Paradox Lost

 

告訴你一個神秘的地方

一個孩子們的快樂天堂

跟人間一樣的忙碌擾嚷

有哭有笑　當然也會有悲傷

我們擁有同樣的陽光

Let me tell you about a mysterious place

A happy paradise for the children

There will be hustle and bustle, just like how it is now

Tears and laughter, sadness--of course

The same sunshine for all of us

"Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither." 

― C. S. Lewis

"The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits."

"The secularists have not wrecked divine things; but the secularists have wrecked secular things, if that is any comfort to them. The Titans did not scale heaven; but they laid waste the world."

― G. K. Chesterton

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Dear Kate,

In 1921, after giving a lecture in New York City at the Times Square Theatre, G. K. Chesterton was asked whether there was any "psychological significance" in the use of paradox (his trademarked modus operandi).  This is how he answered: "I never use paradox.  The statements I make are wearisome and obvious common sense.  I have even been driven to the tedium of reading through my own books, and have been unable to find any paradox.  In fact, that thing is quite tragic, and some day I shall hope to write an epic called 'Paradox Lost'."

Of course he was being paradoxical again.  What he meant though was that one can never be too heavenly minded to be of no earthly use.  Or as his friend C. S. Lewis said, "If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were precisely those who thought most of the next. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this."

Jesus said, "Let the little children come to me, and do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of heaven belongs."  What is common-sensical to a child is too naive, too fantastical, altogether too impractical to us adults.  So all we have day after day is hustle and bustle as we lay waste the world and our own lives, which, unparadoxically, feels like hell.

What is going to be the legacy of COVID-19?  Can we see the future as it is happening now?  Are we so heavenly minded that we are of good earthly use in the here and now?  Last night at the dinner table I talked to my kids about one lasting legacy that their generation will need to face: mental illness and addiction.  "But you know that already, don't you?"  Of course they do.  They have friends, many.

How are we going to love our neighbors, now?  Not ten years later.  Not only after people have come around to give it a corporate slogan or get a celebrity endorsement.  Not only when things are so out of control that we must prescribe pills and guns.  What are we singing about today, at church, in our head?  What are the stories we are taking in, telling each other?  How do we use our time, money, energy?  Do we ever honestly look at our own value system?  Is our mind, our heart, so thoroughly secularized, prosaic, that we can never live hope-full-y?

"Joy is the serious business of Heaven."   That's because no tear or sadness in our here and now is ever too trivial to be forgotten, dismissed.  Jesus is so serious about our sadness that he was nailed on a piece of common wood for it.

Yours, Alex