A Peculiar Provocation

"There is something more peculiar and provocative in the Christian idea, and it was expressed in the words repentance and humility. Or, to put it in more topical terms, it means that when we face the facts of the age, the first facts we face should be the faults of ourselves; and that we should at least consider, concerning any fact, the possibility that it is our fault."

By G.K. CHESTERTON, an excerpt from Is it a New World? A Series of Articles and Letters Contributed by Correspondents to the "Daily Telegraph" August-September, 1920 (published in 1921)

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Dear Kate,

The most eminent G.K. Chesterton is so eminently quotable that I am tempted to use only his quotes from now on.  At least for my knowable future.  Chesterton would know how to laugh at my last claim.  Or the one before that.  Or the idea of quoting him at all.

Quotable because they are always at once most particular and universal, which is to say Chesterton has made good use of God's gift that was a brain with two sides, more Father Brown wise, whimsical than Sherlock Holmes smart, showy.  Intuition is the tool, the "killer app" of Father Brown's trade, not deduction.  One time Father Brown confronted a master criminal who masqueraded as a priest, "You attacked reason. It's bad theology."

The sentence before today's quote is about the "pity in the Iliad or piety in the Æneid" but we don't have to know that.  What comes after that, though, is further illumination on the "Christian ideas" of repentance and humility: "Now, of course, the most important form of this is too individual for this public problem; indeed, it cannot in its nature be a criticism of anybody else. But there is another form of it in those more corporate cases in which a man speaks for a class, or a country, or a school, or a social type. In this public sense, also, there is no value in any pessimism that is not penitence."

What is the value of pessimism? we ask.  We move forward with no need to look back, try to "do better" often with no serious reflection on how we have done badly, smash statutes from the past to usher in--we think, quite logically--a smashing tomorrow.  If we ever "repent" we don't dwell in the act.  To take a knee this very brief moment is to rise up in the next and do what's necessary in life, mine first.  If I am a football player, the next moment of my rising will always have to do with playing football, the same game that I've been playing and thriving on, in my past, all along.  And the bent knee, properly understood, was mostly for my protest of what's wrong with this World, not for the confession of my being part of the System.

Who are we to change at all, when every new morning is the last old?  We rise everyday to the unreasonableness of our "proper" expectations of what life can only be.  And that's bad theology.

Yours, Alex