40 Inspirational Classics

I spent a couple of days re-reading G.K. Chesterton’s spiritual autobiography, Orthodoxy and decided that I should read a bit of Chesterton every few months, if only to remind me that Christianity is a merry and somewhat eccentric philosophy of life. Chesterton says that the “frame” of Christianity, its conservatism and rules, enables us to be like children playing on a cliff with a fence to keep them from falling over. We can range far and wide, “fling [ourselves] into the every frantic game and make the place the noisiest of nurseries.”

Chesterton himself was a merry old soul. He weighed over 300 pounds, played the part of the absent-minded professor in his daily life, and enjoyed a beer, a debate, and a nap, but not all at the same time. Nicknamed “The Prince of Paradox,” his verbal gymnastics are sometimes exhausting, usually entertaining, but at the same time full of wisdom and insight into the fallacies of pagan and modern philosophy and into the satisfying rightness of Christian orthodoxy. Here a few assertions and witticisms that grabbed me as I read through Chesterton’s philosophical defense of orthodoxy:

“I have attempted in a vague and personal way, in a set of mental pictures rather than in a series of deductions, to state the philosophy in which I have come to believe. I will not call it my philosophy; for I did not make it. God and humanity made it; and it made me.”

Of course, I am reminded of the song, Creed, by Rich Mullens:

“Of all horrible religions the most horrible is the worship of the god within. . . . That Jones shall worship the god within him turns out ultimately to mean that Jones shall worship only Jones. Let Jones worship the sun or moon, anything rather than the Inner Light; let Jones worship cats or crocodiles, if he can find any in his street, but not the god within.”
The Jones part is probably what reminded me of Jim Jones who went from rejection of the God of the Bible, to worship of himself, to the insistence that his followers should also worship him as God. They certainly would have been better off worshipping cats.

Christianity came into the world firstly in order to assert with violence that a man had not only to look inwards, but to look outwards, to behold with astonishment and enthusiasm a divine company and a divine captain. The only fun of being a Christian was that a man was not left alone with the Inner Light, but definitely recognized an outer light, fair as the sun, clear as the moon, terrible as an army with banners.
If the world and its meaning begins and ends with me, I am of all creatures most tragically unhappy. I have a friend who believes that he will find any meaning that there is to be found in this world inside himself. I pity him.

“The essence of all pantheism, evolutionism, and modern cosmic religion is really in this proposition: that Nature is our Mother. Unfortunately, if you regard Nature as a mother, you discover that she is a step-mother. The main point of Christianity was this: that Nature is not our mother: Nature is our sister. We can be proud of her beauty, since we have the same Father; but she has no authority over us; we have to admire but not to imitate. . . . To St. Francis, nature is a sister, and even a younger sister: a little dancing sister, to be laughed at as well as loved.”
What breathtakingly beautiful freedom there is in that order of things. We are not beholden to nor dominated by Nature; we are the stewards, the caretakers. God is still over all and through all, without Nature taking over His role as Creator and Sustainer.

“A characteristic of the great saints is their power of levity. Angels can fly because they can take themselves lightly.”
“It is much easier to write a good Times leading article than a good joke in Punch. For Solemnity flows out of men naturally; but laughter is a leap. It is easy to be heavy: hard to be light. Satan fell by the force of gravity.”
In this season of Lent, and certainly as we approach the celebration the Resurrection, take time to laugh. The Story is after all a comedy, and God wins in the end.

“[Modern Philosophy’s] despair is this, that it does not really believe that there is any meaning in the universe; therefore it cannot hope to find any romance; its romances will have no plots. A man cannot expect any adventures in the land of anarchy. But a man can expect any number of adventures if he goes travelling in the land of authority.”
A world without meaning and without Christ at the center is either too terrible to explore or too boring to enjoy—or both. Hence, voodoo dolls and fetishes or Sartre’s existential hell play, No Exit.

Choose the adventure.

Links:
The ‘Ample’ Man Who Saved My Faith by Phillip Yancey at Christianity Today.
The American Chesterton Society
Semicolon thoughts on The Man Who Was Thursday by G.K. Chesterton.