Satsifying Riddles

Here's another Chestertonain nugget:

The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man.

Mystery Laid Hold Of

Said G. K. Chesterton:

There is a great difference between a mystery of God that no one understands, and a mystery of God laid hold of, let it be but by one single man.

[p. 81, Jesus Manifesto, by Leonard Sweet and Frank Viola]

"The polluted stream of religious professionalism..."

My praise for Eugene Peterson's Bible translation is, well, muted at best, but my praise for his books on the other hand knows very few bounds. I've been reading his Living the Resurrection, which harbors under its generally winsome tone a distinct and rather urgent critique of the church in America today.

The best I can do, as usual, is simply offer a quote. Peterson begins by citing Chesterton:

A hundred years ago, G. K. Chesterton protested against the way the specialists and experts were taking over common and essential human activities. He wrote that it wasn't so long ago that men sang around a table in chorus. Now one sings alone before a microphone for the absurd reason that he can sing better. If this kind of thing goes on, Chesterton predicted, "Only one man will laugh, because he can laugh better than the rest."

This kind of thing has accelerated in our society and it continues to infect Christian consciousness, where it is most crippling to the human condition. But we are not without Chestertonian voices calling our attention to the spiritual devastation that takes place when Christians lapse into religious consumerism and abdicate their dignity and glory as followers of Jesus. There are strong and articulate men and women--some of them reading these words right now--who are urging and guiding us to go against the polluted stream of religious professionalism that has unleashed this rampant, relentless onslaught of religious commercialism, which commodifies the spiritual life and treats the church as a free market for promoting and selling programs, techniques, and devices to the greater glory of God. I hardly think God is pleased.

Thursday on Saturday

Why do all the clerks and navvies in the railway trains look so sad and tired, so very sad and tired? I will tell you. It is because they know that the train is going right. It is because they know that whatever place they have taken a ticket for that place they will reach. It is because after they have passed Sloane Square they know that the next station must be Victoria, and nothing but Victoria. Oh, their wild rapture! oh, their eyes like stars and their souls again in Eden, if the next station were unaccountably Baker Street!

Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday

Chesterton on Christmas

There is no more dangerous or disgusting habit than that of celebrating Christmas before it comes.... It is the very essence of a festival that it breaks upon one brilliantly and abruptly, that at one moment the great day is not and the next moment the great day is. Up to a certain specific instant you are feeling ordinary and sad; for it is only Wednesday. At the next moment your heart leaps up and your soul and body dance together like lovers; for in one burst and blaze it has become Thursday. I am assuming (of course) that you are a worshipper of Thor, and that you celebrate his day once a week, possibly with human sacrifice. If, on the other hand, you are a modern Christian Englishman, you hail (of course) with the same explosion of gaiety the appearance of the English Sunday.

Read the whole article here.