Effects of Chesterton
It was about five years ago (maybe 4?) that I fell into the gaping pothole at the library that is Chesterton.
At first it was a swift decline, where I devoured sentence after sentence, wondering wide-eyed what The Man Who Was Thursday could possibly mean. But it quickly became a free-fall, where I couldn't contain my excitement about essays written a hundred years ago about today. I eagerly shared whatever I could with friends and family, even at one point reading aloud while walking the streets at night, pausing only between street lamps. Chesterton had become my solace, my every waking moment window into a rational reality full of imagination. He replaced my NPR habit, as he was the original author of "All Things Considered" and had a stronger anchor in intelligent, creative thought and superior vocabulary.
Shortly (and stoutly) thereafter, the humor of Chesterton infected my bloodstream. I went from a generally too-serious and rather unhealthy worrywart, to a person who began to see humor in the observation of everyday paradoxes. I came to believe in the possibility of a God who is full of mirth. I began to see the beautiful and the hilarious in the world, after long pondering the ugly and the depths of pain.
It's hard to say whether I became a Chestertonian and was healed, or if I was beginning to exit my personal darkness already and happened upon Chesterton. In any case, these things seemed to co-occur. My passion for Elfland, always present in me even before reading Chesterton's description of it, was enlivened and enriched by GKC.
Essay after essay made the truths I already knew inside myself become more powerful, more present, more rational, and more reasoned. I fell more in love with Main Street when I saw it compared with Wall Street. The material world I previously scorned became something desirable and magical.
I have come now to a place where I must explore Chesterton's Catholicism and plumb the depths of his reasoning for conversion. I first learned about Elfland and magic from my mother, C.S. Lewis, and George MacDonald. My mother's mother-tongue is one of the most Catholic versions of Protestantism you can imagine, without looking or smelling or sounding anything alike. A part of me clings to this very important part of my family heritage, even while I desire to examine it - with respect and love, but with an eye toward the things that differ from Chesterton's magical Catholicism.
My attitude about Catholicism growing up was that God had to be in there too somewhere, because people talked about Him. But jargon and code words of my tradition were not present, so it was hard to measure the Catholic church's efficacy in the lives of friends. I had a whole list of phrases and songs and manifestations of humility and holiness that people needed to speak or live out in order to externally demonstrate their passion for pursuing God. Everyone has a list like that, shaped by language and local culture. The differences between my upbringing and what I perceived about the Catholic church were so enormous on the surface, that I could not even see the deep similarities underneath. The "smells and bells" (sorry for cliché) that either attract or repel other people seemed to have no impression on me whatsoever, in my few times within the walls (weddings, mostly). But they did cause a sense of the foreign to distract and to render theological underpinnings nearly impossible to notice. As a Protestant, I believed that the church consisted of its members. So it took until now for me to realize that the few Catholic people in my life do not represent with accuracy the doctrines, disciplines, or core beliefs of their organization as a whole. In fact, there are authoritative teachings that exist outside of people's personal beliefs - a few teachings are so far outside, I rarely met with them until recently.
But I am slowly learning (influenced by the concepts in "The Book That Made Your World") that we in America have no idea how much our culture and thinking have been influenced by Christianity, so I'm certain far more "goodness" has seeped into people than what I can easily observe, being a member of my own Western Hemisphere. Being critical of differences between Christians is sometimes like looking at a mosquito bite on your hand without noticing how amazing the very hand is in the first place.
Much of my life (until this last segment) I have strained to find holiness in other places. My version of holiness. My community and family's version of holiness. Basically, nothing can measure up if it's supposed to be like the Mount Athos of our denomination, my home. I can never date anybody, because they use words that make me squirm inwardly. Their friends drink for recreation. They don't know words to hymns and openly scorn anything traditional. They watch movies that would have caused my childhood TV to be unplugged and turned around backward. They flirt with the unhealthy to prove they are not different or unique from the world. They brag about how they can be as much like the world as possible while still calling themselves Christian.
With this background scenery, how can I be attracted to people from other types of churches who know nothing about my community's understanding of the Bible, and who go to church all the time, but make up their own personally convenient truths and reality out of the thin air of sentimentalism? (Whatever feels "nice" or "friendly" defines moral goodness.) Or even today's thick air of hedonism? Searching for holiness outside of home is a lonely existence, and it can make a person want to cast off the mother-tongue version of virtue, even when that is your third lung, and without it you may lose your ability to breathe. And believe me, I have cast it off repeatedly with astonishing disdain, only to find myself chasing after it again - the old vice that is familiar virtue. Without that lung, you are not yourself anymore. You are not your family's anymore. Without that third lung, life is full of people, but void of the sense of clean air that you first breathed from infancy.
I normally compare it to culture shock. People who hate my community for its different-ness have a simultaneously peculiar respect for cultures on other continents that are far more "different" from Americans in their behaviors and beliefs. It's okay to be different if you live far away. But dare to poke your head out of your community in America, and you'd better be ready to conform. When I poke my head out for a while, I realize I can't breathe out there and go running back to the familiar. But that familiar place is getting smaller and smaller, and soon I will be running back to a small box with an oxygen tank inside. Or maybe I am growing larger. Alice in Wonderland would understand how hard it is to figure that out. In any case, I keep stepping out and exploring various other types of cultures within our culture.
As a last effort at finding traits of "home" someplace else (read GKC's "Manalive"), I look upon the Catholic Church with new eyes, squinting and straining to peer into a place within it that I have never seen before. I am standing on my head, using Chesterton's favorite intellectual stance, to get a view of what holds everything up in the church - its foundation. I look with new eyes, sometimes holding my nose, and trying to overcome the culture shock that washes over. I am sure the cradle-Catholics stare back at me and see all my bizarrely foreign customs and behaviors, especially standing on my head, and become equally uncomfortable. But here I remain, upside-down.
My journey is not a new one, as most of my friends have wandered into new Christian traditions that are different from their upbringings. But something about this particular venture is new for me. The concept of examining the foundation instead of the building is new for me. I always thought a building would reflect its foundation, and so I could know something about it by looking at it from the outside (observing church members). But as it turns out these days, a building can be very beautiful and sturdy, but one small hole in the foundation and the whole thing quickly loses its usefulness. And the opposite may be true. What may look like a colossus of varying quality and disunity might indeed have a sturdy foundation.
People are like trees. But maybe organizations of people are nothing like trees. A good tree has good fruit; a bad tree has bad fruit or none at all. But maybe a church is a place for bad fruit to go and become good fruit. So maybe it's supposed to look really moldy and huge on top, while underneath there is a steady, strong basis in history and reality that is holding everything up. Maybe the Catholic church itself is a Chestertonian paradox, where the uglier it looks on top, the more effective it is becoming on the bottom. Maybe GKC has already contemplated this somewhere in a long essay about how everything under the sun is a kind of aged cheese.
Actually, Chesterton's persistent love of paradox is really Christ's, and GKC just borrowed it for his entire life. I think I may want to as well. The most enormous paradox we can ever know in all of Elfland and also the land of pragmatic business people is that of a creator making himself into a sacrifice for his own creation.
That is all for now. Pray for me, that I will have good circulation to the brain while standing on my head. And that I can overcome my sensibilities about what is "wrong" and realize some of those "wrong" things are just "foreign" things. But that I don't cast off all manner of virtue in an effort to fit into the world, or lose my roots in a large, broccoli-shaped church.
At first it was a swift decline, where I devoured sentence after sentence, wondering wide-eyed what The Man Who Was Thursday could possibly mean. But it quickly became a free-fall, where I couldn't contain my excitement about essays written a hundred years ago about today. I eagerly shared whatever I could with friends and family, even at one point reading aloud while walking the streets at night, pausing only between street lamps. Chesterton had become my solace, my every waking moment window into a rational reality full of imagination. He replaced my NPR habit, as he was the original author of "All Things Considered" and had a stronger anchor in intelligent, creative thought and superior vocabulary.
Shortly (and stoutly) thereafter, the humor of Chesterton infected my bloodstream. I went from a generally too-serious and rather unhealthy worrywart, to a person who began to see humor in the observation of everyday paradoxes. I came to believe in the possibility of a God who is full of mirth. I began to see the beautiful and the hilarious in the world, after long pondering the ugly and the depths of pain.
It's hard to say whether I became a Chestertonian and was healed, or if I was beginning to exit my personal darkness already and happened upon Chesterton. In any case, these things seemed to co-occur. My passion for Elfland, always present in me even before reading Chesterton's description of it, was enlivened and enriched by GKC.
Essay after essay made the truths I already knew inside myself become more powerful, more present, more rational, and more reasoned. I fell more in love with Main Street when I saw it compared with Wall Street. The material world I previously scorned became something desirable and magical.
I have come now to a place where I must explore Chesterton's Catholicism and plumb the depths of his reasoning for conversion. I first learned about Elfland and magic from my mother, C.S. Lewis, and George MacDonald. My mother's mother-tongue is one of the most Catholic versions of Protestantism you can imagine, without looking or smelling or sounding anything alike. A part of me clings to this very important part of my family heritage, even while I desire to examine it - with respect and love, but with an eye toward the things that differ from Chesterton's magical Catholicism.
My attitude about Catholicism growing up was that God had to be in there too somewhere, because people talked about Him. But jargon and code words of my tradition were not present, so it was hard to measure the Catholic church's efficacy in the lives of friends. I had a whole list of phrases and songs and manifestations of humility and holiness that people needed to speak or live out in order to externally demonstrate their passion for pursuing God. Everyone has a list like that, shaped by language and local culture. The differences between my upbringing and what I perceived about the Catholic church were so enormous on the surface, that I could not even see the deep similarities underneath. The "smells and bells" (sorry for cliché) that either attract or repel other people seemed to have no impression on me whatsoever, in my few times within the walls (weddings, mostly). But they did cause a sense of the foreign to distract and to render theological underpinnings nearly impossible to notice. As a Protestant, I believed that the church consisted of its members. So it took until now for me to realize that the few Catholic people in my life do not represent with accuracy the doctrines, disciplines, or core beliefs of their organization as a whole. In fact, there are authoritative teachings that exist outside of people's personal beliefs - a few teachings are so far outside, I rarely met with them until recently.
But I am slowly learning (influenced by the concepts in "The Book That Made Your World") that we in America have no idea how much our culture and thinking have been influenced by Christianity, so I'm certain far more "goodness" has seeped into people than what I can easily observe, being a member of my own Western Hemisphere. Being critical of differences between Christians is sometimes like looking at a mosquito bite on your hand without noticing how amazing the very hand is in the first place.
Much of my life (until this last segment) I have strained to find holiness in other places. My version of holiness. My community and family's version of holiness. Basically, nothing can measure up if it's supposed to be like the Mount Athos of our denomination, my home. I can never date anybody, because they use words that make me squirm inwardly. Their friends drink for recreation. They don't know words to hymns and openly scorn anything traditional. They watch movies that would have caused my childhood TV to be unplugged and turned around backward. They flirt with the unhealthy to prove they are not different or unique from the world. They brag about how they can be as much like the world as possible while still calling themselves Christian.
With this background scenery, how can I be attracted to people from other types of churches who know nothing about my community's understanding of the Bible, and who go to church all the time, but make up their own personally convenient truths and reality out of the thin air of sentimentalism? (Whatever feels "nice" or "friendly" defines moral goodness.) Or even today's thick air of hedonism? Searching for holiness outside of home is a lonely existence, and it can make a person want to cast off the mother-tongue version of virtue, even when that is your third lung, and without it you may lose your ability to breathe. And believe me, I have cast it off repeatedly with astonishing disdain, only to find myself chasing after it again - the old vice that is familiar virtue. Without that lung, you are not yourself anymore. You are not your family's anymore. Without that third lung, life is full of people, but void of the sense of clean air that you first breathed from infancy.
I normally compare it to culture shock. People who hate my community for its different-ness have a simultaneously peculiar respect for cultures on other continents that are far more "different" from Americans in their behaviors and beliefs. It's okay to be different if you live far away. But dare to poke your head out of your community in America, and you'd better be ready to conform. When I poke my head out for a while, I realize I can't breathe out there and go running back to the familiar. But that familiar place is getting smaller and smaller, and soon I will be running back to a small box with an oxygen tank inside. Or maybe I am growing larger. Alice in Wonderland would understand how hard it is to figure that out. In any case, I keep stepping out and exploring various other types of cultures within our culture.
As a last effort at finding traits of "home" someplace else (read GKC's "Manalive"), I look upon the Catholic Church with new eyes, squinting and straining to peer into a place within it that I have never seen before. I am standing on my head, using Chesterton's favorite intellectual stance, to get a view of what holds everything up in the church - its foundation. I look with new eyes, sometimes holding my nose, and trying to overcome the culture shock that washes over. I am sure the cradle-Catholics stare back at me and see all my bizarrely foreign customs and behaviors, especially standing on my head, and become equally uncomfortable. But here I remain, upside-down.
My journey is not a new one, as most of my friends have wandered into new Christian traditions that are different from their upbringings. But something about this particular venture is new for me. The concept of examining the foundation instead of the building is new for me. I always thought a building would reflect its foundation, and so I could know something about it by looking at it from the outside (observing church members). But as it turns out these days, a building can be very beautiful and sturdy, but one small hole in the foundation and the whole thing quickly loses its usefulness. And the opposite may be true. What may look like a colossus of varying quality and disunity might indeed have a sturdy foundation.
People are like trees. But maybe organizations of people are nothing like trees. A good tree has good fruit; a bad tree has bad fruit or none at all. But maybe a church is a place for bad fruit to go and become good fruit. So maybe it's supposed to look really moldy and huge on top, while underneath there is a steady, strong basis in history and reality that is holding everything up. Maybe the Catholic church itself is a Chestertonian paradox, where the uglier it looks on top, the more effective it is becoming on the bottom. Maybe GKC has already contemplated this somewhere in a long essay about how everything under the sun is a kind of aged cheese.
Actually, Chesterton's persistent love of paradox is really Christ's, and GKC just borrowed it for his entire life. I think I may want to as well. The most enormous paradox we can ever know in all of Elfland and also the land of pragmatic business people is that of a creator making himself into a sacrifice for his own creation.
That is all for now. Pray for me, that I will have good circulation to the brain while standing on my head. And that I can overcome my sensibilities about what is "wrong" and realize some of those "wrong" things are just "foreign" things. But that I don't cast off all manner of virtue in an effort to fit into the world, or lose my roots in a large, broccoli-shaped church.