Christmas with Chesterton
I spent Christmas with G.K. Chesterton. Not literally, of course–he shed this mortal coil nearly a century ago. But through the Christmas and Epiphany seasons–the “Cycle of Light” in the Christian year–I’ve been absorbed in his writing on Christmas and the Incarnation.
Chesterton wrote with singular range: He authored novels, philosophy, essays, short fiction, history, travelogue, theology, and cooking recipes. And he loved Christmas, returning again and again in his essays, poems, and books to the theology of God’s self-disclosure in Christ and the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem. In one article he wrote about the story of Jesus’ birth, Chesterton observed that
“Christmas] expresses better than any religious periphrasis the peculiar richness and intensity which clings round the story of Bethlehem. . . Above all, it expresses that quality of instantaneousness, of urgency and excitement, which distinguishes Christmas from so many of the earth’s festivals: the sentiment that it does not celebrate some event a thousand years back, but some event that has just happened…
Chesterton understood that a view of life shaped by the Christmas story had a peculiar richness and intensity, a sense of a singular event in the past which has permanently altered our present. In other words, he saw the Incarnation and revelation of Christ as an invitation to wonder. Chesterton saw that this feature of the Christian story as the heart of its genius. In his book Orthodoxy, he discusses the way in which Christianity accounts for the astonishing miracle that is life:
I had always vaguely felt facts to be miracles in the sense that they are wonderful: now I began to think them miracles in the stricter sense that they were willful. . . In short, I had always believed that the world involved magic: now I thought that perhaps it involved a magician. . .I had always felt life first as a story: and if there is a story there is a story-teller.
Epiphany & Making Christianity Weird Again
Chesterton’s deep sense of wonder feels timely to ponder during Epiphany–the season of the year in which we Christians celebrate the revealing of Christ to the world in a star, baptismal water, miracles, and parables. We all inhabit, after all, a dis-enchanted time.
The philosopher Charles Taylor, in his seminal work A Secular Age, describes at length how we in the late-modern West have forsaken the “enchanted-ness” of prior cultures. We’ve banished gods and angels and demons; we live within, to borrow Taylor’s phrase, an “immanent frame.” We carry out our lives on the operating assumption that the material world–the one we can record on video and measure in a test tube–is all that’s real.
Yet, we still hear persistent echoes of transcendence–a stubborn desire for spiritual reality that pushes up through the cracks of 21st century Western life like the roots of some great maple tree that keeps growing up through the crevices in a concrete sidewalk.
The story that Almighty God came to us as an infant, that the Creator entered into the sweat and frailty and tears of material human life, that God’s Spirit fluttered down upon Jesus of Nazareth; and that, at that moment, the barrier between heaven and earth was torn apart forever–this story is a profound gift to a world hungry for transcendence, thirsty for wonder. Ironically, the Church herself in our time has often been sheepish about these staggering claims that lie at the heart of our faith.
I was fascinated to listen to the historian Tom Holland notice this. In a wide-ranging interview Holland did about the indelible impact of Christianity on world history, he was asked what he wished he heard from Christian preachers and those who speak for the faith today:
I see no point in preachers just recycling the kind of stuff you can get from any soft-left liberal, because everyone is giving that. . . If you’re a Christian, you think that the entire fabric of the cosmos was ruptured when, by this strange singularity. Someone who is God and a man sets everything on its head. To say it’s supernatural is to downplay it: this is a massive singularity at the very heart of things. . .It seems to me there’s a deep anxiety about that, almost a sense of embarrassment. . .‘Well, Jesus was just a nice guy’–no, Christianity is stranger and weirder that that!
I’d like to advocate, this Epiphany, for making Christianity weird again. For unashamedly celebrating this strange story of the invisible God becoming human, showing us his face in miracles, telling us his truth in parables. Because I think that this is exactly what a world starving for wonder is looking for.
Perhaps this is why Lewis and Tolkien were so much more powerful for many of us in forming our Christian faith than what we got in our Sunday School curriculums. I have come to love and appreciate the orthodox Reeformed doctrines of my heritage, but what captured my soul and opened my imagination to wonder and joy was Tolkien. I brought this joy and wonder back to the Bible and to the world, especially to trees. So I think I know what you mean. But here is where I may disagree with you. I know that for many, especially within Catholicism and Anglicanism, the Incarnation is the Singularity, but for the New Testament itself, certainly for St. Paul, the axial Singularity is the Resurrection. I dare say even for St. John, though his first chapter might suggest otherwise. I suggest that the Resurrection is more challenging to imagine, more difficult to work out, maybe even less comforting, and therefore even more “wonder-full”.
I’m struck by your mentioning “…especially to trees,” In preparing to lead a hymn sing on the theme of trees throughout Scripture and in poetry, and what we continue to learn about trees even communicating with each other–wondrous indeed.
My favorite stories of wonder –besides Tolkien/Lewis– have always been the NT post-Easter accounts of encounters with the Risen Jesus: Mary at the tomb; the travellers to Emmaus; appearing to Thomas; and the miraculous draught of fish (with an exact count!).
“If Christ be not raised from the dead, then faith is in vain.”
For most of my life I had a mental block on how to spell weird. I kept wanting to write wierd and even when second-guessing myself I’d get it wrong every time. Finally I found the trick to spelling it correctly. I’d just say to myself “we are weird.” Yes, we are. Fearfully and weirdly made. Wired for weird (and so is God). I think that’s why I was initially attracted to the pentecostal take on the Christian life: it has plenty of room for celebrating the weirdness of God and God’s good news. I never want to lose that capacity.