.
i came to see the despair as a normal symptom of fallen humanity estranged from its creator.
somehow, i must reconnect.

Ch had pointed to st. francis, who learned his proper state from 'brother sun' and 'sister moon',
and who saw inexhaustible beauty in the humblest weed, like a dandelion.
in a memorable passage,Ch contrasts our state with that of God,
who 'is strong enough to exult in monotony.
it is possible that god says every morning, 'do it again' to the sun; and every evening, 'do it again' to the moon
it may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike;
it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them.
it may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy;
for we have sinned and grown old
and our Father is younger than we'.
bit by bit , nature helped to rejuvenate in me that appetite of infancy.

yancey however saw mixed messages in nature...
Ch viewed this world as a sort of cosmic shipwreck. (see romans 8.19-23)..

..after Orthodoxy i read many of Ch's other works.
(he wrote more than 100 books and as a writer it depressed me for weeks to learn that
he dictated most of them to his secretary and made few changes to the first drafts.).
i was writing on the problem of pain at the time
and found much insight in his fictional treatment of that dark subject, 'the man who was thursday'.
amazingly, considering their differences in style, he wrote it during the same year as Orthodoxy.
he later explained that he had been struggling with despair, evil and the meaning of life
and had even approached mental breakdown.
when he emerged from that melancholy, he sought to make a case for optimism amid the gloom of such a world.

in 'the man who was thursday' Ch does not diminish the incalculable mysteries of suffering and free will.
rather, he transforms them into a minimalist argument for faith.
at its worst, at a bare minimum of goodness, with nature revealing only the back side of God,
the universe offers reasons for belief.
in God's own speech to Job,
God pointed to  the fierce wilderness of nature
-the hippopotmus and crocodile, thunderstorms and blizzards, the lioness and mountain goat,
the untamed oxen and ostriches- not its friendly side.
if nothing else, nature reveals God as mysterious, incalculable, 'wholly other', worthy of worship.
we may have limited clues to the secrets of reality, but what wondrous clues they are.
'even mere existence, reduced to its most primary limits, was extraordinary enough to be exciting.
anything was magnificent compared with nothing, Ch testified later.
in his life also, nature and romantic love sounded as loud, reverberating grace notes.

...in addition to the problem of pain, Ch seemed equally fascinated by its opposite, the problem of pleasure.
he found materialism too thin to account for the sense of wonder and delight
that gives an almost magical dimension to such basic human acts as sex, childbirth, play and artistic creation.

why is sex fun?
reproduction surely does not require pleasure:
some animals simply split in half to reproduce
and even humans use methods of artificial insemination that involve no pleasure.
why is eating enjoyable?
plants and the lower animals manage to obtain their quota of nutrients without the luxury of taste buds.
why are there colors?
some people get along fine without the ability to detect color.
why complicate vision for all the rest of us?

it struck me, after reading my umpteenth book on the problem of pain,
that i have never even seen a book on 'the problem of pleasure'.
nor have i met a philosopher who goes around shaking his or her head in perplexity
over the question of why we experience pleasure.
yet it looms as a huge question:
the philosophical equivalent, for atheists,
to the problem of pain for christians.
on the issue of pleasure, christians can breathe easier.
a good and loving God would naturally want his creatures
to experience delight, joy and personal fulfillment.
christians start from that assumption and then look for ways to explain the origin of suffering.
but should not atheists have an equal obligation to explain the origin of pleasure
in a world of randomness and meaninglessness?

after his long odyssey, Ch returned to faith because only christianity
provided the clues to solve the mystery of PLEASURE.
'i felt in my bones, first that this world does not explain itself...
second, i came to feel as if magic must have a meaning
and meaning must have some one to mean it.
there was something personal in the world, as in a work of art...
third, i though this purpose beautiful in it old design,
in spite of its defects, such as dragons.
fourth, that THE PROPER FORM OF THANKS TO IT
IS SOME FORM OF HUMILITY AND RESTRAIN:
we should thank God for beer and burgundy by not drinking too much or them...
and last, and strangest, there had come into my mind a vague and vast impression
that in some way all good was a remnant to be stored and held sacred out of some primordial ruin.
man had saved his good as (robinson) crusoe saved his goods: he had saved them from a wreck'.

where does pleasure come from?
after searching alternatives, Ch settled on christianity as the only reasonable explanation
for its existence in the world.
moments of pleasure are the remnants washed ashore from a shipwreck,
bits of paradise extended through time.
we must hold these relics lightly and use them with gratitude and restraint,
never seizing them as entitlements.

as Ch saw it, sexual promiscuity is not so much an overvaluing of sex as a devaluing.
'to complain that i could only be married once was like complaining that i had only been born once.
it was incommensurate with the terrible excitement of which one was talking,
it showed, not an exaggerated sensibility to sex, but a  curious insensibility to it...
polygamy is a lack of the realization of sex;
it is like a man plucking five pears in a mere absence of mind'.

the churches i attended had stressed the dangers of pleasure so loudly
that i missed any positive message.
guided by Ch, i came to see sex, money, power and sensory pleasures as God's good gifts.
every sunday i can turn on the radio or television and hear preachers
decry the drugs, sexual looseness, greed and crime that are 'running rampant' in the streets of america.
rather than merely wag our fingers at such obvious abuses of God's good gifts,
perhaps we should demonstrate to the world where good gifts actually come from
and why they are good.
evil's greatest triumph may be its success in portraying religion as an enemy of pleasure
when, in fact, religion accounts for its source:
every good and enjoyable thing is the invention of a creator who has lavished gifts on the world.

of course, in a world estranged from God, even good things must be handled with care,
like explosives.
we have lost the untainted innocence of eden, and every good harbors risk as well,
holding within it the potential for abuse.
eating becomes gluttony, love becomes lust.
and along the way we lose sigh of the One who gave us pleasure.
the ancients turned good things into idols;
we moderns call them addictions.
in either case, what ceases to be a servant becomes a tyrant
-a principle i had clearly seen at work in my brother and his flower children friends.

'i am ORDINARY in the correct sense of the term, said Ch
which means THE ACCEPTANCE OF AN ORDER;
a creator and the creation,
THE COMMON SENSE OF GRATITUDE FOR CREATION, LIFE AND LOVE
AS GIFTS PERMANENTLY GOOD,
marriage and chivalry as laws rightly controlling them..'
under his influence i too realized the need to become more 'ordinary'.
i had conceived of faith as a tight lipped, grim exercise of spiritual discipline,
a blending of asceticism and rationalism
in which joy leaked away.
Ch restored to me a thirst for the exuberance
that flows from a link to the God who dreamed up all the things that give me pleasure.

'there are an infinity of angles at which one falls, only one at which one stands, said Ch
and he ultimately fell from excess, never achieving the balance he preached so convincingly.
..his weight hovered between three and four hundred pounds...

Ch cheerfully engaged in public debates with agnostics and skeptics of the day,
most notably george bernard shaw
-this at a time when a debate on faith could fill a lecture hall.
Ch usually arrived late, peered through his pince nez at his disorderly scraps of paper
and proceeded to entertain the crowd,
making nervous gestures,
fumbling through his pockets,
laughing heartily in a falsetto voice at his own jokes.
typically he would charm the audience over to his side,
then celebrate by hosting his chastened opponent at the nearest pub.
'shaw is like venus de milo;
all there is of him is admirable', he toasted his friend affectionately.

cosmo hamilton, one of his debating opponents, described the experience:

'to hear Ch's howl of joy...
to see him double himself up in an agony of laughter at my personal insults,
to watch the effect of his sportsmanship on a shocked audience
who were won to mirth by his intense and pea hen-like quarks of joy
was a sight and a sound for the gods...
and i carried away from that room a respect and admiration for this tomboy among dictionaries,
this philosophical peter pan,
this humorous dr. johnson,
this kindly and gallant cherub,
this profound student and wise master
which has grown steadily ever since...
it was monstrous, gigantic, amazing, deadly, delicious.
nothing like it has ever been done before or will ever be seen, heard and felt like it again.

...in Ch's day, sober minded modernists
were seeking anew unified theory to explain the past and give hope to the future...
Ch would cheerfully defend such reactionary concepts as original sin and the Last Judgment.
Ch seemed to sense instinctively that a stern prophet
will rarely break through to a society full of religion's 'cultured despisers'
he preferred the role of jester.

Ch claimed to distrust 'hard, cold, thin people
and perhaps that's why i have grown so fond of the jolly fat apologist.
nowadays in the church sober mindedness has won the day...

i have had to forgive the church, much as a person from a dysfunctional family forgives mistakes made by parents and siblings.
an irrepressible optimist, Ch proved helpful in that process too.
'thee christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting.
it has been found difficult; and left untried', he said.
the real question is not
'why is christianity so bad when it claims to be so good? but rather
why are all human things so bad when they claim to be so good?
Ch readily admitted that the church had badly failed the gospel.
in fact, he said, one of the strongest arguments in favor of christianity  is the failure of christians,
who thereby prove what the bible teaches about the fall and original sin.
as the world goes wrong, it proves that the church is right in this basic doctrine.

when the London times asked a number of writers for essays on the topic,
'What's Wrong with the World?'
Ch sent in the reply shortest and most to the point:

'dear sirs:

I am.

sincerely yours,
g.k. chesterton'

...for all his personal quirkiness, he managed to propound the christian faith
with as much wit, good humor and sheer intellectual force
as anyone in recent times.
with the zeal of a knight defending the last redoubt, he took on, in person and in print,
anyone who dared interpret the world apart from God and incarnation.

Ch himself said that the modern age is characterized by a sadness
that calls for a new kind of prophet,
not like prophets of old who reminded people that they were going to die,
but someone who would remind them they are not dead yet.
the prophet of ample girth and ample mirth filled that role splendidly.
t.s. elliot judged that
'he did more, i think, than any man of his time.. to maintain the existence of the important minority
in the modern world'.


RECOMMEND: ORTHODOXY; biographies, ST. FRANCIS OF ASSISI, ST. THOMAS AQUINAS;
THE MAN WHO WAS CALLED THURSDAY and the Rather Brown stories: his AUTOBIOGRAPHY