Monday, December 23, 2024
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Chesterton at Christmas
Thus says the Lord God: Lo, I am sending my messenger to prepare the way before me. And then suddenly there will come to the temple … yes, he is coming, but who will endure the day of his coming? For he is like the refiner’s fire. He will sit refining silver, purifying the sons of Levi.
G. K. Chesterton was a jolly old soul, and if he decided to play Santa Claus at a children’s hospital, he would have had all of the doctors, nurses and patients in stitches. Whether debating with his great atheist friend Bertrand Russell, writing essays, detective stories, novels and poetry, hobnobbing with his friend Hilaire Belloc or his wife Frances, GK made playing with words an art, sometimes to drive an idea home and sometimes just to play.
Lo, I will send you Elijah the prophet to turn the hearts of the fathers to their children, and the hearts of the children to their fathers.
Our Pastor Matt loves Chesterton and shared an excerpt from his book Orthodoxy yesterday. Echoing the psalmist’s praises in Psalm 104, Chesterton writes about a similarity he sees between children and their (our) Father:
The sun rises every morning. It might be true that the sun rises regularly because he never gets tired of rising, in a rush of life as can be seen as well, for instance, in children, when they find some game or joke that they specially enjoy. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead.
For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony, but perhaps God 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. The repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical encore.
And we can, if we are childlike enough and caught in its wonder, rise to our feet roaring with approval, and God will give us encore after encore. Do it again! And God … does it again, because He loves us.
Chesterton has magical things to say about Christmas too, and its wonder for children and adults.
Philosophers are happy; saints have a jolly time. The important thing in life is not to keep a steady system of pleasure and composure (which can be done quite well by hardening one’s heart or thickening one’s head), but to keep alive in oneself the immortal power of astonishment and laughter, and a kind of young reverence. This is why religion always insists on special days like Christmas.
Do you laugh when you’re tickled? That is the best of Christmas, that it is a startling and disturbing happiness; it is an uncomfortable comfort. The Christmas customs destroy the human habits. The object of the religious festival is, as I have said, to find out if a happy man is still alive. A man can smile when he is dead. Composure, resignation, and the most exquisite good manners are, so to speak, the strong points of corpses. There is only one way in which you can test his real vitality, and that is by a special festival.
All of us notice, and disdain, the way Christmas shopping starts earlier every year. All of us also wonder if Christmas could be kept just a little longer after December 25, like … 12 days longer, maybe? Chesterton noticed it too and shows us that even a hundred years ago we were in a hurry to get somewhere, when really, where we are is full of wonder, full of light.
The Futurist fashion of our time has led nearly everybody to look for happiness to-morrow rather than to-day. Thus, while there is an incessant and perhaps even increasing fuss about the approach of the festivities of Christmas, there is rather less fuss than there ought to be about really making Christmas festive. Modern men have a vague feeling that when they have come to the feast, they have come to the finish. By modern commercial customs, the preparations for it have been so very long and the practice of it seems so very short. This is, of course, in sharp contrast to the older traditional customs, in the days when it was a sacred festival for a simpler people. Then the preparation took the form of the more austere season of Advent and the fast of Christmas Eve. But when men passed on to the feast of Christmas it went on for a long time after the feast of Christmas Day.
It were vain to conceal my own reactionary prejudice, which deludes me into thinking there is something to be said for the older manner. I am so daring as darkly to suspect that it would be better if people could enjoy Christmas when it came, instead of being bored with the news that it was coming.
Ryan Whitaker Smith compiled Chesterton readings for 30 potential days of Advent and then added Poems, Essays, Short Stories, Recipes, along with  Games & Traditions of Christmas in a single volume, Winter Fire: Christmas with G.K. Chesterton. Along with the quotations above, Ryan included this poem, written when Chesterton was 22 years old:
A Christmas Carol (1896)
The Christ-child lay on Mary’s lap,
His hair was like a light.
(O weary, weary were the world,
But here is all aright.)
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The Christ-child lay on Mary’s breast,
His hair was like a star.
(O stern and cunning are the Kings,
But here the true hearts are.)
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The Christ-child lay on Mary’s heart,
His hair was like a fire.
 (O weary, weary is the world,
But here the world’s desire.)
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The Christ-child stood at Mary’s knee,
His hair was like a crown.
And all the flowers looked up at Him,
And all the stars looked down.
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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